Glimpses of Reality

THE Atlantic has discovered that ‘twenty minutes of reality’ is a conservative estimate. Since the first of May the editor’s desk has been ‘ saturate with brightness,’ and every mail brings in its sheaf of visions, some mystical, others in plain testimony of patent facts of life. ‘As though a star should open out, all sides,’ these intimate and eager revelations glow and shine and will not be rejected. It is a temptation to pack the magazine from cover to cover with ‘reality’; to pursue and prove the stuff which it is made of, whether subjective or objective, part of the mystery of personality or part of that other mystery that makes the world about us; but it has seemed kinder to the general reader to temper ‘the too-much glory.’

The explanations which multitudes of our correspondents offer are as various as the spiritual adventures others recount. One maintains that the cause of the experience is cosmic consciousness; another that it is common sense. Some say that Christian Science is once again made manifest; others that ‘projection’ and ‘detachment’ have been at work. One or two make delicate references to the ‘ milder forms of insanity,’ while numbers write that here is accomplished the mystic union of the finite with the eternal consciousness.

Of the multitude of deeply personal experiences which the article has called forth, three have been chosen, for the sake of the spiritual kinship revealed through their temperamental variety. It is a question whether or not St. Theresa and Brother Lawrence and their fellowship would concede that the writers had experienced reality according to the accepted definition. But the At-lantic does not presume to settle questions so subtle and so expressive of divers ways of thought. It is content to record these three adventures and the witness they bear to healthy spiritual hunger.

I. THE UNREMEMBERED VISION

The article, ‘Twenty Minutes of Reality,’ will, I feel sure, have interested many readers of the Atlantic, some of whom, no doubt, can recall similar happenings in their own lives. The following short account of a somewhat analogous spiritual experience that I recently went through may be of significance to those whose interest in the subject has already been awakened.

Unlike the writer in the May Atlantic, my fears as a child were awakened, not by the thought of life everlasting, but by the thought of everlasting death. I feared personal extinction; feared it at times so acutely that I seemed to realize what it would be to suffer complete disintegration, to feel the very pangs of the snuffing out of the personal entity. I sometimes visioned to myself an immense funnel, fashioned of some unyielding substance of stone or steel, with, at its bottom, a tiny pin-head of a hole for outlet. Down the steep sides of its converging walls there rolled masses of stone and rock, which at the bottom slowly and inexorably by some unseen power were ground to dust and forced through the minute opening. Sudden terror seized upon me as I thought: ‘This shall be my fate’; and, though I felt that such obliteration somehow was impossible for my soul, whatever happened to my body, my panic was real. I seemed to dread the emergence of some undreamed-of force or will that in a flash would make the impossible a thing accomplished.

The acuteness of this fear was not of long duration. Thoughts on this subject were of infrequent occurrence and I soon outgrew such fears entirely, pushed them aside, ignored them, as was only proper for a healthy and much occupied youth. By the time I came to mature faith and belief in the goodness of the universe and the existence of God, I seemed never to have entertained them.

The vision of which I would speak is not properly a vision, rather the effect of what I think must have been one; realization I prefer to call it. This realization was connected with an event that happened but a year ago. It was not so much a part of the event as an aftermath, occurring two days later.

About a year ago I underwent a slight operation that caused me to stay in bed for only a few hours. I suffered very little discomfort in going under the anæsthetic; in fact, few of the physical sensations that I had been told to expect. What occurred to me seemed almost entirely to be within the realm of mind or spirit. After a moment of calm waiting and deep breathing, my mind suddenly reverted to my childhood days and I asked myself, ‘What if those childish fears were not unfounded?’ Then a quick conviction came over me that I was trapped, pinned down helplessly, by an inexorable power; that I had deluded myself through all the years in which I had so carelessly cast aside fear. Reality in all its hideousness seemed hanging over me. A great sound reached my ears, or rather a mighty vibration smote them with fast-repeated waves, as if the whole adamantine universe were beating in upon my soul some hard, ironic message. There was no powder to struggle left in me. I thought, ‘Hark, God laughs at you!’ Then unconsciousness came upon me.

