When Did I Get to Be So "Mystical" (Spiritually-minded?)

It started before I was born. That's what I learned from LDS doctrine after I became a Mormon. Up until learning that I had a premortal life, all I knew was what I felt in my core and recorded in a flimsy (and long lost) spiral notebook when I was about 13 (1 year before I ever even heard of the LDS faith):

I know that I've lived in a world, somewhere, other than this world. A world where there was no hate and cruelty and loneliness. I feel so homesick for that world sometimes.

Actually, it was well before 13 that my mystic inclinations began manifesting in me. In A Voice from the Fire I wrote this about two of my earliest childhood memories:

My first sense of the mystical life, though of course I didn't know what to call it back then, came to me at about five years of age . . . Already seeking that Something I could feel pulsating in and through all things, [I spent hours in the "three-foot-tall spring grass in the fields near my parents' house"] . . . and "I found my first awareness of heaven, since falling to earth." (p.47)

And again, on page 48, I wrote:

Some nights . . . I would haul a blanket and pillow out onto the lawn and lie on my back and let the infinite come down out of the stars and cover me . . .I was loved and I knew it. . . . The UNKNOWN GOD whom Paul preached to the men of Athens introduced Himself to me long before I knew His name, or knew that someday, I would be called by His name (Mosiah 5:7)