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Quantum Waves Explained

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Quantum Waves, Hegel’s Intuition and the Gospel of John: The Personal Account of a Mystical Experience

Dear Jennifer,

Here I am, finally able to sit down and tell you all about my own “mystical experience.” I could do no less after you wrote me about yours!

I hope you will not mind—having waited so long—if I do a little stage setting before I begin describing my own “case.” It concerns what physicists call “nonlocality.” This detour may seem uncanny at first, but I’m sure you will see the point before you even arrive at my personal account of “it.” You may look at this presentation as two perspectives on the same “thing.”

Although I’m very interested in physics, I’m not a physicist, which means you are free to allot as little or as much credit as you like to the first part of this text. As for the second part, the experience depicted there happened a long time ago. It was—and still is—very strange and alien to my usual “frames of reference,” which means my recollection and my rendering of the experience are severely limited. However, there is one thing I clearly remember having learned in those days: I may not understand “it” or know it properly, but I know I cannot seize it or cling to it, nor can I part from it or loose it.

The personal (direct) experience is obviously the most important for me since no amount of science or reasoning could replace it. I’m sure you understand this.

Unfortunately, I could not resist weaving some comments and even a few digressions into the personal account as I was writing it. However, I’m convinced that, in some way, they do help conveying what I believe to be the core of what I experienced many years ago.

*

Back in the sixties, a physicist named John Bell formulated a theorem, now known as Bell’s theorem, showing that standard quantum theory and its local hidden variables alternatives had different experimental implications that one could actually measure. Bell’s theorem is grounded on solid numerical relationships. Experimental physicists conceived and preformed several experiments over the years with an increasing degree of sophistication, and each time standard quantum theory has won over local hidden variables interpretations.

This does not mean that standard quantum theory is complete or that all hidden variables interpretations are necessarily wrong. It only means that no conceivable set of local variables could explain the experimental results according to Bell’s theorem.

Quantum theory always implied nonlocality, that “spooky action at a distance” Einstein held against it. He also disliked its probabilistic character, which made him think it was incomplete (because, in his famous words, “God doesn’t play dice”). While this last objection may still hold, nonlocality is now firmly established on experimental grounds thanks to Bell’s theorem.

In spite of the formal consensus around nonlocality, physicists in general have shown some reluctance about integrating it fully into their world-view. Their attitude probably reflects main culture prejudices against the idea of nonlocality, since until now its impact has been mostly felt in popular, avant-garde and marginal sectors of western culture (I discuss briefly these prejudices in a short article entitled: “Hidden Variables in Quantum Theory: The Hidden Cultural Variables of Their Rejection” which you may find in my website).

The experiments that proved nonlocality involve a couple of (or more) “entangled” particles. These may be photons as well as electrons, neutrons, protons, whole atoms or even massive molecules. The behaviour of two entangled particles is described by a single mathematical expression, a “state vector” as it is called. This state vector is supposed to correspond to a wave, spreading out in space, in which the particles move apart from a common source. In order for the particles to stay entangled, there must not be interaction with other particles. With the help of fibre optics, experimental physicists have been successful in projecting entangled photons several kilometres apart from each other. Each time, statistical analyses have provided good evidence that an action at a distance does take place between the entangled photons. This “action” is practically instantaneous and, in any case, far above the speed of light—the superluminal connexion being the criterion for nonlocality.

For the great misfortune of the engineering spirit of western and westernised humans, you cannot use particle entanglement to transmit or receive information faster than light! This is something to bear in mind.

Of course, this kind of entanglement is only a particular case of nonlocality in which the lack of disturbance allows experimentation and quantification—“disturbance” meaning any kind on interaction with other particles. Disturbance does not destroy nonlocality: it simply blurs it for us.

In other words, to obtain particle entanglement, we have to create a very peculiar situation in which we seem to separate to some degree two particles from the whole but not from each other. (In reality, they never become separated from their source or from their potential targets—or “context”—as many interference experiments have shown.) As soon as you reintroduce disturbance, you are in fact fully reuniting those particles with the whole. They now appear to be separated from each other as if the link uniting them was destroyed. In reality, that link was modified by the “addition” of a cascade of other links connecting those two particles with every other particle in the universe in an ever-shifting sea of mingling quantum waves. (Here I should again stress that in no moment did we really disengage them from the whole to which they were always attached by at least their two “ends”: their common source and their potential targets—or “context.”)

