Some days are special gifts but it takes something else, some extra gift to be able to share them. When I say days, I mean moments within days. And when I say special, I refer to some magic visible only to the inner eye. A day is a torrent of moments which pass us by, whether we attend to them or not. Then they vanish into a hole like a stream into a culvert; they join the great ocean of the Past, now immutable forever. If you think about Time too much it gives you a kind of vertigo. We call some moments Heaven, others Hell. I appeal not to your reason but your immediate experience, the thing in you which can be bored or astonished, according to mood.
Richard Dawkins has brought out a new book, The Magic of Reality, mainly aimed at children. I turned over a few of its pages in the bookshop. One of his chapters is “What is the Sun?” He retells some of the ancient myths, then answers the question in his own scientific terms. He is confident that the reader will agree with him as to which is the more magical, myth or science. One is tempted to remark that Dawkins relishes the role of arch-priest, having as he thinks kicked out the previous incumbent, by exposing non-scientific ideas as “unreality”. In the days of Gilgamesh, as I reported in an earlier post, everyone believed that the sun passes through a tunnel under the earth’s surface, in time to rise again in the east the next morning. That was no tale told by priests, but sprang from the vivid imagination of the people. It is full of relevant meaning about rebirth, replenishment and diurnal rhythms. It is faithful to direct perception, which connects us with reality. Science views reality through its own mesh of abstraction and constructed theory. God and Science as alternative theories have this in common: that they require the deployment of abstract concepts not seen in daily life. As David Abram says in the concluding chapter of Becoming Animal:
Commonly reckoned to be at odds with one another, conventional over-reductive science and most new-age spiritualities actually fortify one another in their detachment from the earth, one of them reducing sensible nature to an object with scant room for sentience and creativity, the other projecting all creativity into a supernatural dimension beyond all bodily ken.
Reality is what floods my senses when I step out of the house. I don’t always perceive it as magical but ten days ago it certainly was. I’ve been trying to write it down ever since. I started out from home following a blind impulse, when the streets were still busy with the tail-end of the morning’s rush hour. The bright round moon must have influenced me when I saw her above a chimney-pot just after dawn. I was impatient to roam, but not till I stepped out did I understand my need to bathe in the cosmic rays, to be gilded by the September sun, to accept the blessings poured down on everyone, that special day. The feeling of blessedness burst into bloom on a familiar street which leads to the town centre. There was nothing pretty about it. Old buildings have been razed to enable modern traffic flow, the gaps filled piecemeal by successive generations of mediocre architects. Lorries and cars exuded noise and fumes. A sprinkling of fellow-pedestrians hurried late to their offices. A chill breeze tempered the Autumn sunbeams. Still I felt a magic in the air. “All is well,” I thought, “everything is happening in its proper orbit and propriety”. I wanted to describe it but didn’t know how.
On a bend of that street, there’s a scruffy patch of shrubs and mown grass, with a public bench. Behind is a rushing stream which cascades into a culvert. To reach this point, the stream has flowed through the overgrown spaces behind factories. But when it reaches the busier town centre it has to go underground, reappearing at the other end between two stations: police and fire. Then it meanders round the Council Offices before it finally reaches the series of grassy open spaces and playing fields that go all the way to Loudwater. Standing at the culvert, I stopped to watch the water cascade and disappear down a sturdy grating whose teeth had been carefully spaced by engineers to prevent small children from being lost in a scary underworld. If the teeth were any closer together, the stream would get too easily dammed with debris, and cause a flood. In this way, every well-ordered street on earth is built on the work of trustworthy engineers. After bombs and wars, they arrive like surgeons to tend the wounds—patching, sewing back severed arteries, maintaining those flows which never bother us till they are interrupted: water, drainage, electricity, telephones. Fortunate is this valley town, my home, never to have been ripped apart by violence. There are places where the reliability of piped supplies matters more to the residents than democracy, or even the downfall of a tyrant. There can be no civilisation without infrastructure.
I’ve written several times about my Valley Path, which follows the flow of that stream. My favourite part has been closed for the past two years. Public footpaths are sacrosanct in this country and protected by law anyhow, so an official Order had to be posted, explaining the closure was temporary for the construction of a bridge. This has now been built, and leads to a new housing development of several acres. Footpaths are used mostly by dog-walkers, but to me they’re a blessing preserved from the ancient days; a counterpoint to the madness of modernity; conduits of wilderness that slice through the town. The Order said the bridgeworks were to be completed by April 2010. Countless times I’ve been been to look since then; and been disappointed.
So I took a different route, and had various absurd adventures, resulting in a direction for my walk determined by necessity not choice. I ended up against my will on the Valley Path going west back towards home. The closed section was not far ahead. So be it, I thought. 
