Always and Forever — Rapture
A state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.
I will describe a personal experience for you, because it is the best way I can think of to illustrate the concept we’re about to discuss.
I went out into nature just before dawn, during that ghostly hour that puts a chill through one’s bones no matter what the season. It is unfamiliar, that hour, a time when we’re usually asleep, and that made me uncomfortable to be out, among the shadows and the creatures of the night. There was something different about that early morning, a strange stillness, like all existence had come to a stop — no sounds in the branches, no gusts of wind, no calls.
I couldn’t feel the air against my skin, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. The light switched gradually from violet to gray, enough that I could distinguish the things around me, and be astonished even more by their strange stillness.
I sat on the ground, and I couldn’t feel the coldness of the earth beneath me, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. It didn’t feel like one usually expects, and you know exactly what I mean if you ever had to sleep on the ground.
In that strange frozen tableau there was only one thing in motion: the sky. I sat on the ground and watched the clouds pass quickly over my head, strangely fast compared to the stillness of the air around me. The light got gradually brighter, turning from gray to lavender and rose, but it was just a backdrop for the real action, an unrelated detail, yielding the center stage to the fascinating sweep of the clouds across the sky in a swift sequence that stirred no motion in the air close to the ground.
It would be difficult to describe this perception, but in that moment air was the only thing in reality that felt alive.
I was still, just like everything around me, and I watched this relentless translation of the sky over my head, at constant speed, in the absence of any other signal to distract the senses: no sounds, no sensations against my skin, no scents.
I lost track of my being altogether after a while, and my only awakened sense, the sight, traveled away with the clouds, fully caught in their sweep across the sky, it connected to them; it reflected them; it was them. I had this eerie feeling I was that air, moving very fast across the sky, making no sound, stirring no breeze in the world below. Just me, traveling fast with the air, sharing its nature, oblivious to time, free of my body. There was no thinking to be done in that state, no worries, no plans, no questioning of purpose. In this strange state I experienced what it felt like to just be, and not even to be me, but to be air.
Why am I describing this? To illustrate a state of mind called rapture.
When people hear this term, they immediately think pleasure or bliss, but it is nothing of the kind, it’s something beyond human emotion, something different altogether and impossible to explain.
The state of rapture is very rare and transforms a person dramatically, because it opens the door to a whole other way to experience reality, one for which we don’t have words, emotions or systems of reference.
It allows one to touch a primal level of being, one which underlies the things we see and which is the reason for how their details came to be, the guiding equation behind a complicated curve.
Did this allow me a superior understanding of reality, one that revealed some precious hidden knowledge? Absolutely not! I can’t even explain it. I don’t even know what it is, a thought, an experience, an emotion, it is probably none of the above, because it is from outside, somehow, and please don’t ask me from outside of what. This is the best way I can describe it with the information and rational processes available to me.
You may say that something that cannot be described, shared, or used is not worth bringing up in a rational discussion. We are in this world for a very short time, compared to the age of the universe that surrounds us, so what would be the point of walking through it with a finite set of rules, never straying from the beaten path and ignoring everything that doesn’t fit with the picture we were handed? Whatever this experience was, it informed my life, it shaped its course and I won’t deny myself it.
There is one thing people forget in the course of their busy lives. There is no objective reality, only our personal experience of it. We have no way of verifying that when we are looking at a tree, for instance, the way all of us see that tree is exactly the same.
Also, what we see is a flat picture of the tree, not the real thing, alive with the movement of sap, with its growth processes, and with an endless series of transformations that take place every second and which we simplify out of the representation of it.
Its treeness always eludes us.
If everything we think we know is a personal interpretation of a set of rules that keeps shifting as we advance in wisdom, what makes a type of experience, say the experience of understanding a mathematical concept, valuable, and another type of experience, say sharing in the wholeness of being, worthless?
I think that if reality condescends to give you a gift, you should graciously accept it.
[The manuscript darkens here, so much that it becomes unreadable.
Judging by the similarities between the discoloration of this page and that of the one we found at the beginning of the document we are fairly certain that the two pages were together at the time the water damage occurred.
As with the other page, we have tried every method to slow down the darkening of the paper, from chemical processes to ultraviolet light filters, to no avail.
Unlike the other one, the damaged portion of this document was already too dark to read by the time we found the manuscript and the information contained inside it is irretrievable.
This page is sealed with a rose, just like all the others, and the water stain divides it precisely in half. The bottom portion is dark. There is a marking above it, on the right side, close to the edge of the paper, a marking we haven’t been able to identify, which looks like a derivative symbol lying on its back.
The page is evidently more worn than the others; it looks like it has been handled extensively.
We can’t discount the possibility that the damaged portion was chemically triggered to darken, to protect the secrecy of the information it contained in case of an unauthorized attempt to obtain it.
On the other side of the document, at the same level with the rose seal, there is a line drawing of a blue lotus flower, the way we usually see it in Egyptian hieroglyphics, from the side and half opened, dangling at the top of a winding stem.]