The same way we cannot use two entangled particles as a means to transmit action or information at superluminal speed, it is also impossible to use this ever changing “quantum wave sea” for the same purpose. In the first case, our controlling efforts are hindered by what appears to us as the fundamentally unpredictable behaviour of each individual quantum particle. In the second case, a second and bigger limitation adds to the first one: the fact that such a colossal sea of interfering and changing quantum waves appears to us as pure chaos, inaccessible even to the kind of mathematical modelling of chaotic systems we use to make weather forecasts or to generate rough models of turbulence phenomena.

Although including the delayed consequences of distant events, mathematical models of atmospheric dynamics are local because they do not include superluminal interactions and they only account for the behaviour of great masses of particles, whereas our “quantum wave sea” is by definition non-local, all-inclusive, and is only “directly” active in and through (microscopic) quantum events.

The fact that this “universal dynamic connectedness” cannot be used as an “instrument” to transmit action or information at superluminal speed does not mean that it is not determining to what happens locally in our universe. It is determining, even if we do not know how much or precisely how. As for the possible significance of single quantum events, their experimental detection is a clear example of how they may generate cascades of consequences that eventually lead to macroscopic phenomena. The “butterfly effect” is a popular way of understanding how massive the consequences of a single quantum event may be.

The very existence of this pervasive sea of interconnectedness of which we know so little casts a doubt on the assumption held by many, if not most, physicists that the verified probabilistic predictions of quantum theory depict an objective randomness of quantum local reality instead of reflecting the relative and approximate character of our present knowledge of that reality. If it is true that no particle—and it would be more accurate to speak of “particle-effects” rather than particles—is ever entirely disconnected from the whole, then is it unreasonable to suspect that while the probabilistic pattern predicted by quantum theory and routinely confirmed in laboratories all over the world may result from local constraints on the dynamics of the particle-effects (which would be approximately described by the “state vector”), the exact behaviour of each particle-effect could be a function of (among other possible factors) its local conditions coupled with its connexion to the whole “quantum wave sea”? Such is, I believe, one of the contentions put forward by D. Bohm and B.J. Hiley in The Undivided Universe.

Concerning the apparent chaos of the quantum wave sea itself—as well as of any other chaotic system—it would be appropriate to leave here a note of disagreement with the view, held, among others, by Prigogine, that stochastic or chaotic phenomena necessarily imply objective randomness. What a curious lack of human modesty to force on reality the limitations of its discerning observer…

We are then left with the knowledge that the “quantum wave sea” is somehow determinant to—as well as somehow determined by—local events; and with the possibility that the phenomena taking place at the level at which the “quantum wave sea” is locally determinant (quantum level) may well not be objectively probabilistic but locally and non-locally determined and determinant…

This would be the fully blown meaning of “nonseparability”—a better expression than “nonlocality” because local causality is not excluded from the picture: it is complemented by what we could conceive as a “non-centralized supra-local dynamical co-generation” which would include in its “composition” every local happening.

You must have realized how paradoxical the whole situation is. The universe is “undivided”—to use Bohm’s and Hiley’s expression—inasmuch as we don’t perceive it to be so:

a) The two “particles” return to the undivided whole the moment disturbance destroys their entanglement (the limited portion of nonlocality we are allowed to “watch”), but they now look separate to us;

b) We have inferred from the above phenomena (and from the equations that account for it) the virtually instantaneous connectivity between all of the “particle-effects” of the universe (including their aggregates), but we cannot use it to transfer information or effect changes at a distance.

Yet, every single atom, neutron, proton and electron in our body is mysteriously interwoven with every other “particle-effect” in the whole universe. To use the term Lévy-Bruhl deemed appropriate to describe some of what the early twentieth-century scholars called “primitive beliefs,” we participate in the whole universe. We are its local expression, so to speak, but we perceive ourselves, the world and the “things” within it as separate entities.

I would like to quote here, from the book On Physics and Philosophy (2006) by d’Espagnat, a paragraph that prompted me to write about nonlocality in the first place. I would have been satisfied to quote it and then carry on with the account of my personal experience, but I first needed to provide the background without which I would not be able to convey its significance for me. Here is what I stumbled upon the other day as I was rereading the Foreword:

“One of the main arguments that should convince scientists of the need to distinguish between empirical and mind-independent reality lies in the nonseparability of whatever sensible notion we may form of the latter. [Nonseparability] constitutes a feature of any sensible representation of mind-independent reality that, unquestionable and significant as it is, still does not fully and genuinely extend to the empirical [i.e., mind-dependent] reality domain. In other words, in sharp contrast with mind independent reality, which, to repeat, can hardly be thought of as constituted of distinct parts, most of the phenomena that compose empirical [i.e., mind-dependent] reality exhibit no features that could be called nonseparable.” (p. 4.)

