Mystical Experiences through the Lens of Heidegger and Mamardashvili: Overcoming the Metaphysical Model of Human Existence

Abstract

This essay relates a Heideggerian interpretation of metaphysics, as determined by an interpretation of Being in terms of a priori laws/essences, to a traditionally passive model of experience. The spiritual principles of the Christian and the Buddhist experience of the Nothing are shown as an overcoming of this model and an overcoming of metaphysics. The essay displays the ways in which Heidegger and Mamardashvili stress the illusionary nature of a metaphysical understanding of human existence and the central role of personal transformation beyond one’s psychological subjectivity. This transformation is tied to the possibility of active engagement with the Nothing, requiring efforts of attentive self-detachment from the constant pressure of one’s representational faculties motivated by a hidden flight from anxiety. Buddhist and Christian notions of detachment and letting-be are then interpreted in light of Heidegger’s and Mamardashvili’s ideas, allowing for a phenomenological interpretation of certain passages from the New Testament and the Bodhidharma’s teaching.

1. Introduction

In “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, we read that enlightenment is a state in which one realizes that nothing depends on anything and that the mind depends on nothing.1 In the Bible, we hear that the law and the prophets were until John but now the kingdom of Heaven is entered by force. In both cases, there is an emphasis on an overcoming of a system of laws, which is not a mere abandonment of the law—as Christ stresses—but rather fulfillment. Namely, as long as one’s spiritual condition is determined by rules, laws, or any metaphysical system in general, one has not yet fulfilled the very essence of spirituality itself. One is not yet ready for the kingdom of Heaven and has not yet reached enlightenment. This is the way we should also read Dostoyevsky when he emphatically rejects theodicy in The Brothers Karamazov and furiously resists the rational order of things in Notes from Underground. Indeed, in a way that echoes Heidegger’s criticism of Das Man and the anonymous normativity thereof, Dostoyevsky stresses the existential intolerance of the everyday mode of human existence as submitted to a priori laws that one did not choose. Such a predicament is simply unacceptable for Dostoyevsky, not, however, because he adores human subjectivity as, for example, Sartre does, but because, as Merab Mamardashvili stresses, the situation in which the world is determined in some way “without me”, that is, without my personal responsibility for its meaning and “structure”, is humiliating and infantile (Mamardashvili 2014, p. 195). It is a situation in which I am a passive observer of the meaning of Being, a superfluous element which at best solves the problems that he himself has created. In short, in such a situation, one does not exist. To overcome this situation, i.e., to exist, is precisely what Bodhidharma and Christ speak about when they speak about the realization of the law as its overcoming.

In this light, Dostoyevsky and Mamardashvili reject metaphysics in the sense that Heidegger illuminates, that is, as an assumption of a priori structures determining the world independently of human will. For Heidegger, this assumption pertains to the heart of the forgetfulness of Being as a tacit interpretation of Being in terms of the a priori structure of the beingness of beings. The metaphysical version of the ontological difference thus proceeds from a conventional view of beings from which we abstract a formal structure. Though metaphysics frequently names such a structure as a “condition” of beings, in reality, such Being is nothing ontologically different but merely an indication of beings’ most general features. Such a metaphysical view on Being entails a rigid understanding of what beings are and might be. As Heidegger stresses, it determines the very sphere of the possible and excludes anything that does not fit into the artificial form of the a priori of the beingness of beings.2

As I shall show, spiritual enlightenment pertains precisely to the overcoming of the mode of existence pre-reflectively determined by this assumption (i.e., by metaphysics). I shall display that this overcoming pertains to a shift of the mode of one’s experience from the traditional passive model we find in most Western philosophy to the active mode of experience, the possibility of which is presented by Heidegger and Mamardashvili. In particular, I shall argue that what the Buddhists call “non-attachment” or “non-discrimination” and what Meister Eckhart names “detachment” and “letting-be” are not merely characteristics of a mystical or a religious mode of experiencing, but express the essence of experience itself in its ontologically active, non-metaphysical sense, which, however, must at the same time be grasped as an overcoming of the ontic passive–active dichotomy.

