The most profound experience I have had in this life was a visionary experience of being a soul in a dimension of souls, a soul world if you like. This happened in 1989 - I was at an emotional low point in my life after a love affair that had gone very wrong. At the same time I had been working on myself spiritually for over a year, following intuition I had become vegetarian and was striving to be very temperate in all habits, and (I now know) was meditating regularly, though I thought I wasn't 'doing it right'. So I was struggling towards 'purity' and seeking help from 'beyond'. I was also living in a remote place with a spiritual history (15th century Celtic/Christian monastery).
I received over a few months a number of experiences, the last two of which were very powerful and changed my life, forming the basis of my spiritual understandings and beliefs ever since. Both happened when I was asleep, but were very real and very vivid and detailed.
In the first vision, I went to a subtle dimension of white light and met an angelic being (no wings!), and was shown a vision of the future of the world, which also appeared to be the history of the world, as if time is a loop. I was also given a taste of judgement day (or purgatory), and finally a brief experience of being in earthly paradise, which I afterwards assumed was the garden of Eden, or the Golden Age referred to by many traditions.
In the second vision I was an egg shaped being of light in a region of orange light, interacting with several other egg shaped beings of light. The eggs were translucent orange with golden light emanating from the centre. The experience was of absolute bliss and comfort, warm, velvety, the best I have ever felt. One of the most interesting aspects to me now, is that I did FEEL, and I did SEE the other souls - we all floated around and had control over our movement, and there was a telepathic awareness shared between us: this may have been from me being in a trance state whereby I was experiencing the Soul World from a non-soul-world perspective, I don't know, but my perception was that I WAS that egg shaped being, and my consciousness was within the egg looking out. The golden light emanating from each of us seemed to merge into the element we were floating in: we were floating in golden light. When I came out of the experience, I was high as a kite and radiantly happy, the opposite of what I had been before it. I knew I had experienced something divine. I believed then that the golden light was pure spiritual love (and still think so).
It may be that we all experience different realities, I don't know, but I have never read or heard of a similar experience from anyone else, and I have looked extensively, devouring vast tracts of philosophical, religious, and occult writings.
Twelve years later, I got caught up in a religious sect, the Brahma Kumaris, when I found that their logo was a radiating red/orange egg of light, and I do believe that my visionary experiences are connected with this organisation in some way. At the time I joined them I thought I had found my spiritual "home". They claimed to be Spiritual University, and I , who had always avoided joining any religious groupings, took the bait, and in no time found myself inside a religious cult soaking up their intense doctrines. Fortunately, after 5 years of a fascinating journey, involving many psychic and mystical experiences, I saw through their dogma and walked away, into the clear bright light of freedom and personal responsibility. They did teach me to meditate properly, and I grew greatly in psychological, spiritual, and philosophical terms, as a result of my experiences with the Brahma Kumaris. They also filled my head with confused and twisted philosophy, a simplistic elitist dogma based on Hinduism - I had to make a lot of effort to unravel this programming afterwards.
And, fundamentally (for me), the Brahma Kumaris were unable to shed a light on my earlier mystical experiences. Nobody I met there had experienced anything similar, and it was quite clear that most of them did not believe a world I was saying.
Anyway, there is no substitute for experience. The intellect and words can only take you so far, but please, if anybody else out there has had experiences similar to mine, perhaps they would like to share them?