Epiphanies

I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. ALBERT EINSTEIN

All that man has eternally here in multiplicity is intrinsically one. Here all blades of grass, wood, stone, all things are one. This is the deepest depth. MEISTER ECKHART

We read about epiphanies in Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and we see characters in his Dubliners stories experience sudden transformative insights. Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea undergoes an epiphany of understanding when he hears the song One Of These Days in a dingy bar and when he stares at the roots of a chestnut tree. What's going on here, and what are epiphanies?

Magical moments, mystical moments, eternal moments, liminal moments. Gateways to something much larger and more significant. Portals into the unknown which vanish as mysteriously as they appear. Sudden shafts of illumination, insight, knowledge. Unexpected, unsought hits of joy and ecstasy. Unheralded instants of revelation, transformation, transcendence.

Epiphanies don't come to order; they usually happen when least expected. The places where they occur may be, or may briefly become, 'thin' places. (There exists in Celtic mythology the notion of 'thin places' in the universe, where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity.) In an epiphanic moment the 'I' may disappear briefly as one is united with the cosmos.

One of the most important stimuli and excitements in my life is the recollection of past epiphanies and the expectation of future epiphanies.

Four personal epiphanies:

Climbing a small, rounded lump called Potter's Hill overlooking Woolacombe, Devon, at the age of twelve. Throwing myself down on the close-cropped turf, feeling the warm sunshine on my skin, listening to the screaming seagulls, their voices stifled by gusts of wind. Discovering all at once that I was incredibly happy — there, in that unremarkable place, on my own, in total freedom, in a state of grace. Recently I wrote a poem about this which you can find here. 

Art class at school at the age of fourteen. The bearded, gruff and eccentric art teacher, Billy Booth, had brought in some photographic slides for us to look at — it was an end-of-term treat. Projected on a white screen were pictures he'd taken of Crete, of the sites of Mycenae and Knossos, of the fabulous Lion Gate. A sudden shudder, a violent frisson overwhelmed me, and I was granted a deep, imaginative insight into history and culture and art and the transformative power of art — an experience which is still almost as vivid to me now as it was over forty years ago.

The Derbyshire Peak District at the top of a bluff above Monsal Dale. I was now in my thirties. A view of the old viaduct, the winding valley, the glinting river, the distant purple hills. Peace descended on me, calm and perfect peace, and a feeling of oneness with myself, with others, with nature, with the universe. I could have died happy at that moment.

Several times on the Camino, in France and in Spain. I can't remember clearly all the occasions. But definitely the penultimate day on the GR65 from Geneva to Le Puy-en-Velay: hot sun, brilliant blue sky, autumn colours of red, orange and gold setting the wooded slopes on fire. I crossed the watershed and a panorama of rounded hills, extinct volcanoes, stretched in front of me as far as the eye could see, wave upon petrified wave receding ever more hazily to a smudged horizon.

Can you remember your own epiphanies?

Nearly Heaven

God is at home; it's we who have gone out for a walk. MEISTER ECKHART

If you do not pause upon the bridge and look over the parapet, you will not see the row of cairns bisecting the river Irthing. Who built this progression of tiny ziggurats, this ley-line of stone stupas? Down the adjacent green lane you wander, seeking an answer, following Ariadne's thread. Then stop, amazed, at an airy threshold. On your right, a heap of stones coalesces into faces, cats' eyes, flowers. A sign says Nearly Heaven. You hesitate, then softly step from the sunken hawthorn track into the sanctuary.

On your left, even more artfully arranged stones suggest a dog, a buddha, a Spanish nobleman - whatever you may imagine. A child's swing, knifed from a rubber tyre, dangles. A comfy chair and sofa are draped in blue plastic against the rain. Semi-circular voodoo heads, roughly hewn from wood, with knapweed seed for hair, swing from a central tree. Behind the tree a dead mouse floats in a rain-filled bucket. A streaked and autographed mural dominates this stage set. It's like a painting by Joan Miró. On it passers-by have scrawled names, dates, messages.

