Quote:
Originally Posted by pamela
One evening while enroute to an engagement, i missed my exit off the highway. I turned around and attempted to gain access back on. It was just after dusk and typically any and all vehicles should have had their headlights on.As i turned to enter the ramp and viewed to my right, there was an approaching car and obviously with no lights on. Moving at approximatly 50 miles an hour and only 20 feet away, a collision was inevitable. The thought that entered my mind at that moment wasn't how to avoid the accident, that was simply impossible. But what did enter was this. I expected the car simply to go thru me and my vehicle and continue on- with no damage or consequences. How odd, i thought, that i should think that, as i sat crumpled in my destroyed car and wondering if an ambulance would arrive.It was strangely quiet and i wasn't registering the pain of my broken body. I began to contemplate my lack of fear of death.One certainly should have been terrified at such a scenario and yet i wasn't.It was merely a passing to me. From a point A to a point B yet not knowing what point B was/is and yet that didn't matter.It just was. The pain recognition finally set in and i was aware that i could only see out of one eye.And really hadn't it always been like that? only seeing part of the picture and not the whole? It was then that really both of my eyes were truly opened and they way i viewed the world and the world in me, was opened.Life and death really isn't so linear, it is a loop of self discovery and moving in and out of those things that perceive as reality and yet find to be so much deeper. The fear is replaced with anticipation and the wonder of what might be discovered yet
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There's something very very strange here.
The first thing all authors say about the mystical experience is that it is ineffable. It can't be described; it can't be explained. Pamela, you have just, in maybe 300 words, effabulated that mystical experience.
You left out a couple of parts of the Western tradition, as described by Evelyn Underhill:
Evelyn Underhill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, but they are folded into the whole anyway, so it doesn't matter. What matters most is that you got the result right.
I see now, thanks to your modest little post, that those other effabulators fail because they try to describe the journey. That journey is a part of what you describe as a loop. I hadn't thought about that before. You don't really see the journey as described by Kurt Vonnegut in "Slaughterhouse Five" or Thomas Berger in "Little Big Man," or as struggled with by director John Maybury in "The Jacket." In that flash, the flash that grows in retrospect to encompass a life and sometimes more, you saw that, as Berger put it, "This is a good day to die."
Of course, there are some forms of wisdom that can only be acquired
in extremis. You have the opportunity to describe something that is, by definition, rarely described.
The rest of us, like Sheriff Bell in "No Country For Old Men," see what we see from the outside and could never get beyond "a hell of a thing" to describe what we see.
This post is unusual for you. It looks like it was hastily written and unedited, a burst of expression you needed to get out before you lost the memory or the words to describe the memory. I'm glad you had the courage to post it, to tell something pretty unscientific in a science blog. Thank you.
--lemit
p.s. About all those allusions. You don't have to read all of them; there won't be a test.