2. Experience and the Nothing

All empirical scientific knowledge begins with experience, hence the basic common-sense meaning of “nature” in natural sciences is “the experienceable reality”. Accordingly, when someone argues in favor of some hidden, unseen world, the natural scientist justly frowns. If such a world is neither a part of the experienceable reality, nor belongs to its formal structure (e.g., mathematics), it cannot be seriously taken to be real. Indeed, even the a priori principles of natural sciences, which cannot be tested within it but must be assumed for the scientific law to make sense as a law, are not speculative but come from experience. E.g., we experience things as causally related. We may be wrong regarding the concrete causal relations, but it is in principle unimaginable that someone would not experience objects as causally related. This is something Kant has formulated with great clarity—there are certain formal conditions for a thing to be counted as an object that belongs to the world, that is, to be objectively real. It is this objective reality that constitutes the sense of “nature” in natural sciences. Though in humanities, we meet fields in which the basic principles of being-an-object are not easily applicable—think, for example, of art or history. The natural sciences assume that all such fields are, after all, grounded in objective world. Whatever is present in the world, i.e., is not a hallucination, shares the world with other things and can be lawfully determined in relation to them; an un-natural thing—as Kant stressed—would simply not fit into the world, as its presence would make no sense and have no effect on any of the realities that we experience and live through. So, we may formulate the common-sense relation between experience and reality in the basis of the natural sciences in the following way: only what is present in the world and can therefore become an object of consciousness is real, even if it becomes so non-directly, e.g., by means of certain equipment or as a detectable effect of something else (i.e., a theoretical object). It is this general assumption of the natural sciences that Heidegger has already criticized in his first 1919 lectures. Indeed, this criticism can be seen as the very entrance into his path of thinking:

Objectivity and reality are correlates of consciousness as such, of the epistemological subject as such. All Being is only in and through thought, and all thought is thought of Being. For idealism too the world is not mere representation, but reality is always what it is only as we are conscious of it; there are only objects as objects of consciousness, and genuine reality is the objectivity of the sciences. Only what becomes objective in scientific knowledge is real in the genuine sense.

(Heidegger 2008, pp. 69–70)

Heidegger points out here that to identify reality with objective scientific knowledge means to assume a particular sense of “real” and to set it as a standard. Namely, the idealist and the realist assume the same sense of the real as a correlate of consciousness. It does not matter whether reality is constituted by transcendental consciousness or merely mirrored in an empirical one since in both cases, we only accept as real something that fits the structure of our conscious representation. Here, Heidegger applies a phenomenological reduction of what is usually taken for ontology: it does not matter in his case whether the world is physical or ideal. However, he performs the reduction not in order to ignore ontology, but rather in order to stress its more profound sense—the ontological meaning of an entity does not tell us what it is “made of” but indicates in what sense it is a real entity. Though Heidegger does not deny that only what is experienceable is real, he emphatically rejects from the very start that “to be experienceable” equals or can be in some way reduced to “to be an object of consciousness”.

Such a reduction of experience has happened since, according to Heidegger, Being has been interpreted as a constant presence since the Greeks and until (i.e., including) modern science. That basically means that we interpret things in the world as ‘hanging’ on their own, i.e., as simply present and fully available for our investigation and manipulation. The crest of such interpretation is the mode of human existence that Heidegger criticizes in terms of “technology” (or rather “technicity”). Rather than addressing the mere ontic fact of the questionable nature of our dependence on technology, Heidegger delves into the ontological reduction of beings into what presents itself merely as a resource, ordered to stand by and be immediately at hand (Heidegger 2013, 3:36, p. 17). For a “technological” mode of existence, beings appear only as a “standing reserve” and are revealed in the mode of ordering. As Heidegger stresses, such a mode of revealing beings does not merely reduce beings to what is present and representable as an object, but restricts their “realness” to the mere controllability within the rank and order of possible production.