You asked me what I think about instances of rapture as described in religious literature. I have not experienced any of them myself, but I learned not to dismiss information by default. I would have to learn a lot more about the specifics of those cases to form an opinion.
Is it possible that some of these encounters are accompanied by a state of bliss? Anything is possible. There is a state of heightened emotion associated with these moments when reality reveals itself to one, a state of awe and grace. It makes one feel humble and small, at a loss for words, but privileged to have been granted the awareness of it. I don’t doubt that some people perceive this state as bliss.
Depending on somebody’s life and beliefs these incidents that have no precedent can associate themselves with many expectations — divine judgment, being taken to other realms, being bathed in infinite love, an expansion of one’s consciousness, waking up.
It is easier to fall back on a structure of understanding you already have than to build one from scratch on the spot.
Maybe it is a religious experience, I know no better than anybody else who has been through it. If these are encounters with the divine, I would have no references to qualify them as such. I prefer not to define them, just describe them to the degree to which that is possible.
Can these occurrences be unpleasant? Yes.
Can I elaborate on this? I hesitate to go into details, things like these stick in one’s mind and pop out at the most inconvenient moments, when they do more harm than good, but since you asked, yes, some people have had very unpleasant experiences. I’m sure apocalyptic visions are not enjoyable. Living through one’s final judgment isn’t comforting either.
The mind is stubborn and works in mysterious ways.
It draws upon what comes closest to an event unlike anything it ever encountered in an effort to make its experience stand on reason again, and to this end even unspeakable tragedy is preferable to the abyss of the unknown.
We can’t form concepts outside a context.
How does a moment like this inform one’s life?
It’s a shifting of perspective, more than anything else. You see exactly the same things, but you don’t see them in the same way you used to anymore. Life gets resifted through a finer sieve that changes its granularity.
Can I give you an example for that?
An explanation first.
The mind doesn’t differentiate between an instance it derived from the real world and an instance it built and experienced inside itself.
To it, both are just as real. You can’t dismiss the happenings in someone’s mind, or their influence on the person’s perspective on life. If I told you that you love or hate a person, it would not influence the real emotion you have towards that person. I can’t convince you that you hate that person any more than you can convince me, in the abstract, that you love them. We compromise and agree to take a person at their word in matters of the heart.
These states outside the norm are just as much matters of the heart as emotions. If somebody tells you they had an insight into the divine, and you don’t believe that such a thing is possible, how would any of you convince the other to adopt their point of view?
And now the example. People who believe they glimpsed a higher dimension are never the same after that. They revisit their past and try to come to terms with it. They change their priorities. They take more chances. Their lives transform, based on this experience, which is as powerful as love. How this experience came about, and whether it had some basis in reality or it was just a figment of their overheated minds is as irrelevant as the circumstances that induced one to fall in love.
The feeling itself is no less real.
Is it possible that people fake these experiences just to become more interesting? Sure. Some.
But let me ask you something: who changes their entire life based on a false claim to get attention? Whatever these experiences may be, they do feel real.
Can I describe how my encounter with air changed me?
Do you remember how I said that I felt uncomfortable walking outside before dawn, like I was an intruder, in danger, and out of my element? I never felt like that again after that. Now, whenever I am in nature, I am at home, welcomed, in a place that is a lot more like me than it is different from me. There are no menacing shadows and creatures of the night, there are only creatures, just like me, and they cast shadows, just like me, and they’re neither good nor bad, just like me. The world is like me. That’s what I learned from that experience.
Am I going to feel what it is like to be air ever again? I don’t know, but that is not important. I am already at home in reality. It is hard to explain the deep sense of security one derives from a feeling like that.
A lot of the hardship of living draws strength from the fact that people feel like they don’t belong, they’re unsure of their footing, ungrounded. Imagine that instead of that you get the experience of having lived in a town all your life, that you know its every street and shop, all the people who live there, and that you’re friends with most. That’s how I feel about existence.
[After our last attempt to transfer the manuscript to the Institute failed, we decided that the advantages of having it closer to home did not justify the level of effort required to move this artifact.
Maybe it is for the best.
The paper has acclimated to the levels of temperature and humidity in the library and will probably fare better if those conditions don’t change.
In a separate letter we made a request to expand the scope of our research grant to include the history and the symbolism of the rose seal. We believe this artifact is a lot older than the manuscript itself, going back all the way to ancient Egypt. We are excited to take on this new challenge, which we accidentally stumbled upon. Its origins may shed light on some of the strange drawings found in the document which occasionally feel out of place in its historical period.
If the rose seal is Egyptian, this brings up questions about how it came to be in the master’s possession and why it seems to be so important to him, almost like his personal crest. We can’t help but feel that the writing in the damaged portion of the document might have been able to shed some light on that, but now we will never know. The problem with history is that one only gets to draw conclusions about its situations and events based on the artifacts that survived it. We still don’t know if the master was teaching a lecture for one, the pupil whose handwriting we have become so accustomed to, or for an entire class. We don’t know where the rest of the document is hidden. We don’t know why of all places the manuscript portion we do have found its home here. An incomplete puzzle at best.]