I had little trouble in coming out of the ether, and I was on my feet again and returned home the same afternoon. A few days’ rest made me feel as fit as ever. It was while quietly lounging about on the second day that my thoughts reverted to what had just passed. It was then that the realization came over me. It is as vivid to-day.

To my surprise, the past event was seen in an utterly new light; the experience undergone before the loss of consciousness had lost its grip of terror upon me. Certainty dwelt calmly, assuringly, inevitably in my soul—certainty that the past was past and had not been an approach to death, and that the future could never be torn from out my soul. I knew that not for an instant during the period of utter blankness had I ceased to exist, nay, to be conscious; that my soul had made some tremendous journey whose range and destination my mind could but dimly guess. I was assured that the very adamantine laughter of God had been unable to destroy the entity that was my soul; somehow that mighty beating in upon my consciousness no longer seemed ironic to me, but filled with the ubiquity and power of ineffable life.

I was not mentally elated or physically excited, but calm in mind and body. I was having no vision. Simply I seemed possessed of the certainty of having had such a vision; rather of having been for a time a conscious part of the ultimate reality, the vision of which was no longer present in my mind. Something had happened in that period of blankness — I know not what. It was as though I had been borne gently up out of some dark abyss, toward which I looked back now without terror, into a realm of mist and moving gray cloud through which I could distinguish immense granite cliffs forming the walls of the pit above whose sun-lit rim I had at last been given a vision of unimaginable beauty; as though, as Dante says, I had seen ‘ un riso dell’ universo’; as though it had been vouchsafed me to gaze for an instant into the very eyes of God to receive assurance from his smiling glance.

This certainty of the goodness of the universe has dawned in my soul, though I have no vision to recount as its cause. The strength and quiet peacefulness of its presence have not lessened. I am convinced that during that short period of unconsciousness something of immense import to my soul took place. How could nothing have happened?

Thus it was that my childhood fears of non-eternity were effaced.

II. ROCK-RIBS OF TRUTH

Reading the very interesting article in the May Atlantic entitled ‘Twenty Minutes of Reality’ inclines me to contribute an experience of my own. It happened more than forty years ago, but the memory of it is still fresh.

My experience differed from that of the Atlantic author in that it was distinctly moral in character; in fact it was brought about by wrong-doing. It all happened so many years ago that I can now tell the story as if I were speaking of another person.

I believe I am naturally very honest, but at the time I speak of I had been pursuing, for a considerable period, a course that was, to say the least, disingenuous, and thereby I was attaining what seemed to me at the time a great advantage. I was not at peace, however, and all spiritual truth, to which I had previously been keenly sensitive, appeared to me dead and unreal. I used to pray that I might be made to feel the reality of it, but no answer came until, after a long time of jangling conflict and inner misery, I one day, quitequietly and with no conscious effort, stopped doing the disingenuous thing.

Then the marvel happened. It was as if a great rubber band which had been stretched almost to the breaking point were suddenly released and snapped back to its normal condition. Heaven and earth were changed for me. Everything was glorious because of its relation to some great central life — nothing seemed to matter but that life. While the experience lasted — and I think it must have been some time, as I remember it both in the house and out — I could have gone cheerfully to the stake. I walked on air, so gloriously commissioned did I feel by some higher power. Even the details of daily living, such as tying one’s shoestrings, or brushing one’s teeth, which had previously almost suffocated me by their monotony, became of thrilling interest as fitting me for the work I was to do. Reality was shown to me in answer to my prayer. I saw, as plainly as I see the city chimneys from my window as I write, great shoulders of Truth and Righteousness reaching down underneath all material things like the rockribs of a mountain-side beneath the shifting clouds and shadows. I saw that all material things are but clouds and shadows in comparison. Hence I have never doubted what Reality is.

