This event is, without a doubt, the greatest spiritual experience of my life, to date. However, it is somewhat difficult to explain and first requires a minimal amount of background information. In particular, I must show that 'time is an illusion,' before this experience will make much sense. I will try to keep it as simple as possible.
One morning in 2008, I sat reading the New Testament Gospel of St. John. This was not long after I recognized that Einstein's famous theory of relativity can be spiritually interpreted as indicating that time is ultimately an illusion. I began to peek at the pages ahead, and suddenly realized that all of chapter 17 was the prayer that Jesus prayed before crossing a small bridge to enter the garden of Gethsemane.
I saw that, if time is ultimately unreal, then history itself is also. However, if time and history are illusions, then the two thousand years between Christ Jesus and each of us, is also nonexistent from this viewpoint. This means that, without in any way devaluing Christ Jesus or what he accomplished in time, each and every one of us must ultimately be equivalent to the Christ! Now, before accusing me of blasphemy, take special note: I didn't say that we are equivalent to the Christ under the conditions of our existence in time. Rather, we are essentially, or in our essence, created equivalent to the Christ in the reality that we truly are, outside space and time. Within time, or (following the language of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich) within "the estrangment under the conditions of existence," each human is born with the potential to completely actualize the Christ consciousness in their being. John __:__ states "To as many as believed on his name, gave he the power to become sons of God (KJV) and in Ephesians 4:__, St. Paul speaks of achieving "the full stature of Christ."
Therefore, with much excitement, I realized that any one of us could, under these 'outside time' conditions, truthfully apply to ourselves, any statements that Christ Jesus made of himself! And so, with faith I decided to pray, from myself to God the Father, using these words of Christ, from the 17th chapter of the Gospel According to John (verses 4 and 5):
"... Father, I have completed the work that you have given me. Father, glorify me with the glory I had with thee before the world was. … "
Less than half way through the chapter, I exploded with a joyous grief greater than any I had ever known. I spontaneously screamed, cried and wailed for several minutes, as I was struck with wave after wave of absolute certainty, that I was present with God before time began; before the foundation of the world, before the Big Bang, before any material thing was made. I now knew absolutely that I-have-always-co-existed-with-God. I had finally experienced the goal of the Sufi mystics: I had seen 'the face before I was born.' I now also understood the immortal words of the 'Christ within Jesus,' as equally applying to the 'Christ within' my own timeless Self: "Before Abraham was, I AM."
From Joel Goldsmith's A Parenthesis in Eternity (p.136):
"Ultimately, we shall all discover that our true identity is Christ, and although we may have been brought up as Jones, Brown, or Smith, our real name---our identity and our potentiality---is Christ, the spiritual offspring of God. In the moment that this truth is revealed to us, all that has been imposed upon us by human belief will drop away, and as soon as we begin to perceive our true nature and identity, it will not take long to become accustomed to the atmosphere of Spirit which is our original abiding place."