Mystical experiences are a universal, spiritually revelatory phenomenon with all kinds of individual textures––time suddenly comes to a glorious halt, or the world becomes one breathing, whole organism, or the entire cosmos and your place in it immediately make soul-shaking sense. While before you could only hope to stumble upon a passage in someone’s memoir about such an experience, I came across an amazing trove of them at bodysoulandspirit.net.

Judging by this archive, it’s clear that someone else has been reading the autobiographies of the famous for us, underlining––and typing in––the juicy, mystical stuff. You’ll find fascinating descriptions of brushes with the divine by a wide range of authors from Carl Jung (who had “sick bed visions”) to Jane Goodall (who feels supreme joy in the Notre Dame Cathedral) to Virginia Woolf, who wrote: “I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture” while alone on a beach.

There’s also a space to record your own mystical experience for others to savor.