A footpath sign (green with yellow arrow) directed me through an alley, one of those which weaves between the backyards of houses, I’d never encountered this one before. As I passed the side wall of a Victorian cottage, which shone in the sun, I found myself saying: “Infinite are the depths”, out loud because I take a voice recorder on these walks, and sometimes talk to it. When a fragment like this suddenly comes into my mind, I tend to assume it’s from the Bible. Later, I checked it on Google, with scant result. So the words must have come from a depth within me, and I asked myself what they meant, how they had arisen from within my train of thought, or somehow bounced off that sunny wall. Expanded as best I could, the phrase came to “Infinite are the depths in all this”. I felt that everything is alive and conscious. The thoughts I carried and allowed to elaborate themselves in my head were somehow at one with the physical space through which I walked. It even felt as though this alley I walked was a corridor slicing through time, offering dim glimpses of the past and so adding an extra dimension to perceived reality. That was just a momentary perception. The “infinite depth” was something else, an inwardness present in this physical creation, or an awareness which goes beyond individual consciousness of the human “I”. It felt like a kind of immortality, though not of the self. In one moment I saw an eternal Here, as if this alley itself, or my own self in this alley at this moment, were enough to contemplate forever.
Later, I recalled a sentence of David Abram which I’d copied down when I read it:
No matter how long I linger with any being, I cannot exhaust the dynamic enigma of its presence.
When Abram says “being” he means any animal, plant, mineral, cloud—or even the wind. Normally, when we speak of being immortal, we refer to the notion of the “I” not dying when the body dies. But I saw, in that moment, that the “I” is nothing more than the body’s mechanism for looking out for itself. It dies and unravels, but consciousness is all-pervasive, in all beings, in all matter. Call it awareness, call it an indwelling intelligence in everything, if you like.
The experience itself cannot really have lasted more than a second. For I went back to the place another day, out of curiosity to see again what I saw when I said “Infinite are the depths”. I knew I had been looking at a blank white wall as I walked down the alley without stopping, and imagined there must have been at least twenty yards of white wall. But the length was more like fifteen feet. So it was a one-second moment and by capturing it in words, I can retrieve its meaning forever.
I walked on till the point where, round the next corner, I’d discover whether the closed section of the path has been reopened. I confess to having said a little prayer first. Then I went round the bend. It has indeed been reopened.
It is not easy to convey what the words of the title meant to me, but today, ten days later, I’ve now finished that book by David Abram, Becoming Animal. It contains a great deal of words, sometimes too many, I felt. So I’ll try in too few words to sum up his book, or what I have so far understood of it:
Infinite are the depths to be explored in this place of wonder, our earthly home.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Naturally, I am intrigued by this glimpse of immortality that you had. It has always seemed to me that in a universe where nothing, not even information, can be completely destroyed, that the idea that our vital substance, our consciousness, our soul if you will, can simply disappear seems to almost violate some kind of natural law.
And yet, I remember one of your earlier posts that I stumbled upon in your archive a while back (I can't remember which one it was now) where you said something to the effect that one has to experience something like that for themselves. I wish I could remember which post it was. Anyway, I can only hope to have such a wonderful revelation of my own. I certainly open to the idea, and I like the way you put it: the ego being part of our survival mechanism and not the final word on consciousness, our life, or existence.
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Depending on your religious or metaphysical bent, you either experienced a revelation, an epiphany or a satori. Or all of the above. (grin) being in the right frame of mind at just the right time can leave you open to the most amazing experiences.
I'm glad you found that one.
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I love those rare moments but I rarely feel the need to put my thoughts into words. To experience the essence of it is enough for me.
For you, it made for a fine read and I thank you for it.
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I too treasure the rare moments of wordless bliss that can light and make meaningful the most drab surroundings. I remember a particular afternoon in Providence, RI where every brick, weed, and piece of rusty metal had an immanence I'd never have been able to describe in words. The experience lasted for what was probably an hour but it's essential reality remained ever since.
You wrote beautifully about a similar experience.
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Thanks for these valuable comments. Another post is called for, to follow up properly, but in the meantime …
Yes, Bryan, I suppose you could say it was a glimpse of a possible immortality. I can't think which post I wrote which said that you have to experience it for yourself. It could be any. And I think you are right about the survival mechanism which stops us having experience like this more continuously. Another thing I think is if one overvalues the rational part of consciousness, one may undervalue another way of seeing which stands there unnoticed like a plain girl at the dance, or rather one whose beauty is less brazen than that of her friends. “Choose me! choose me!” she cries, but it sounds too quietly for most of us, most of the time.
You're right, Rev, it must be being in the right frame of mind at the right time. And though religions may claim it as being in their gift, they don't own it. (Of which more in another post, I hope.)
Yes, Gina, to experience the essence is enough, but to share it is my whole reason for taking the trouble to learn to write! And on that day I had the idea as I set out to try and describe whatever I experienced; in emulation of David Abrams, whose writing showed me possibilities beyond my previous horizons.
Yes, Susan, I've felt that such experiences do stay with us, and offer something valuable. But I also find that in putting something down in words, however inadequate, the writer is reminded of some things that he may have forgotten; and may convey part of it to others by some mysterious power of words that goes beyond logic. There can be no other reason why poetry is popular.
