The peculiar thing about having an Epiphany is that it usually happens very, very quietly.
There are no early warnings. There is no fanfare - no dramatic sound effects or signature theme music no matter how much the general sitcom supra-conscious may have conditioned you to expect something like that.
Quietly these profundities saunter into rooms where your Experiential Self is on auto-pilot, processing and simultaneously perpetuating the phenomena of living.
Quietly they lurk, surreptitiously trying to catch your eye before they have to slink out again so non-clamorous that sometimes the only way you can tell they were present is by that vague sense of disquiet within that tells you : you missed something important.
Of course, the times they do manage to make themselves known, outwardly, it's such an unremarkable event. The earth does not stop spinning on its axes. Physical laws like gravity and motion are not reversed. Time and space are not invalidated. Nothing has changed. But inside you is a cataclysm; a private earthquake and nothing is precisely quite the same again.
It's as though a word or phrase in the topographical landscape of a conversation or cognition shifts ever so subtly and rearranges itself just so, suddenly giving you access to meaning that is immeasurably beyond the immediate and the mundane; giving you one more piece of the jigsaw that makes up life as you understand it, changing the way you process the world forever.
The first time I remember being gobsmacked like that was over a handful of soot.
Yes, soot.
Or lamp black - that black stuff that collects on things that have been held over a flame.
I found a coat of it on some object I was in the process of cleaning, I think.
And after the first thoughtless smush of my fingers over the surface, I had an involuntary meditative moment that lasted for maybe 15 minutes and consisted of me mesmerized, just staring at this stuff on my fingers for the entire duration.
It was the most absolute black I'd ever seen - dense and lush and creamy. It was solid and amorphous at the same time. So dark and soft. So deep and intensely black that it consumed light but at the same time so pure it was luminescent.
It was beautiful. It was perfect.
It was devastating.
Because no sooner had my intuitive self recognized the perfection than my experiential self needed to make something of it.
I wanted to crow about it as though it were a new species of rare flora or fauna that I'd discovered; as though somehow by noticing the presence of the sublime within the mundane, I had had a hand in its very creation. I'd been given a one-off pass to the other side to see the beauty of the universe and all I could think of was getting a souvenir for when I went back to the real world just so I could say I'd been there.
To my mind, merely sensing beauty wasn't enough if I couldn't somehow translate the insight into something communicable.
What was the point of perceiving perfection if it couldn't be...disseminated; its properties mined, its attributes applied. What good was it if it couldn't be used.
But nothing that I came up with would fit. For years I tried. I'd revisit the memory and think: What? How?
And it came to me gradually, over the course of years. Through a process of elimination, I realized that there is nothing I can do with or make of the perfect blackness that I had witnessed that would create, in another human being, the same experience or understanding I'd been given in my moment with it. This, I came to realize was the reason I'd been tussling creatively with this concept for more than a decade. I had been trying to share it. I had been trying to make it better, clearer...so I could share it.
And so it came to me, just recently, that by it's very definition, you can not do more to perfection. You can not make it better. It is perfection. It is.
And the gift I has been given was the opportunity to see the perfection...not the perfection itself.
There are no early warnings. There is no fanfare - no dramatic sound effects or signature theme music no matter how much the general sitcom supra-conscious may have conditioned you to expect something like that.
Quietly these profundities saunter into rooms where your Experiential Self is on auto-pilot, processing and simultaneously perpetuating the phenomena of living.
Quietly they lurk, surreptitiously trying to catch your eye before they have to slink out again so non-clamorous that sometimes the only way you can tell they were present is by that vague sense of disquiet within that tells you : you missed something important.
Of course, the times they do manage to make themselves known, outwardly, it's such an unremarkable event. The earth does not stop spinning on its axes. Physical laws like gravity and motion are not reversed. Time and space are not invalidated. Nothing has changed. But inside you is a cataclysm; a private earthquake and nothing is precisely quite the same again.
It's as though a word or phrase in the topographical landscape of a conversation or cognition shifts ever so subtly and rearranges itself just so, suddenly giving you access to meaning that is immeasurably beyond the immediate and the mundane; giving you one more piece of the jigsaw that makes up life as you understand it, changing the way you process the world forever.
The first time I remember being gobsmacked like that was over a handful of soot.
Yes, soot.
Or lamp black - that black stuff that collects on things that have been held over a flame.
I found a coat of it on some object I was in the process of cleaning, I think.
And after the first thoughtless smush of my fingers over the surface, I had an involuntary meditative moment that lasted for maybe 15 minutes and consisted of me mesmerized, just staring at this stuff on my fingers for the entire duration.
It was the most absolute black I'd ever seen - dense and lush and creamy. It was solid and amorphous at the same time. So dark and soft. So deep and intensely black that it consumed light but at the same time so pure it was luminescent.
It was beautiful. It was perfect.
It was devastating.
Because no sooner had my intuitive self recognized the perfection than my experiential self needed to make something of it.
I wanted to crow about it as though it were a new species of rare flora or fauna that I'd discovered; as though somehow by noticing the presence of the sublime within the mundane, I had had a hand in its very creation. I'd been given a one-off pass to the other side to see the beauty of the universe and all I could think of was getting a souvenir for when I went back to the real world just so I could say I'd been there.
To my mind, merely sensing beauty wasn't enough if I couldn't somehow translate the insight into something communicable.
What was the point of perceiving perfection if it couldn't be...disseminated; its properties mined, its attributes applied. What good was it if it couldn't be used.
But nothing that I came up with would fit. For years I tried. I'd revisit the memory and think: What? How?
And it came to me gradually, over the course of years. Through a process of elimination, I realized that there is nothing I can do with or make of the perfect blackness that I had witnessed that would create, in another human being, the same experience or understanding I'd been given in my moment with it. This, I came to realize was the reason I'd been tussling creatively with this concept for more than a decade. I had been trying to share it. I had been trying to make it better, clearer...so I could share it.
And so it came to me, just recently, that by it's very definition, you can not do more to perfection. You can not make it better. It is perfection. It is.
And the gift I has been given was the opportunity to see the perfection...not the perfection itself.
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