Maybe—and this is just a maybe—consciousness is somehow responsible for introducing separation, difference, in the universe, and I’m not referring here to some interpretations of quantum theory according to which quantum measurements would depend on the observer’s consciousness. I’m thinking about something more subtle. Consciousness as an experience of something requires a difference, a distinction that instates the consciousness of something and the experienced something and that other experienced something and so on… Without this divisive and temporal “and,” no conscious experience would be possible.

However, who experiences something each time this divisive consciousness breaks up the whole? If you refrain from introducing the Cartesian postulate according to which consciousness is “not of this world,” then the obvious answer is: The whole, the universe is experiencing itself.

This would all be quite straightforward if the act of naming the whole was not, in itself, another division providing nothing more than an illusory take on what we are talking about here… After all, are we not all consciousness in action, dividing ourselves away all the time in a perpetual feast or sacrifice?

That is why no amount of talk can replace direct experience and that is what I will address now albeit indirectly because, here again, we will continue to be consciousness in action, dealing with words, these useful shadows of our curiously fragmented worlds.

*

I was 18 when it happened.

I suppose my family could be correctly described as an upper middle-class Portuguese family. I lived with my parents, my older brother and our housemaid (who was also a kind of second mother to me) in a big house with nice back and front gardens.

In my first years of high school, I was a good student. However, as adolescence set in, my performance began to decline together with my general disposition and trust in life.

Until the end of the ninth grade, I had enjoyed a stern routine. I had perfectly assimilated all the middle class values of efficacy and efficiency, economy, patience and perseverance. However, I had absolutely no experience of life and had little contact with the social environment outside our family circle and my school life.

From the beginning of the tenth grade on, I was given more liberties, like the permission to go out with my (new) friends in the evening, and I began to meet more people, most of whom were my age, but some were older. As I learned more about people and their worlds, my old life began to look somewhat limited and silly.

Looking back on those days, I now realize how unbalanced and biased my outlook had been (and still was). It was not my fault, nor was it my parents’ fault or anybody else’s for that matter. I had just been a good student of the public values of my social environment and was not lucky enough to have had some naughty uncle who would have showed me the other side of life.

As you know, in North American Indian cosmogonies there is usually a character—an animal, sometimes the coyote—that spoils the nice harmony and symmetry of a perfect but dull creation. Unfortunately, most of us, Westerners, do not realize the importance of “coyotes” and “serpents,” and entertain a notion of good and evil as absurd as the idea of a one-sided coin.

I was fortunate to have a friend that was somewhat of a coyote himself but I essentially had to be my own “trickster,” as they are also called. That may be a dangerous thing for a young and inexperienced person and, in a certain measure, it was.

I was now more interested in having fun and in learning more about the shadier sides of life than in working hard or in complying with what was now beginning to look like shallow values and outward appearances. I had little experience and no one with whom to learn how to balance the conflictive aspects of life or to tame my feelings of confusion and guilt. I guess you could say that, in my own manner, I was struggling to become a two-sided coin instead of the one-sided one young people are often naïvely expected to be.

I drifted along through the tenth, the eleventh and the twelfth grades, discouraged and hopeless, until I finally failed the maths course in the twelfth grade and had to repeat the year. It was a true shock to me because I still identified with the disciplined and good student I had been up to the end of the ninth grade. Nevertheless, those years were not fruitless. On the contrary, I learned a lot about the world around me.

As I had completely lost interest in maths and as I was given the option, I decided to take philosophy instead. This meant a whole year with just the philosophy classes to keep me busy.

Reading had always been a favourite activity, but now that I had plenty of time in my hands, I decided to get a library card and began reading a lot. I read fiction mainly, because that was the only kind of book our town library lent. I also wrote a bit, no to mention drawing and painting, which I had been doing for some years, thanks to the encouragement from a great arts teacher.

Of course, there was the need to study philosophy as well. Our twelfth grade philosophy manual was cryptically stupid or stupidly cryptic: I put it aside at once and never discovered which the case was. I first bought a History of Philosophy written by three Spanish authors for senior high school and undergraduate university students, which was quite helpful. However, the real help and inspiration came from a thick “History of Philosophy” my brother had bought a few years before and was now lying on a forgotten shelf. It was written by Julian Marías, the disciple of the great Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset.