Who lives here, who has lived here, who's passed through? What is this place, this surreal haven just a stone's throw from Hadrian's Wall's rational alignments? A hippie lair or artists' colony? A New Age traveller or gypsy camp? A children's den? A pilgrim resting place? The peat-brown stream rushes round the curve on its stony bed, giving little away. Across the water lies the stub of a ramshackle, do-it-yourself bridge made of wooden packing cases. And beyond this there's a shelter, a big tarp strung below the boughs of thick-set trees. It seems uninhabited.

Signs and markers. Signs and markers. You construct a simple cairn right at the end of the line, at the spot where the row of cairns hits the stony shore. You choose differently sized stones - large ones at the bottom, smaller ones on top - varying the colours, contrasting this smooth red sandstone with that olive-green rock, this black and white striated pebble with that speckled conglomerate.

What does it all mean? Does it have to mean anything? You sigh, happy to bathe in the mystery. Then walk back from this liminal space into the shadowed lane. Perhaps you'll now tease out a myriad meanings for evermore? That's fine. For within the mystery lies the meaning; and within the meaning lies the mystery.

(Click here and here for the responses of Dominic and George to Nearly [Almost] Heaven.)

Passing Through

The explorer and the traveller, not to mention the tourist, may take to a pilgrimage route, but the motives for their departure, what they seek, and the significance of their ultimate destination are never those of a pilgrim. The pilgrim's progress is both an interior journey, a spiritual exercise, and a physical journey towards an actual site imbued with a divine character. The condition of the pilgrim, in fact, comes remarkably close to that of the hero. By abandoning familiar, worldly surroundings, submitting oneself to physical hardship and sometimes considerable danger, and paying homage or penance at a holy site, pilgrims, like heroes, know that they will return from their odyssey in some way renewed, or at least inwardly changed. 'A visitor passes through a place;' wrote Cynthia Ozick, 'the place passes through the pilgrim.' In describing mystical experience, Meister Eckhart used pilgrimage as a metaphor: 'the Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves.' That, in a phrase, is every pilgrim's goal.

NICHOLAS SHRADY Sacred Roads: Adventures From The Pilgrimage Trail (1999)

Dharmakaya Light

I've been stimulated recently by Loren Webster's discussion of Robert M. Pirsig and the Buddhist concept of Dharmakaya Light.

I interpret it as a kind of ecstasy of illumination which may be reached, for example, through meditation, sexual union, deep sleep, a near-death experience, and other paths. (Or photography, Loren!) According to Buddhist teaching the 4 main characteristics of this sublime state are: a Bright Image; Cessation of Thought; a pervasive feeling of Oneness not Duality; Slowness or even Cessation of Breath. I'm not sure how this differs from Nirvana - but it seems to be in its particular emphasis on Light as the gateway. In a wider context I think there are connections here with all kinds of "peak experiences" - from the epiphanies of Joyce to the insights of early Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart - and even the transformative jazz riff heard in the café by Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea.

I was reminded of a poem I wrote years ago on this very subject. Whatever its merits or demerits - I now think it's too self-conscious, too literal, not metaphorical enough, though I still like the ending - it's perhaps interesting in its attempt to define some sort of mystical experience, to capture an instance of Dharmakaya Light:

Light Shines

The days go by

unnoticed as breathing

- weeks, months, maybe years -

and then perhaps at the end

of a dark avenue of leafless trees

- just when you were not specially

looking, thinking or expecting -

you come across a simple church

- rough, stone-hewed -

and witness a rush of winter sun

spotlighting dark ivied corners

of the graveyard, fragile symmetries

of spider webs now dewbright filigree.

This sudden, unsought

gleam of understanding

renders you breathless,

altered in some way

just for an instant,

clarifying for a moment

what you'd half thought

or dimly felt one time

- on the road to Damascus

or to Egypt in flight -

that you're an unknowing pilgrim

at an altar of pure light.