By 
Perhaps you can vividly, nostalgically remember a wonderful place from your childhood. Perhaps one where there were moments of peace and fleeting joy.
Or as an adult you can remember being in a beautiful setting. There could have been a sunset. Anyway, you felt calm and content and you were moved by a sense of wonder as you watched the whole scene. People may regard special places as sacred. Perhaps there was one in which you inexplicably felt as if you were part of the vast, living, creative Life. This is an experience that many can remember having at one time or another. Did you want to be one with nature and other human beings?
One view is to say that these are soul experiences in harmony with the Universal Spirit. How can we feel alone when we feel like we are part of a mysterious life force?
Transcendence seen only as a fallacy
A very different understanding is based on a natural way of seeing things. Science teaches that knowledge only comes from information available to the senses, interpreted using logic. Consequently, we are often told that the idea of any ultimate reality not seen by your measuring instruments is just a fantasy.
Among other things, biology measures physiological processes, anatomical structures, and genetic material. In other words, study how things appear. According to the spiritual philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, space, time, and materiality cast a veil, masking an ultimate reality that lies beyond. At the same time, different natural things reflect the reality of spiritual qualities. There is an order within nature that science unravels. However, I consider that scientific research misses a deeper awareness. It omits a human perception that penetrates beyond what the eye can see: one that can draw you out of yourself and connect you with a living force. This awareness means that when we look at nature, we can have a sense of immense power and beauty. A feeling that something you cannot physically see is expressed through what you see.
Greater awareness of individual scientists.
Although science itself is blind to what it cannot observe with its technology, many individual scientists cannot help but marvel at the laws of nature. I am thinking, for example, of the predictability of gravity that keeps the planets in their orbits and the incredible structure of the human body that supports life. Many scientists feel a sense of wonder and fascination. These feelings drive a lifelong curiosity to discover more.
You can choose to think that the laws of the universe come about by chance. Alternatively, you can ask if they come from some kind of hidden intent and design, a universal spirit independent of time and space. In fact, one that lasts forever, that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and present everywhere.
Acknowledge greater awareness
When we manage to calm our natural desires and anxieties, we can find ourselves in contact with our higher self. This happens when we experience a sense of unity of all life. It is the perception that everything is connected in some way and is part of something beyond us.
Throughout history, people have reported this higher consciousness. Perennialists, such as William James, Huston Smith, and Aldous Huxley, see mystical experience in various spiritual traditions as pointing to an imminent and transcendent reality called the foundation of all being. Perennialism has its roots in the Renaissance interest in Neoplatonism and its idea of the One, from which all existence emanates.
Some mystics speak of being one with the Whole, with the Infinite or with the Absolute. But what do they mean? They use adjectives that have no noun. The whole of what, the infinity of what, the absolute of what?
Something else recognized by William James
William James was one of the most influential philosophers in the United States and the “Father of American Psychology.” William James’s father was an avid reader of Swedenborg’s spiritual philosophy. The son himself was preoccupied with the solitary experience of direct communion with the divine. He wrote about ‘something else’. In other words, there is a life of the spirit that is something more than sensory awareness. It is beyond even the reflective experience of meditation.
He was impatient with all kinds of dogmatism, but even before writing his masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, suggested that at some point in your life you are faced with an inescapable choice. It is to accept or not the transcendent. He felt that not choosing in itself becomes a choice. The idea of the transcendent can be genuinely embraced and the decision to do so, he said, would be momentous. He felt that this attitude would provide a unique opportunity that would make a significant difference in his life.