Yet, as Heidegger explains in many ways, such an idea of existence is ungrounded and—more importantly—does not fit the way beings manifest in our direct experience of the world. We may say that the ‘positive’ aspect of the world, namely the determinable ways in which things show themselves to us, is only the present side of what is. Yet, our experience is also constituted by various forms of absence. It is this ‘Being’ of the ‘not’ that Heidegger sees as remaining unthought in metaphysics. Importantly, the ‘not’ or the ‘nothing’ is not something that belongs exclusively to human experience, but rather co-constitutes the very Being of things in the world. In Being and Time, Heidegger first presented an explicit experience of the nothing as occurring in the mood of existential anxiety.3 This point is made even more clear in What is Metaphysics.4 The mood of anxiety is thus a paradigmatic example of a peculiar kind of experientiality, which emphasizes, within experience, not the present determinable element of beings—which we usually take for beings themselves—but the way this element comes out of nothingness always in relation to other elements (the world) and to our own momentary self-understanding. Namely, beings never become ‘full-fledged substances’ whose presence we could say is solid and constant, but rather are always also concealed, i.e., are also constituted by nothingness. The nothingness here does not mean a simple nihil, like an unoccupied space, but an anxiety-inducing abyss that is the creative origin of all possible determinations of beings. That is not to say that beings have also some hidden, mystical characteristics, but that the very sense of existing as a being, i.e., of manifesting in the world, includes being-abyssal. Being (Sein) conceals itself and only in this way lets beings (Seinde) be (Heidegger 2012, p. 88). Moreover, this refusal or withdrawal of Being is experienceable as it constitutes the way anything is present in our experience. Anxiety is precisely the attunement in which the refusal, that is, the nihilating pervasion of the nothingness, becomes predominant over the familiar presence of beings-as-a-whole.

The phenomenological fact that beings are not fully present objects corresponds to D.T. Suzuki’s words, positing that in enlightenment, one does not take things as too real and is aware of the nothingness in all things (Suzuki 2011, p. 109). Yet, my idea here is that the traditionally passive model of experience, such as perceiving an a priori determined reality, is dependent on an overlooking of this phenomenological fact and is sustained by our own existential anxiety. Namely, all Western thinkers, including Hume, Kant and Husserl, take experience to be intentional in a sense of being determined by some positive experienced element, irrespectively of whether this element comes as it is, or must be constituted and formed by the transcendental subject. We may say that such a model of experience is inherent to Western metaphysics. One is essentially passive in experience; one does not, for example, “decide” on how the experienced is constituted. Yet, if there is a dimension of experience that engages with what is absent and irrepresentable yet is still tangible in ways that may even make us anxious, it makes no sense to say that we merely suffer the external world. In other words, it does not make sense to passively receive the nothingness. Instead, we may notice that we always take an active stance towards the nothing, even if merely by fleeing from it and rationalizing the world accordingly. In such a fleeing, we give ourselves to whatever ontological and ethical laws we find ourselves in and, like children, try to do good and judge the bad accordingly. It is this anxiety-driven passive model of experience that we find in the everyday human experience. It is this slavery to the metaphysical a priori of the world that Dostoyevsky so despised. It is in this mode of existence that we calculate how one thing is dependent on another and imagine spiritual levels, steps, procedures, etc. It is in this mode that we are enclosed in the subject–object distinction and experience the world as either objectively estranged or as a place where our subjective wishes may be fulfilled if we follow the right rules.

3. The Nothing and the Self

Both Heidegger and Mamardashvili show that all calculations based on eternal a priori principles of metaphysics, which also determine the meaning of transcendence as relative to such principles, assume the essence of being-human as something determined (Heidegger 2012, p. 22) and block the possibility of experiencing the abyssal emptiness of one’s genuine selfhood as something that must yet be enacted (Mamardashvili 2014, p. 319) not arbitrarily, however, but rather according to certain ontological characteristics of creativity of the event of Being. That is to say, the nothingness of which Heidegger speaks indicates that the world is not determined a priori by some list of essences, but is an event in which its fundamental ontological constitution unfolds in unpredictable ways. The unfolding of the world is unpredictable not because something surprising happens in the world but because the very meaning of what does it mean to be a world,5 to be a being, to exist, transforms so that each time, we can only look backwards and witness ad hoc the occurred transformation of Being.6 Still, Being does not change arbitrarily, but rather according to its own inner Logos, not in a Hegelian sense of a systematic unfolding but in a sense that there is indeed a measure according to which Being becomes more essential and true to its enigmatic, unique and genuinely creative nature. The forgetfulness of Being is, on the other hand, an ontological mode in which the way beings exist has degraded into the modern self-concealment of nature, i.e., the mode in which we are unable to experience the enigmatic nature of beings as never being fully present and always partially undetermined in ways that allow them, for example, to serve as signs of the gods, but also, and foremost, as the “natural shelters” of the truth of Beyng.7 Beyng, as Heidegger explains, is not a mere fact of a thing’s realness and presence in the world, but a meaningful dimension of the many aspects and possibilities of such realness, which always, in each thing, include a thing’s indeterminate background, thus allowing for the ontological flexibility and creativity of beings-as-a-whole. It is these ungeneralizable principles of creativity that also guide the transformation of human selfhood.

