A moment of pure insight, where you felt like you were connected to everything around you?
After the thought-provoking conversation in the Tavern about the nature of political correctness and freedom of speech, I began thinking about the mediation between the two extremes. How finding a center ground was a necessary step in solving the underlying issues.
The resolution is one of give and take, push and pull, yin and yang. As I sat in class, I thought of the swinging pendulum, our attraction to physical symmetry, the forces of magnetism and gravity in our universe. I somehow felt the traditions of old intermingling with the evolving social standards of new generations. Equilibrium.
And I thought. A pendulum swings to two extremes but it always returns to the center. A middle ground must always be found in debate. Mediation can bridge war and peace, even as understanding fosters harmony between brothers.
As I walked back to my apartment, I saw the symmetry of architecture and I felt everything connect. A balance seemed to lead me home, and I seemed to be aware of every footstep, ever muscle, every part of my being working in harmony, symmetry, and purpose.
I feel the need to thank you, fellow Guilders, for your inadvertent participation in my experience. I realize this is a personal topic, but if anyone else has anything they want to share, feel free.
-ElDo-
The experience you're talking about is something important. It's almost like a means with which someone can come to terms with the universe. I've gotten close, a couple times, to an epiphany matching the sort you have described, but I've never quite gotten there. I hope that someday I will, and congrats to you for not breaking down mentally when you saw it all.
I have had a few, but at the moment there is really only one that springs clearly to mind.
First off, there is a performance artist/musician named Laurie Anderson who is one of my heroes. She's incredible. Find some stuff of hers if you can (i reccoment the video of one of her concerts called Home of the Brave).
About 2 years ago, she was doing a tour and i was fortunate to go see both of her Toronto shows. For a while before this she had been the first, only and last artist-in-residence at NASA. Don't ask me what it means. She didn't know, and neither did they. It was an experiment. However, at the end of her time there she was asked for a report and this was done in the form of a show called The End of the Moon - the very show i saw.
Now she has many styles of shows, and they frequently include huge halls, a large varied band, giant projection screens and a variety of custum built instruments. However for this show it was just her in a small theater, on a small stage covered in little white cristmas lights and a projection of varrying nebulaes and stuff onto the back wall, with nothing but a small mixing board, a mike her electric violin and a large red leather arm chair.
The show alternated between her telling a series of small stories about NASA or about life or whatever else (and all the stories were told in the same soothing monotone), and her playing the most gorgeous music on her violin (and she is not only a virtuoso, but immensly creative). There was only one way to describe the music - epic. Not in the dnd sense, but in terms of it's grand scope.
The final song of the night though was what did it. Picture youself on a balcony looking down at a dark stage covered in twinkly lights and pictures of incredible spacial phenomena. And overlaying this is a song that in my mind conjured the strongest feelings of soaring through the cosmos. I got lost in the lights and in my mind had the most vivid images of flying through everything. Then it ended.
There was no encore.
I walked out of the building and across the parking lot to a small bar where you could meet her at an afterparty. The entire way, i didn't even say a word. IT is one of the few times i have been strick dumb - I was simply so connected with everything that at once it both all made sense and was completely unfathomable.
I met and talked with her and i have a picture of us at home, but after that last song, the next few hours didn't quite feel reel. I fas both connected and detached.
I saw it again the following night.
It lost none of it's impact.
I am waiting for a recording of that show, just so i can hear that final song once more.
Thank you for listening to my babbleing.
I recognize the all-too-elusive feeling you describe. I am glad I seem to have had an indirect role in helping you achieve it.
I've had this feeling many, many times. A lot of the time, it doesn't include some point of high relevation, though. I think the most common trigger, for me, is when I look at a leaf at the end of a branch, and see how the sunlight plays off of it.
I did have one major experience like this, but at the moment, I'm not up for typing all of it.... maybe when i have more time and drive, i can edit this post :)
Obvious, what you describe sounds a lot like something Rick Wakeman would do, he doesn't play a violin but yeah, the whole epic of it and the story telling. Maybe it's not the same thing, but you could check it out.
I do feel like I've come close too, to this you speak of... Everything just seems to click and everything makes sense. Strangely, the cause of that whole political correctness thread, what I said about halflings and jews; I felt kind of the same when I realized it (Not to such degree, though).
Wow, I also feel good about having been a part of that. I don't know if I've had something quite like that, but I've had epiphanies before.
