MORNING SERIAL
FOR a few moments, something in the way I was perceiving the world was suddenly shifted. I still saw the blue above me, still felt the sun on my face, still heard the buzz of insects in the garden, but now there was more.
Whatever barrier, membrane or veil that there was, beforehand, between me and my senses and what was in the world around me – sky, shed, garden, sounds, and sunlight, whatever that barrier is that marks us off as beings from the wider world – was, well, gone. Just for a few moments, although it may as well have lasted a day, or a decade, because the impact of it is with me still and will never leave me. Just for those few moments there was no sky or shed or garden or anything else in the wide world that was separate from me. All these things, myself included, were now one thing, one being. I floated, for those moments, as a part of everything, no longer apart, but a part.
This was not an emotion. Although I felt content and peaceful, this changed perception of things was not, of itself, contentment or peace. It surrounded those feelings. It contained them. As it contained me. As it contained everything. Seconds later this shift in the world was gone and things were back as they had been; myself and the world apart, with only my senses to show me the world that lay beyond my skin. This change in all the ways of perceiving, this subsuming of self into the world, I know now to have happened to many other people, at times all through history and in all parts of the world.
Some might explain what happened to me that day as some kind of spiritual experience, the kind of experience that some people with a mystical religious view might actively seek out through meditation, or prayer or even fasting. But I was not praying, I had no concept of what meditation was, and any thought of fasting would have been regarded, by that small boy on the shed roof, with horror. I was simply a child, being happy, and it happened to me. I did not wish for it.
I did not understand it. I did not think of God.