The only other unusual experience that has come to me had no moral bearing whatever.

One day, for no reason that I can trace, in looking at a perfectly familiar mountain-side, I became for a few minutes poignantly conscious of the life of the mountain — life of beast, bird, insect, sap in trees, thrill of the earth; the whole mountain, and all it held, seemed to sing and quiver with life.

In a few minutes it was only an ordinary mountain again, thick-set with trees and holding its secret, but I was a little different — at least, I hope so.

The third witness to the truth of these things we may call

III. THE PERMANENT ECSTATIC

What is wrong with my psychology? [she writes.] Why does one very gifted person, with a pen to express what he feels, receive as a vision the psychic experience of joy and the inner conviction that Good is at the bottom of everything which another very un-gifted person, with no power of self-expression, has felt with more or less intensity — generally more — ever since her first conscious awakening of thought; but which, until she read ‘Twenty Minutes of Reality,’she always regarded as merely the normal mental attitude of the normal human being?

As I read this very beautifully written article I said, ‘Of course.' ‘Why, naturally,’‘Of course,’at the ending of so many paragraphs that, at last, I found myself gasping in amazement that any living man or woman should have thought an experience of twenty minutes of reality a thing of sufficient import to write about — it almost took my breath away. But I’m glad they did. For I have been imprisoned in egoism. All my life long (I am forty-four years old), from the age of five years when I danced madly around the first Christmas tree I can remember, shouting ‘Joy, Joy, Joy!’ I’ve known more than twenty minutes of this unveiled naked reality every humdrum day I ’ve lived — and, up to now, I supposed I was just like everybody else, and that everybody else was like me, excepting misanthropes, valetudinarians, Standard Oil magnates, vivisectionists, and kings who, of course, we all know were born blind.

I supposed every normal person heard this undertone of Joy — this unseen but always felt Reality of things, beating and throbbing underneath the horrible and sad, underneath even the monotonous and dull (which is worse than the horrible because less impressive and intense).

I am a very ordinary woman, living a very ordinary life, my days (the bulk of them, at least) given up to housework — tending my furnace, cooking, dusting, washing dishes; but somehow, these duties are never really gray; in the heart of them there’s always a glow.

Whenever I tend my furnace I feel a thrill of wonder as I think of the shiny black coal coming out of this miraculous earth, and of the brave, toiling lives of sturdy men that have been spent and sacrificed down in the mines to dig out that very coal so that I can tend my furnace. I really love my coalbin (except when I see it lowering!) for I always feel as though it brought me so close to a big Reality—close to God and close to man. It’s like a tremendous link. The Beauty of things I don’t find quite so poignant when I’m washing dishes, though there is always a bird warbling in the lilac bush outside my kitchen window or a streak of sunlight on the vines to make me feel the glad wild joy at the heart of life — and did it not sound like too great a silliness, I could truthfully say that I have given way, day after day, to an ecstasy of wonder at the fresh clean water in my dishpan, and have stood, like a gaping idiot, sometimes for several moments, gaping at it as though it were Niagara Falls — and, so it is, only a ‘ little less.’ From the eternal mystery of the stars down to my very dishpan it’s all so thrilling, so outside of ourselves, so God-put-together, that there never has been, to me, any ‘commonplace.’ The rain pattering on my roof always makes something warm swish around in my heart just as it does when I hear Schumann-Heink; it seems perfectly unescapable, this endless consciousness of Joy and Beauty. As to Eternity it’s always made me chuckle. I’ve always counted on an æon with Walt Whitman and John Muir, several æons with Balzac, Dostoievsky, and Burns, the evenings of æons with the Atlantic, the mornings with Seveik’s Violin Finger Exercises, and no charitable organizations anywhere to interfere with the wholesome joy of selfishness and to make one feel elately dutiful and Righteous. Eternity is only fair.