What happened to me?

So I meditate sometimes, but I decided to try transcendental meditation for a change. This basically involves repeating a private mantra or word over and over- silently in your head, and just relaxing, concentrating on your breathing, and letting other thoughts come and go freely... for about 20 minutes. I decided to do this first thing in the morning, before food or alcohol... for maximum effect.

I started about an hour after I woke up... and I guess it must have been about 15 minutes in... I was repeating my private words in my head...

Mantra. Mantra, mantra. Then I stopped, quiet.
But I could hear myself still repeating it... like it was someone else... but I knew it was me, my thoughts... they were just separate from me somehow... not in my head anymore... or maybe I was not in my head anymore???

Beautiful silence like I have never heard before surrounded me, it felt like protection, although there was nothing to be protected from... it felt like peace.

It WAS silent but I could still hear the mantra repeating. I was fully aware of my body laying in my bedroom... yet now I saw I was seperate from it... seperate from my mind and my thoughts even. I was so calm, so at peace, just being. So powerful, I felt like I was hard wired into the mainframe. Tranquil with a crystal clear mind.

Everything was so calm, so still, yet fluid.
No time, no space, no movement. Just energy. It was pure and gentle. It was like I could see each atom, each molecule... I don't know, just so much detail, so clean, so perfect... the colours were unlike anything I have seen before, more of them... I could taste them.

I could hear my own thoughts but I was not inside my own head. My thoughts circled above me... but with this distance I found such clarity, and bemusement. 'What a strange little creature' before realizing It was the whole of humankind... 'what chaotic little creatures' I smiled. I felt love. (Not the overwhelming kind of love, more just a background feeling of oneness, belonging, and pure relaxation.

I could hear everything, and everyone now ... all of their thoughts - but I was still wrapped in this blanket of silence protecting me... maybe it was more like feeling everything than hearing everything... I can't tell.
I was calm and bemused at the quirky chaos of the human mind. I was separate from 'me'... completely.

I was everything. I was connected. There was a source, and I was connected to it. I saw my brain light up.

I was my breath, and it was as though everything had breath, the same breath, the same life energy...

I saw the whole ocean. Then the whole sky. I saw everything.

Past present future, was wrong... it just was. It was all there, simultaneously and still... and just our minds were running around it, trying to make sense of it all.

It was so strong but so peaceful. Words just don't do it justice...this is like trying to describe an orgasm, to someone who has never felt it. But even writing about an orgasm feels like a sad insult to this. This was pure, and calm, and stronger.

When I returned to my 'usual' state. I cried. I cried for the beauty. I cried because something very real had happened to me, and it was beyond my comprehension of reality. It wasn't an imagined thought or dream.
It was more real than reality itself.

It has changed me.

I don't know what it was, or how it worked but I want to get back there so badly... I get flashes of it sometimes whilst meditating since... but nothing really compared to that.

Has anyone experienced this or similar?
Please, be serious, I am not making this up, and I am not delusional... I know it may sound crazy, but it was very real. I wasn't dreaming, and I was sober. I was awake and aware during the whole experience...