More precisely, the self-concealment of Being does not only permeate beings as the intrinsic concealment of their material suchness, which Heidegger calls the Earth, but also as the existential dimension of the mystery of Being itself. Namely, anxiety is not merely a state of confusion in the face of the indeterminability of beings, but rather is an expression of the essence of humans as mortals. The mortals are called mortals, says Heidegger, not because ”their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death.” (Ibid.) The central idea for us here is that death is not merely a moment in human life; it is the shrine of Nothing that harbors within itself the presencing of Being as the mystery of Being itself. In other words, rather than first considering human demise and then attempting to abstract something more significant from it, Heidegger—in his own process of thinking—initially assigns death to Being itself as the ever-present element of the mystery of Being essential for the worlding of the world. He then tells us that this mystery cannot exist in the universe as something that is simply absent and irrelevant to what is present. Instead, the mystery of Being permeates all things as the dimension of death that co-constitutes the Being of mortals. The mortals are the “presencisg relation to Being as Being” (Ibid.) in the sense that the mystery of Being does not disappear in things or hide “behind things,” but rather constitutes the thinghood of things. If the mystery of Being did not permeate things, things would not be. The ontological function of mortals is, then, to be the bearers of the dimension of the world through which the mystery of Being as the Nothing is sheltered in things. Accordingly, the transformation of human selfhood requires a notion of experience that fulfills what I mentioned before as an active experiential stance towards the Nothing. Rational living beings, says Heidegger, must first become mortals (Ibid.).

The most important feature of human experience, which is reduced in the traditional model, but pointed out, for example, by Gadamer, is that experience may transform me. Namely, I may become someone quite different by undergoing an experience.8 Yet, Mamardashvili teaches us that there are two kinds of changes that are possible on the basis of experience. The first is a psychological pseudo-change since it originates within the limits of one’s psychological identity and hence protects rather than overcomes this identity.9 Such a change is ontologically passive—something happens to me in what I do (or not do), but I remain within the a priori laws that sustain my flight from anxiety. This is the sort of change that pertains to humans as rational beings that inertly refuse the mystery of Being. The second sort of change is one in which I detach from the automatic rationalizing powers of my self-identity and allow something strange and unpredictable to shake me in such a way that something changes in me without my explicit knowledge and understanding of what exactly happens. Proust’s novels are full of such examples, and Mamardashvili offers a genuine interpretation of their transformative power. A sudden experience of a seemingly banal thing may create a momentary gap in one’s representational powers and offer a chance to resist the immediate tendency of rationalizing it and explaining it away. One must, in such a moment, attempt to be fully present and detached, not to judge or discriminate what is happening, not to act or do anything at all to resolve the experience. One must rather “stand still and not replace [one’s] states or impressions with anything.” (Ibid., p. 253) While Proust speaks of the rare moments in which one’s senses are being struck unexpectedly in a way that allows for a chance to detach from the already determined world-projection, one can also consciously choose to practice attentiveness and interpretative self-restraint. Whether the gap in the representational order happens entirely on its own or is being “invited” by certain meditative practices, what happens is that one encounters the nothingness lying under one’s own psychological self-identity and witnesses—if one is able to remain within this experience—that this is a creative emptiness that, however, does not invent itself arbitrarily, but allows what I have called the “un-generalizable principle of creativity of Beyng itself” to come through and become embodied in one’s existence. Paradoxically, one cannot do anything directly to make such a transformation happen, yet by heightening the attention to one’s existential stance within everyday experience, one can indeed become actively present in one’s experience in a way that what one experiences is no more pre-determined as an element of a single a priori world-projection and world-constitution, but becomes an active letting-be of the unexpected and the fascinating strangeness of beings.