One that comes to mind is when I decided what I want to do with my life. I grew up at an elementary/middle school with a focus on the arts; I would sing and act, paint, collage, draw, write, read, etc., all the time. It never felt like that was anything special, that was just what we did as part of everyday life. After seventh grade I moved to another state, and for a year I chose marching band as my elective instead of theater or vocal music. I didn't realize how much I missed it until a year later, in my Freshman year of high school, when the choir held a variety show. I sang "I am a man of constant sorrow" from Oh Brother, Where art thou?. I went up there in my silly costume, singing a silly song with a silly dance, and it was amazing: the whole crowd was on their feet, clapping to the rythm of my silly song. To be able to do that to people . . .
It was definitely among the most wonderful experiences of my life, and cemented in me the conviction that I have to be on stage, it's simply where I belong.
~Seraph
[ic=A Moment of Clarity]Once, on a road trip, I was passing by the shell of an abandoned town, little more than a few boarded up stores along the side of a road whose travellers had since grown too busy to stop. The crisp New England air had settled over the scene, and the golden twilight of the setting sun had bathed the autumn colors of the local treeline in fading gold. Wanting to admire the scenery and having just discovered a town full of vacant driveways nestled amidst the forgotten countryside, I pulled off to the side of the road. In that instant, almost too easily, I had connected, had become a part of that small remnant of a town. In a way, I am part of it still.
As night rapidly approached, I took in the last vesitiges of the fading light and admired the raw, uncaring beauty of nature. From there, my thoughts strayed to the residents who had once called this quaint landscape home. I found my curiosity piqued by the buildings those townfolk had left behind, and soon found myself peering through windows that had not held panes of glass in countless years. My mind's eye was busy envisioning the shopkeepers and visitors making their way through these small stores of decades past, residents oblivious to the fact that all would one day be reduced to little more than a shadow of its former self.
And that's when I found the door. It seemed so innocent, just an empty frame on the side of a former general store. Beyond its unseeming bounds, an empty room with peeling paint and a few piles of leaves on the floor. My curiosity - my fateful curiosity - inspired me to step across the threshhold, the store's first visitor in years, or perhaps untold aeons. Night fell the minute I set foot within that ghost of a building, and with it came the crushing weight of times lost and emptiness filled only by inanimate musings of vast, ineffible reaches beyond the bounds of angled space.
Then for me, hapless traveller in the echoes of a scene meant to have faded from the memory of the world, a moment of clarity. Utter, horrible clarity, and the uninvited knowledge that there exists a race of Old Ones whose high priest ascended from the abysmal depths to thrice circle the moon on eldritch wing in a terrible rite of power, that beings too horrible comprehend seep forth from voids beyond imagining to fill the forgotten spaces that sane minds are no longer meant to behold.
Call me mad if you will, but I know what terrible vision I glimpsed in that star-crossed moment of clarity, and it haunts my dreams to this very day. Pray that you never find yourself likewise cursed with the clarity to glimpse the true world behind the facade that is the playground of sane minds. That is not dead which can eternal lie. Cthulhu fhtagn![/ic]
My moment of clarity came in the (Australian) winter of 2005, when I began having my first hallucinations. As a young lover of philosophy who oft touted notions of "subjectivity" and "personal universes", I bewildered many a mind with my existential ruminations. Alas, until my first psychotic experience, I could not have rightly said that I understood what it meant to gaze into a subjective world. For theoretical purposes, we might call our experiences individual, but by concensus we nevertheless come to accept the world we perceive as the world perceived by all.
It is ironic, then, that only through the obfuscation of my senses could I appreciate the true individuality of our experience. The precise moment when I came to that realisation occurred when I was with my (now ex) girlfiend in a park, and as she spoke to me a pale figure rose behind her, eclipsing the now setting sun with black wings that unfolded across the sky, and I thought "This must be God." She noted how my attention had been drawn away, and followed my gaze, but she could not see what I saw.
At that very moment, I think I understood all that we as humans have ever done, thought, created or destroyed. I understood the nature of argument, of love, of art, of war... In every mind is a universe. I had spoken of the idea before, but then, in a grassy clearing before a teenage girl and an illusory incarnation of the Almighty, that idea became something real. That winged eidelon was of my Existence, but not of hers. We shared the same place, and yet by virtue of one presence our places were altogether different.
Those of you who have read my setting can now probably see how heavily influenced it is by that moment of clarity.