There are moments in life when one thing breaks open, one thing breaks free, one thing dissolves and resurfaces as massive because the universe. Moments after we entry what G.Ok. Chesterton referred to as “the submerged sunrise of wonder.” Moments after we half what Virginia Woolf referred to as “the cotton wool” gauzing our view of uncooked actuality. Moments when the boundaries of the self fall away and we discover ourselves in oneness with what Margaret Fuller referred to as “the All.”
These are moments marked by William James’s four characteristics of transcendent consciousness, most acutely by their ineffability. However a few times a century, if we’re fortunate, an individual emerges to articulate the internal pulse-beat of such an expertise and, in articulating it, broadens the portal of chance for the remainder of us.
Nobody has captured the ineffable transcendence of such a second extra vividly and passionately than the good British nature author Richard Jefferies (November 6, 1848–August 14, 1887) — a person of unusual sensitivity to magnificence, who died on the age I’m now, having lived a life electrical with marvel.
Like his American up to date John Burroughs, who wrote so movingly about the spirituality of nature, Jefferies believed that communion with the pure world is a portal to the best reaches of our personal humanity. “To be lovely and to be calm with out psychological concern is the best of Nature,” he wrote, insisting many times that we are able to attain this splendid by relinquishing our sense of separateness from the remainder of nature and unselfing into the basic totality of life.
Jefferies first felt this totality in his marrow in the future in his youth when, climbing a hill he climbed usually, he entered a state of being he had by no means skilled earlier than. He recounts the expertise in his non secular autobiography The Story of My Heart (public library):
Shifting up the candy brief turf, at each step my coronary heart appeared to acquire a wider horizon of feeling; with each inhalation of wealthy pure air, a deeper need. The very mild of the solar was whiter and extra good right here. By the point I had reached the summit I had solely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself.
In splendid affirmation of Simone Weil’s insistence that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” he provides:
I used to be completely alone with the solar and the earth. Mendacity down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the solar, the air, and the distant sea far past sight. I considered the earth’s firmness — I felt it bear me up: via the grassy sofa there got here an affect as if I might really feel the good earth chatting with me. I considered the wandering air — its pureness, which is its magnificence; the air touched me and gave me one thing of itself. I spoke to the ocean: although up to now, in my thoughts I noticed it, inexperienced on the rim of the earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired to have its power, its thriller and glory. Then I addressed the solar, wanting the soul equal of his mild and brilliance, his endurance and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its beautiful color and sweetness. The wealthy blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul in direction of it, and there it rested, for pure color is remainder of coronary heart. By all these I prayed; I felt an emotion of the soul past all definition; prayer is a puny factor to it, and the phrase is a impolite signal to the sensation, however I do know no different.
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I prayed by the candy thyme, whose little flowers I touched with my hand; by the slender grass; by the crumble of dry chalky earth I took up and let fall via my fingers. Touching the crumble of earth, the blade of grass, the thyme flower, respiration the earth-encircling air, pondering of the ocean and the sky, holding out my hand for the sunbeams to the touch it, inclined on the sward in token of deep reverence, thus I prayed that I’d contact to the unutterable existence infinitely increased than deity.
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With the earth, the solar and sky, the celebs hidden by the sunshine, with the ocean — in no method can the thrilling depth of those emotions be written — with these I prayed, as in the event that they had been the keys of an instrument, of an organ, with which I swelled forth the observe of my soul, redoubling my very own voice by their energy.
Animated by a need for “greatness of soul, an irradiance of thoughts, a deeper perception, a broader hope,” Jefferies finds himself reworked by this prayerful give up, rendered each extra himself and extra unselved, rendered a pulsating particle of the good totality:
I returned to myself and thought, reclining in rapt thought, stuffed with aspiration, steeped to the lips of my soul in need. I didn’t then outline, or analyse, or perceive this. I see now that what I laboured for was soul-life, extra soul-nature, to be exalted, to be stuffed with soul-learning.
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Having drunk deeply of the heaven above and felt essentially the most wonderful great thing about the day, and remembering the previous, previous, sea, which (because it appeared to me) was however simply yonder on the edge, I now grew to become misplaced, and absorbed into the being or existence of the universe… and shedding thus my separateness of being got here to appear like part of the entire.
William James himself was deeply moved by Jefferies’s account of this transcendent hour. In his talks to teachers and students, a century earlier than our golden age of compulsive productivity at the expense of presence, he cautions towards devaluing such seemingly impractical experiences, urging us as a substitute to acknowledge them as important revelations of what makes life price residing:
Certainly, a nugatory hour of life, when measured by the same old requirements of economic worth. But in what different sort of worth can the preciousness of any hour, made valuable by any customary, consist, if it consist not in emotions of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour accommodates?
But so blind and useless does the clamor of our personal sensible pursuits make us to all different issues, that it appears nearly as if it had been essential to turn into nugatory as a sensible being, if one is to hope to achieve to any breadth of perception into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any notion of life’s which means on a big goal scale. Solely your mystic, your dreamer, or your bancrupt tramp or idler, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which can change the same old requirements of human worth within the short while, giving to foolishness a spot forward of energy, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working typical man a lifetime to construct up. It’s possible you’ll be a prophet, at this fee; however you can’t be a sophisticated success.
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Life is all the time price residing, if one have such responsive sensibilities. However we of the extremely educated courses (so referred to as) have most of us bought far, distant from Nature. We’re educated to hunt the selection, the uncommon, the beautiful completely, and to miss the widespread. We’re full of summary conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and within the tradition of those increased capabilities the peculiar sources of pleasure related with our easier capabilities usually dry up, and we develop stone-blind and insensible to life’s extra elementary and common items and joys.
For Jefferies, the final word perform of his transcendent hour on the hill was the invention of the which means and substance of the soul as a mediator between the self and the universe:
I used to be respiration stuffed with existence; I used to be conscious of the grass blades, the flowers, the leaves on hawthorn and tree. I appeared to stay extra largely via them, as if every had been a pore via which I drank. The grasshoppers referred to as and leaped, the greenfinches sang, the blackbirds fortunately fluted, all of the air hummed with life. I used to be plunged deep in existence, and with all that existence, I prayed… I prayed that I may need a soul greater than equal to, far past my conception of, these items of the previous, the current, and the fullness of all life. Not solely equal to those, however past, increased, and extra highly effective than I might think about. That I’d take from all their power, grandeur, and sweetness, and collect it into me. That my soul could be greater than the cosmos of life.
The Story of My Heart is a transcendent learn in its totality — certainly one of two books Rachel Carson saved at her bedside all through her life, alongside Thoreau’s Walden. Complement these fragments from it with Margaret Fuller’s kindred taste of transcendence, Virginia Woolf’s arresting account of a total solar eclipse, and Thoreau on nature as prayer, then revisit Jefferies on how to awaken to life.