I still remember reading Marías’ illustration of Plato’s “Ideas”: Take a white sheet of paper. Now give it a hard look. Is it absolutely white, as white as you could imagine it to be? Have you ever seen such an absolutely white object? Of course you have not. How then do you know what pure white is like? In addition, could you identify concrete instances of white if you did not know what pure white was like?

You may not find this overly impressive, as I would not if I ran across this today. However, ignoramus as I was then, it stroke me as a revelation.

After a quick rerun of Greek philosophy, our philosophy program essentially jumped to Descartes and went from there onwards, which meant that by Easter time we were talking about Hegel.

That is were my mind was cracked open like an egg. Unlike Colombo’s, mine did not stand on a table or anywhere else. If you know something about Hegel, you will understand why.

For Hegel, nature or the outer world is just a temporary exteriorization of the “Idea” whose destiny is to eventually come to terms, and self-consciously reunite, with itself. In spite of the grandness of his philosophy, Hegel’s views on the “evolution of the Spirit” overestimated conceptual reason (dismissing other approaches as “muddled thinking”) and depicted an unsurprisingly Eurocentric “Spirit” whose final embodiments turned out to be the nation and the state, both capitalized, of course.

Even an uneducated youngster like me could understand that Hegel’s conclusions did not match the promises of his initial intuition; and this was the idea (that Hegel may well have gotten, directly or indirectly, from Indian philosophy) that mind and matter, the spirit and the world, the process and its end, are not strangers but different parts or manifestations of the same fundamentally undivided whole.

It was the first time I was exposed to this conception of wholeness or, at least, the first time I began to understand it, which is the same. (I had by then read a book on Vishnuism or Vaishnavism, but it did not impress me much, maybe because of its monotheistic overtones.) As manifestations or expressions of an undivided whole, each of its parts is the whole but, as parts, they cannot stand for it or represent it. This is an intractable paradox from the logical and rational point of view and it suggests that the separation of the parts is only an appearance.

It would be more than a game of words to point out the connexion between the idea of separateness as an appearance and the idea of consciousness as “appearance of.” This, as you may have guessed, is a restatement of the hypothesis, laid down at the end of the first part of this text, according to which consciousness itself is the “cause” or, more precisely, the very embodiment of distinction (alias separation, alias division).

If you admit the idea of wholeness, which is the idea of an “undivided universe,” then any appearance may be considered as a true and false representation of the whole, as well as a negation and an affirmation of it: true because every appearance is a happening in and of the whole; and false because each appearance is a “negation” of the whole as such, but a negation without which the whole could not manifest (affirm) itself to itself. Concisely, this is truth through falseness and affirmation through negation. Such a paradox cannot be contained within any kind of philosophical or doctrinal system because it is not soluble in dialectics unless time, memory and consciousness are used as solvents, leading us back to where we started…

Of course, I was not then as articulate about this as I’m trying to be here. This is just an intellectual attempt to depict the paradox of wholeness I was confronted with as I came in touch with Hegel’s initial intuition. In spite of the philosophical medium I received it from, I essentially dealt with it in an emotional and aesthetic manner.

This gave me a head start, which you may understand if you think of thought as the inner core of our consciousness’ separating faculty. Thought, and most specifically verbal thought, is the most structured part of our consciousness, the thing we cling to when we are afraid of slipping into unconsciousness, the inheritor of millennia of dividing conceptual activity. However, it is not easy to dismiss thought. Suppose that by escaping thought you would approach wholeness. How would you realize you are approaching the latter without returning to thought? This kind of logical conundrum shows you what happens when you give thought the centre stage…

I still remember reading Marías’ History of Philosophy in the back garden of my parents’ house. We were in May, the weather was becoming warmer and I was lying on a camping bed. I looked at the trees and the bushes, the neighbour’s house and the clouds in the sky, wondering about this notion of totality. It seemed extremely logical and necessary but, at the same time, it left me completely puzzled as I began to realize that I could not look at it from the outside.

It then hit me for the first time.

“I’m alone.”

I must admit that it terrified me to the point of making me sick in my stomach. However, as I recovered from the first impact and from the following ones, I experienced a growing feeling of calm and control as I had never experienced before. The impossible perception of wholeness made me understand how silly it was to picture myself as a complete stranger to the world, as I often had. However, it also showed me that company, being with, is an appearance or, if you wish, a doing of the whole, not a radical ground.

