I am re-reading Colin Wilson's last substantive book - Super Consciousness: the quest for the peak experience (2009) - which serves as a summation of this area of his interest that began with the Outsider (1956). Wilson cites and describes a 'variety of religious experiences' - or Peak Experiences, in Abraham Maslow's terminology - in which there was an alteration of consciousness and a feeling of well-being, elevation, understanding.
Looking at Wilson's accounts of these experiences through the perspective on the evolutionary-development of consciousness that I have derived from Owen Barfield; I see the reports can be understood as beginning with our normal, everyday, mundane, socially-functional "Consciousness Soul" state of feeling cut-off from reality, alienated and trapped in superficiality.
Consciousness Soul is the implicit baseline from-which Peak Experiences/ religious-mystical experience emerges.
Fro this baseline, and despite that Wilson did not recognize this distinction; these mystical/peak experiences of positive 'Super Consciousness' can be understood as falling into Barfield's two categories of Original Participation and Final Participation.
Most of the mystical experiences described can be regarded as a kind of functional impairment, and these seem like a reversion to the Original Participation of early childhood and tribal-Man, by a selective suppression of those parts of the body (especially brain) needed for the manifestation of self-awareness in the Consciousness Soul stage.
In other words, this kind of mystical experience deletes consciousness of 'the self' as a separate entity from 'reality'.
For instance, those of William James and Ouspensky triggered by drugs such as nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Others were associated with dreamlike passivity; stasis of the body, fainting, or sleep - and mentally there are descriptions of becoming blissful in emotion yet unaware of any thinking (stopping the exhausting and futile treadmill of thoughts, worries, plans...); the apprehension of Time is suspended or deleted.
The kitchen and garden were filled with golden light. I became conscious that at the centre of the Universe, and in my garden, was a great pulsing dynamo that ceaselessly poured-out love, This love poured over and through me, and I was part of it, and it wholly encompassed me. (Cited pages 54-5)
In this Original Participation mystical state; problems are not solved so much as dis-solved; it is not a matter of 'knowing everything' so much as recognizing that knowledge does not matter.
Other, less common, reports of higher consciousness states sound more like Final Participation. In this state, the description is a thinking not stopping but having vastly greater power and comprehensiveness, such that the experience is one of 'knowing everything' - of direct-knowing without need for perception or for reasoning.
My train of thought accelerated and vastly improved in quality... New and convincing ideas came into my mind in a steady torrent, flaws in my existing ideas were illuminated, and as I made mental corrections to the the diminishing gaps in the logical sequence were filled by neat, brand-new linking concepts which made a beautiful logical pattern. (Cited page 56)
I interpret this difference as being due to the Original Participation being what Rudolf Steiner called an 'atavistic' state, a reversion to an earlier state which is induced by a lowering of consciousness, a temporarily 'delirious' impairment of brain function (by drugs, drowsiness, hypnosis, illness etc).
While Final Participation is an enhancement of consciousness, the next 'evolutionary step' towards a more-divine, and more free and independent, mode of thinking; in which thinking is clarified and strengthened; and increases in scope and validity.
This relates to the 'flow state' Wilson describes earlier from the work of Csikczentmihalyi; which is associated with increased, indeed the highest, levels of functionality.
For instance; when people such as creative artists, artistic performers, athletes, and craftsmen sometimes attain their supreme performance. Sometimes called being 'in the zone' - they find themselves unerringly doing things they could not usually achieve, and with total confidence.
Yet these two Super Conscious states - the one thinking, the other a cessation of thought; the one knowing without constraint, the other an indifference to knowledge; the one a flow, the other a suspension of time and movement; the one cognitive, the other contemplative... Are not usually distinguished, are indeed generally conflated.
I regard Original Participation as valuable - but mainly as a 'holiday', a recharging process, a therapeutic rest. While Final Participation is - I hope - the ultimate state of God-like, Christ-like, divine consciousness in which - eventually - we will spend most of our post-mortal resurrected lives.
As for the Consciousness Soul in which we Modern Men spend most of our mortal lives, trapped and cut-off form living and reality - I regard it as merely a transitional phase between Original and Final Participations; and I expect that it will very seldom be experienced in Heaven - although it may be normal, or at least common, in Hell.