Mamardashvili calls such an experience that requires our effort to be fully present and detached from the automatism of representational faculties “an experience of con-sciousness”. He stresses that this experience is not “something in which consciousness also presents, but an experience of consciousness in which consciousness is something other, experienced as such.” (Mamardashvili 2014, pp. 9–93) This is not an awareness of our reflectivity but an experience of that dimension which we cannot represent or communicate, but within which alone we feel alive (Ibid., p. 93). The experience of consciousness is precisely the non-intentional active engagement with what cannot be represented, i.e., with what Heidegger calls the Nothing; it is, as Mamardashvili says, in principle not categorizable.

Nevertheless, the sense of “active” here must not be confused with the traditional sense of representational, goal-oriented volition. Instead, Mamardashvili stresses that the sort of experience that might be enacted through Proust’s novel pertains to human elevation in “its old religious sense.” (Ibid., p. 311) One cannot voluntarily elevate oneself—we elevate by choosing one path and not another. Yet, we cannot voluntarily choose another path without the detour through the anarchic element of “demolishing the whole structure” of who we already are (Ibid., p. 485). Such a “demolishing” is something that can happen to us if we let ourselves become released from our psychological identity by courageously stirring within the darkness of the experience of consciousness. This anarchic element is crucial for overcoming not just some particular order but for becoming released from the grip of the very a priori of lawfulness itself. Then, one is in a free fall of faith as a mode of an ever-new witnessing of the (metaphysically) impossible.

4. Revisiting Religious Experience (and Concluding)

In this context we may return to certain sentences from Bodhidharma and the New Testament and grasp their meaning anew. When Christ turns the other cheek, he restrains from all the ontic matters that are too easily projected upon this occasion and questions the very force that urges one to rebel against the unpleasantness and the seeming injustice of what happens. This does not mean that one should in principle avoid stopping the aggressor—that would be a very distorted moral interpretation of the case. What one should do is allow oneself to experience a detachment from whatever a priori logic forces itself on this experience and let something grow and mature beneath one’s psychological self-identity, so that one day it could give fruit and enact a sudden transformation (or emancipation) irrespectively of whether one wishes it or not. The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force, not, however, as a direct implementation of one’s representational will. A representational will only sees intentional objects and is always constituted to fit the self-protective existential stance of one’s ego. In particular, the very subject–object distinction, the objectification of the world, the seeming harmlessness of rationalization and essentialization of beings, are all in service of one’s psychological mechanisms that protect one from the abyssal nature of one’s own selfhood and from the nothingness constituting all things.

The force that is needed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and to be emancipated is precisely the force that aims at the irrepresentable and hence seemingly impossible leap outside the mirror show of metaphysical a priori structures and self-serving rationalizations (apropos the wisdom of this world as being mere foolishness). Mamardashvili stresses that such images, like that of Christ’s walking on the water, indicate that “the really existing and occurring is what we would call impossible and that only the impossible requires our faith—faith as the creation of what is believed and that would not be without faith.” (Ibid., p. 506) Such a faith is a force-less force of detachment from what we take experience to be and from what we take Being to be. As Meister Eckhart stresses, it is a detachment even from God, since even God is an idea that assumes the subject–object distinction and a certain pre-given order of things. One must, for Eckhart, return to the original nothingness—one that, according to the Heart Sutra, belongs to all form—where one is not separable from God, or, in Heidegger’s language, from the truth of Beyng in its creative self-essencing on the path of the divinization of the never-present last God. In this place indeed, as Bodhidharma says, it is meaningless to say that something depends on something else, as it is childish to think that a law has any value in itself. Moreover, the force-less force of faith/detachment is, according to Eckhart, the point of the attainment of the original oneness between the soul and God. The godly man “is a begetter of the eternal Word, and God could do nothing without such a man.” (Eckhart 2010, p. 27) Indeed, Eckhart is most radical in his emphatic rejection of the limits of the metaphysically possible. So is Heidegger when he ties the overcoming of metaphysics to the impossibility of the possibility question (Heidegger 2018, p. 30).

