Eric Raymond
I was raised Catholic by a Catholic father and a relaxed Protestant mother. I had my first mystical experience in 1967 at the age of 10, at an old-style Latin Tridentine mass in the hills outside Rome, as the priests were censing the aisle of the church during the Offertory. It presented itself as a sudden, intense sense of being in a moment outside time, an eternal instant co-existing with every other eternal instants of history, with the illusion of time and change stripped away. “As it was in the Beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without End, amen” conveys the flavor exactly…More