But tell me Susan, on that day in Providence, amongst the bricks, weeds and rusty metal, was it a sunny day? Sunshine seems to help, I find; though other weathers don't always stand in the way.
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I wonder sometimes if there are people who see that all the time. Like maybe the deeply autistic who withdraw inside themselves to keep from being overwhelmed. I imagine being zen-blissed out like that 24/7 would be a little overpowering.
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Hi, returning to your blog a after a gap I see some pleasant changes. The font is larger and a nice shade. The posts are longer and your writing as beautiful as ever. This one has some very pleasnt pictures with it.
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Nice to see you here again, Ashok, & thanks for your remarks.
Rev, I've had the same thoughts often but not about the deeply autistic. I haven't come across them. But sometimes I think it of certain pathetic souls who by reason of some other misfortune or disability have very limited horizons. And I've sometimes mused here about the consciousness of helpless creatures like slugs.
But reading Abram has taken me a stage further towards good old primitive animism–assuming everything is alive, everything is intelligent. And that homo sapiens, possibly being the most anxious creature on the planet, because his survival organ, the brain, is so deeply ravelled and complex, has the greatest difficulty of all to be blissed out at all, never mind 24/7.
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Borrowing a clip from Google Maps' Street View, I've pasted in a photo of that house beside the footpath, whose white-painted wall I gazed at when the words “infinite are the depths” sprang to my lips.
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I've met a few people who were blissed out all the time. They usually have weird hair and say “Dude!” all the time.
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“When Abram says “being” he means any animal, plant, mineral, cloud—or even the wind.”
I think this is similar to the “embrace it all (wan wu)” of Zhuangzi, which even includes moods.
The bliss experience is very short, but it can open the extra-rational door of perception. My experience is that we can keep that door open nearly continuously, even if just a crack, thus allowing us to find satisfaction in both the joy and misery of the human condition, in both the Penicillin and the Listeria.
I feel like crap today, but crap has become another one of my friends, reliably satisfying, whenever he turns up.
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Yes, it was a sunny late afternoon under a clear blue sky. I've experienced briefer moments of equal intensity in rain, fog, mist, and snow but always outdoors. Have you noticed that too?
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Is there not a difference, Rev, between being blissed out all the time and being constantly cheerful? One is an internal state unknowable to others: the other may be just a mask to cover who-knows-what.
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Yes, Susan, the outdoor nature of such a special experience is something I've celebrated in many posts here. Sometimes it hits the moment I step out the door. And rain is no bar. Here is an example.
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Raymond, get well soon. I hope you find some penicillin for that listeria, for to me, Nature has made it that misery is not enjoyable. I heard part of a discussion on the radio the other evening about the emotion of disgust, which is put there by Nature to stop us from poisoning ourselves with toxins or infections. The consensus seemed to be that we should overcome disgust with reason and enlightened attitudes. I'm always suspicious of overriding Nature with reason.
For this reason, whatever Zhuangzi may say, I don't try to embrace it all. I'm just the ordinary pleasure-loving man in the street really, & don't see that changing soon!
What I thought Abram was saying is that all beings are in some way sentient; and that in some way that sentience connects us, through the possibility of communication. This is part of his animism.
There are things I might hate and not embrace, both within myself and outside the membrane of my separateness. This membrane–my skin–being the literal and symbolic boundary between Self and Other.
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I've found that those people who are constantly cheerful can be downright nasty when they are not. It's the exact opposite of depression and there should be a pill for it. If nothing else so they won't be quite so annoying to others.
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I've been giving this some more thought. I started compiling notes for a lengthy reply, but it began to grow so out of hand that I had to consider making it a post of its own over at nuclearheadache. I should have it up by tomorrow Oct. 1st. I know that this comment-so-long-that-it-had-to-become-a-post thing hasn't been a good sign in the past, but this time will be different. I promise.
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I was hoping you'd have more to say, Bryan.
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Holy Hewey! I am behind!
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Post is up: http://nheadache.blogspot.com/2011/10/dust-to-dust.html
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“misery is not enjoyable”
Did I say it was enjoyable? Words and there proper usage are important for accurate communication.
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Sorry, Raymond. A misunderstanding on my part. You said “I feel like crap today, but crap has become another one of my friends, reliably satisfying, whenever he turns up.” I interpreted that in a clumsy way.
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I've commented on your post at your place, Bryan. I couldn't follow you and write a new post at my place by way of comment on yours, because it would violate my principles. Which are that I comment off the cuff, more or less, whilst posts involve an elaborate process.
What I might do is assemble some ideas from Abram into a post. If that is possible.
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It’s odd how different people take different things from a written work. The concluding sentence of the main article, the summary was powerful, and would have been what I took away, if not for one of your explanations of the pictures:
Here, if you look at the light reflecting on a little patch of water, you see one of several springs where water bubbles up from somewhere: Nature’s own recycling under the shadow of man’s.
Always a thinker, you carry everything one step further.
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