What is crucial to keep in mind—and my detour through Heidegger and Mamardahsvili intended to expose this point—is that the sense of “doing” here pertains not to what one does after experiencing the world, but rather to the force by which one enters the Kingdom of Heaven, i.e., a force that belongs to experience as a force to enact a different mode of experiencing. It is an ability to choose how one experiences rather than merely choose what to do with the experienced possibilities. Everything is permissible, says the apostle, but not everything is beneficial. This “beneficial” can be translated to German as “brauchbar” and related to Heidegger’s “brauchen”—a need and a usage pertaining to Beyng itself. Namely, Beyng needs human beings in order to embody its own creative unfolding towards divinity, and so it uses us. In such a usage, says Heidegger, the genuine essence of humans is first liberated (Heidegger 2002, p. 277). We then become the salt of the earth; that is, we first taste what it mean to be truly alive, to be present in each moment in the fullness of our abilities, and the depth of the experienced enigma of Beyng. The essence of experience is then itself experienced as one engages in a dialog with the nothingness and first projects the truly human world. The essence of experience is then revealed not as being a subjective suffering of what comes from somewhere else but—like the German term Erfahrung insinuates—both being-drawn and drawing as participating in experience that is not produced in one’s consciousness, brain, or mind, but is an event of human experience itself. By actively participating in this event, that is, by making the right efforts of not distorting it by our subjective rationalizing projections, or, in other words, by letting-be, detaching ourselves, or non-discriminating, we first return to the living emergence of the physis and allow the world to show itself in all its unrepresentable strangeness and suchness. Such a physis rejects any meta that would enclose it in an a priori structure of mere presence. In such a world, as Bultmann said, we do not only see things but may also hear what they say to us. Through the effort of the de-subjectivization of experience, we pass beyond the naively personal religiosity of the past and the outrageously impersonal objectivization of the universe in the present and encounter the enigma of Beyng, which Nishitani sees as impersonally personal or personally impersonal (Nishitani 1983, p. 40). It is a strange world in which the gods can speak and give signs yet never in a personally schizophrenic way, one that is ego-centered and hence unable to grasp the true responsibility of being the salt of the earth, i.e., of creatively determining the meaning of Being itself. In fact, we already live in such a world but are blinded by inattentiveness to our own experience, noticing only its roughest aspects and silently feeling lost and helpless within its more expansive, non-reifiable and existentially distressing dimensions. Yet, these dimensions of experience are phenomenologically given—this is not a reflection or a thought about experience but the very core of the experientiality of experience. And in this core, we are either active by making constant efforts to be present (to remember ourselves, as Gurdjieff phrased it), or we direct our energy automatically into the current of psychological self-protection in front of the abyssal nothingness to which we all belong, hence directing our energy against anything truly human, against Beyng, and against the possibility of the divine. We mays say that modern nihilism is, paradoxically, a flight from the experience of the nothing, while a courageous readiness to experience the nothing is, according to Welte, a possibility of a new, universal religious experience:

If a new religious experience is possible in the form of nothing and shows up here and there, then this can also be of great importance for the understanding of certain features in our Christian history of tradition that have often been forgotten. And this can also be of great importance for the understanding of non-Christian religious traditions, whether they are Jewish or Islamic or whether they are Hindu, Taoist or especially Buddhist. Large ecumenical spaces and possibilities can open up from here, which can both open up our own tradition and reach far beyond our predominantly European Christianity.

(Welte 2015)

As Mamardashvili stresses, anything that can be said in religious language can also be said in “non-religious language.” (Mamardashvili 2014, p. 160) Though the religious symbols, myths and terms may be needed to communicate the enigmatic and grandiose significance of human transformation beyond the illusions of the ego, the subject–object duality and the a priori based rationality—this is why Heidegger also uses such language occasionally—we may find all the elements and the clues for what experience really means and for the transformation explicated by the Christians and the Buddhists in our everyday life. Moreover, Mamardashvili points out that it is not accidental that religious people commonly downplay the anti-metaphysical (i.e., rejecting any a priori order) element of religious experience. “Since religious work aims at worshiping,” says Mamardashvili, “the side of thoughtful investigation is being reduced.” (Mamardashvili 2014, p. 634) That is why it is crucial, today more than ever, that those who are—by definition—meant to conduct a thoughtful investigation of the phenomena, namely the phenomenologists, become free from metaphysics in a sense that Heidegger had highlighted. We need a better phenomenology, one that is mature enough to realize that the “matters themselves” are not what is always easily approachable and objectifiable in experience, but that which truly matters in our existence. We need the sort of reflection in which we actively engage ourselves, not in a theoretical reduction of the momentary and the personal, but in a thoughtful letting-be—one in which the momentary and the personal are being-afforded the opportunity of leading us home, to the genuinely human sphere of the trans-personal and the eternal.