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"Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” wrote the poet T.S. Eliot in a line from “Burnt Orange,” the first of his Four Quartets. We are all too familiar with the mind’s tendency to recoil from unpleasant truths and to upholster our sense of well-being with softer material, even if it involves denying reality. But what about the other extreme of human experience? How much of the spiritual heights can we bear without retreating to more comfortable latitudes?
This question is brought into sharp relief in Oscar Wilde’s magnificent meditation on human suffering, De Profundis, written from Reading Gaol, where He was serving a two-year sentence at hard labor for “gross indecency.” He wrote, ”Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the City of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realize a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'the height that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time…”
“The height that the soul is competent to gain” is a line borrowed from William Wordsworth’s “The Excursion,” which in context reads:
'Tis a thing impossible, to frame
Conceptions equal to the soul's desires;
And the most difficult of tasks to keep
Heights which the soul is competent to gain.
This passage highlights a theme in much of Wordsworth’s poetry: the challenge of maintaining those incandescent moments that survive only in idyllic memories of another time and place. In Wordsworth’s case, many such memories harkened back to his boyhood in England’s rustic Lake District, which he regarded as a kind of Eden. One of his best-known poems was “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from "Recollections of Early Childhood” which begins:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
· · · · · · · · ·To me did seem
· · · · · · Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
Then comes the lament:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
····················· Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
····················· He sees it in his joy;
…At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Critics use the phrase “Proustian memory” to describe those highly charged memories in which the world seems “appareled in celestial light.” The term is named for a famous incident in the opening chapter of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The narrator in Proust’s novel tastes a small pastry soaked in lime-blossom tea and is immediately transported back to his childhood in the French village of Combray, where his aunt had fed him the same confection. Proust writes: “No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…”
Proust memorably characterized the phenomenon this way: “The only paradise is paradise lost.” Yes, but why should this be so? To answer that question, we might turn to the pioneering psychologist William James’ seminal work, The Varieties of Religious Experience·(1902), which catalogued the personal narratives of some 200 individuals who reported episodes outside the range of everyday human experience. James reported that "the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination." But James noted, as Wordsworth did, that this intense metaphysical illumination was destined to fade into the light of common day.
James identified several common characteristics of mystical experience, among them their transiency. Wilde put his finger on it when he said, “One can realize a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet.” That single golden moment might appear to exist outside of time. But sooner or later later one begins to hear the clock ticking. Inevitably, our sense of a timeless present is thought of in the past tense.
The transience of so-called peak experiences may have a completely down-to-earth explanation. Briefly, we didn’t get to where we are as a species by being able to ascend the spiritual heights and to remain there indefinitely. In evolutionary terms, we needed to be able to survive to reproduce. The author Aldous Huxley theorized In The Doors of Perception that our normal waking consciousness functions as a “reducing valve” to filter out the vast flood of sensory stimuli that might otherwise interfere with the unglamorous business of staying alive. British researcher Robin Carhart-Harris chimes in, noting that “a lot of brain activity is actually dedicated to keeping the world very stable and ordinary and familiar and unsurprising.”
What we think of as reality is actually an agreed-upon conceptual framework that optimizes our ability to function in the world. This would include our sense of linear time, which we impose upon the unfolding of events so we can perform such mundane tasks as showing up at work on time and keeping a doctor’s appointment next week. We don’t really think in eternity, as Wilde suggested. We think in time; indeed, time is built into the language of our thoughts. We must order them into past, present and future in order even to think about them. Eternity, if we can conceive of it at all, tends to be thought of as unending time rather than as timelessness.
So why do we conceive of eternity at all if it serves no evolutionary purpose? We might as well ask why our our Pleistocene ancestors came equipped with brains capable of comprehending quantum mechanics and of writing the works of Shakespeare when they spent much of the last 250,000 years hunting mastodons with spears. Evolution would appear to have gotten ahead of itself. Then again, with suitable apologies to Darwin, perhaps evolution has deliberately left us room to grow.
Virtually every human society has shamans or priests or prophets who ascended the spiritual heights and returned with stories to tell. Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all founded by individuals who claimed to have had a direct personal experience of the divine. Moses encountered the God of his ancestors in a burning bush while tending his father-in-law’s flocks on the slopes of Mt. Horeb. The prophet Isaiah had a vision of the Lord on his throne while a captive in Babylon. St. Paul was blinded by a light from heaven as he traveled to Damascus. Muhammed saw the angel Gabriel in a cave at Mt. Hira.
The Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade coined the term “hierophany” to characterize a manifestation of the sacred. The word is derived from the Greek adjective hieros, meaning “sacred” or “holy,” and the verb phainein, “to reveal” or to “bring to light.” For Eliade, the sacred and the profane occupied separate realms entirely, and a hierophany occurred during those brief moments when those two worlds intersected.
Eliade believed that heirophanies were the source of all religions, from the most primitive to the most developed. In The Sacred and The Profane, Eliade wrote that a hierophany is “the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world.”
Granted, such “breakthroughs,” as he called them, are discontinuous from our everyday reality. But is that because they exist in their own separate realm? Take Isaiah’s vision of the Lord siting on his throne while the prophet was captive in Babylon. He later reported, “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him…And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.'” Granted, a vision of the Lord o his throne might be overwhelming. But the true significance might be be found in the latter part of this statement: …the whole earth is full of his glory. Perhaps the real import of such breakthrough moments is not that we have been touched by angels but that we got a glimpse of things as they truly are.
Isaiah 6:1-3
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