Nothing on earth could have prepared me for what happened on that Friday morning.

Although I was surrounded by hundreds of people, an invisible force slammed me backwards five or six feet. I crashed into a chair. That small voice in the back of my head gasped, this is impossible!

Feelings pulsed through my entire body: amazement, fear, and shock, followed by heart-stopping anxiety.

What if I’m going crazy?

But some other part of me felt … exhilaration, and a beauty so intense that my jaw muscles clenched tight—even as my eyes swam with tears. Something way down inside of me was burning and tingling, like never before.

And, I felt … alive, in some impossibly deep place within my heart. Energy pulsed through every cell of my body. Warm electric oil surged along and through my limbs, reaching my toes and fingertips until they felt like they were on fire. And as I lay there, stunned, fascination began to replace fear.

What is this?

Whatever this … this thing was—or is—and wherever it came from, I knew instantly it was unlike anything I’d ever known before.

No one around me seemed to pay any attention to my crumpled state, slumped motionless between the chairs. With my eyes shut, I was utterly consumed with feeling, stunned.

Some thing, some force, some entity was pouring fire, energy, heat—I had no idea what—through my whole body. And this … this power was opening a vast inner world within me which had somehow remained hidden my entire life. Even my hearing shut down, obliterated by crashing waves of amazement pounding upon this undiscovered shore within my heart.

I had no answers or explanations, and certainly no prior experience with which to compare.

Whatever it was, in those first overwhelming seconds I was flooded by Life—an all-consuming feeling, pouring through every nerve and fiber of my body. But I had no idea how this was happening to me.

**********

Well, o–kay.

I can just imagine how some of you, reading this first page, might react: Whoa! This guy must be flipped out! He’s either exaggerating like crazy, or completely nuts.

And in all honesty, caution would have been my first response too if I’d read a similar account seven years ago. “Probably on drugs,” I would have muttered (under my breath).

That’s why I’ve rewritten that first page repeatedly, seeking to communicate sanity without diminishing the shocking nature of this encounter. And drugs had nothing to do with any of this. Nor has the passage of time diluted the intensity of this experience.

Faced with these realities, I have felt compelled to prepare this account without excuses, qualifiers, or exaggerations. There was simply no way I could dilute what began right there, even though I had no clue what it was. Nor did I grasp this was the beginning of a journey, the first steps into a world I had long ago dismissed as belonging to fantasies and fairy tales.

Now, as you’ve probably guessed, this isn’t a work of fiction. It has never been my intention to assemble a cute story to serve as a vehicle for my own ideas. These things actually happened, and overwhelmed me with their implications.

Of course, I didn’t understand any of this at first. I had absolutely no clue anything like this was even possible. I’d had some sense of anticipation coming to this place, although I wouldn’t describe it as monumental. But when this thing hit me, I was blown away.

Most powerful experiences in life give some advance warning—like getting married, or having a baby. Not this. In the weeks before, life’s daily routines yielded no hints of the earthquake ahead. Of course I’d expected something from traveling to this place, but in the thirty-plus years I’d been searching, this encounter was beyond my wildest dreams.

Back in college we tried to come up with a way to measure the power of various ideas. We’d spend hours discussing and arguing. Why are we here? What’s our passion? How can we solve the world’s problems? Typical, great college stuff. And when we did occasionally stumble across a new perspective, we’d gauge its value based upon how much lasting excitement and enthusiasm it could generate.

This worked well enough, but I eventually added another, gut-level, check point. I’d set aside all evaluations until the next morning. That was my acid test. If I woke up and felt different—then I’d go back to that discussion, searching for the “power button.”

Sometimes I’d wait a few more days. Long after the words had melted, leaving little more than fuzzy impressions, I’d sift through how I felt inside. That’s when I discovered how few ideas held enough depth to change the inner me. Sure, I might tune up my stash of theories, polish the chrome on an argument, or realign my sense of steering and direction. But my innermost awareness was mostly untouched.

In contrast to our assumptions during those college years that new ideas were the key to lasting change, this encounter somehow bypassed thought. It both found and penetrated a vast inner world within my whole body.

How could that be? I was secretly devastated. I felt like I’d stumbled across an undiscovered continent just inside my heart, another Africa. For someone who had spent decades in search of understanding, the discovery of such overwhelming blindness was crushing. And this new world contained—or controlled—power sufficient to bring immediate physical changes.

I didn’t get this at first either, but when I finally tried to stand (hours later), I couldn’t speak normally or keep my balance. Although I could more or less stand upright, I kept swaying and bobbing to avoid falling over.

Something was flowing through me with enough intensity to change my entire sense of connection to the familiar world.

If you’ve ever spent a long day in constant motion, driving on curvy roads, or on a small boat at sea, sometimes, if you lie down at night in a quiet room and close your eyes, you feel your body still moving. Imagine that, but add to it the sensation of standing in a fast-flowing river. Crystal clear water swirls around you, just breaking over your shoulders. Your feet are planted firmly on smooth, flat rock. You feel the press of this water, but instead of it flowing around your body, it’s flowing right through you. As strange as that sounds, imagine you can feel every cell in motion—washed and caressed by this liquid—and with enough power to give you a strong, all-consuming sensation of flow.

This current I felt was so strong—and so exhilarating—it’s really no surprise that I could barely stand, let alone walk. But I was in shock too:

What am I feeling? And how is this possible?

Up until this experience, the only people I’d ever seen unable to stand upright were either drunk or very ill. I had never heard that such things could happen. And yet, for weeks, I had to lean against walls or chairs, unable to keep my equilibrium as this energy continued to pour through me, day and night.

At first, this totally freaked me out. My little scientist voice would mutter: Hey, you’re really losing it—fruitcake! But a deeper part of my awareness sifted through these physical influences and whispered:

You’re alive as you never were before. You’re feeling depths you’ve never seen.

If you’ve ever been in love, you’ll know that feeling of awakening. You’ll smile as you remember heightened senses, deeper colors and intensities around and within you. I could see these changes were somehow coming from that place, and were not due to insanity.

But it was not just the experience that left me stunned—and changed. Even more disturbing was the why and the vast cloud of implications.

Why had I fumbled around for so many years, so blind and impenetrable?

How come so few of us ever have such experiences? And, even more significant, why is this happening to people all over the planet? What does that mean?

Although I hope to answer these questions in the pages ahead, I’ve postponed starting to write this account for over four years. Time has a way of sifting between first impressions and lasting realities, and I wanted to research the history of transformative encounters. Plus, various concerns (and fears) held me back. Was it even possible to explain such a strange experience? Would anyone believe me? And then again, I found myself battling against a reluctance to face the inevitable ridicule and mockery some will eagerly shovel my way. I have no illusions about being dismissed as a borderline lunatic.

When you’ve been trained as a scientist and work as a professional litigation consultant and coach, individual credibility is a big deal. Anything that undermines personal integrity—or even raises the shadow of a question—usually proves to be very costly.