I do not know whether my experience should be considered as an instance of that famous oceanic feeling Freud spoke about but never experienced himself¹. I can at least guarantee that it is not a disguised re-enactment of childhood feelings of comfort and of being hold. If you really understand yourself as of the undivided whole, you are not only “contained” as you are also the “ultimate container” and, as such, you are immeasurably alone.

My understanding of myself as of the whole came gradually and sometimes by waves, but I realized very soon where I was heading. I had the good fortune of not having been raised in a monotheistic religion (in my case it would probably have been the Christian religion) which meant I was less tempted to magnify my ego and to mistake it for the undivided universe. I instead saw myself as not more nor less important than a speck of dust, a star, another human being or a car parked in the street. If you understand yourself as of the undivided whole, hierarchical thinking and hierarchical structures, appear as just that: appearances whose significance depend on the divisive discrimination of the perceptive consciousness and on a certain degree of unconsciousness about its own operations – namely the co-generation and the co-dependency of opposites like the ones defining hierarchical structures (above/below, greater/smaller, etc.).

In spite of not having a religious (and, more specifically, monotheistic) education, I did grow in a country where Christian religion prevailed (in its catholic version). Given the religious overtones of my experience, I naturally felt compelled to search the Bible for possible parallels to it. I eventually found them in the Gospel of John. Scattered through the text, there were unmistakable signs of what I could recognise as a perception of wholeness akin to my own.

Looking back on that recognition now, I feel inclined to agree with Alan Watts who believed the gospels, and particularly the Gospel of John, contain the translation of a man’s mystical experience into the religious and cultural language of the Near East in general and of the Hebrew people in particular². I do not know how much of what Jesus (or Yeshua, which would have been his Hebrew name) said was conserved in the gospels we have today, nor do I know how much of what we find in those texts was actually uttered by him. I do know, however, that a number of passages in the Gospel of John clearly indicate the human paradoxical experience of the undivided whole.

Nothing is hidden. You just have to realize that, if you were a Hebrew living in the Near East 2000 years ago, you would not use the same notions and words as we would to translate, or to think about, the absurd experience of the “undivided universe.” The Hebrew were not very keen on cosmological imagery, which suggests they would rather search for their symbols of totality in the human realm. As I argued in a text entitled “Expérience mystique et totalitarisme,” in order to communicate with the people around you, the familiar symbols of domination and sovereignty would be the most obvious and the most efficient means of expressing an undivided whole. Such is the case of the patriarch (the “Father”), standing for the extended family under his dominion, or the king (the “Kingdom of God”), which represents the people and the land under his authority. Even though my reading of the Gospel of John was not “mediated” by these “hermeneutic” considerations, I intuitively understood words like “Father” or “Kingdom” as symbols of the unspeakable and anonymous everything-and-everyone.

I will just quote—and comment on—a few passages³.

When the Pharisees accused Jesus of standing as his own witness (8:13), Jesus reacted by claiming the validity of his own testimony and explaining that his other witness was the Father who had sent him. When asked where his father was, he answered: «"You do not know me or my Father," Jesus replied. "If you knew me, you would know my Father also."» (John, 8:19.)

In another moment, Jesus was having a long argument with his people (“the Jews”). They had opposed to Jesus’ “Father” their own “father,” Abraham. After a long dispute, Jesus closed the argument: «"I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!"» (John, 8:58.)

Who is?

Two chapters later, we read the statement: “I and the Father are one.” (John, 10:30.)

A few verses after this fundamental assertion, we come across that controversial passage where Jesus, having been accused of pretending to be God, replied: «Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are gods'? If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came—and the Scripture cannot be broken—what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, 'I am God's Son'?» (John, 10:34-36.)

The passage to which Jesus refers (Psalm 82:6) uses the word “Elohim,” which literally means “gods.” Elohim is the Hebrew plural of Eloah, meaning “god,” “divinity.” Both are related to the name of the Canaanite supreme deity “El.” We also know, from the Bronze Age texts of the Canaanite Ugarit, that the word Elohim denoted the entire Canaanite Pantheon whose members were El and his family. The Psalm in question depicts a great assembly of “gods” presided by “God” who reproaches their unfairness (like “defending the unjust”) and condemns them to—or recalls them that they will (depending on the chosen interpretation)—“die like mere man” and “fall like any other ruler.”

Naturally, both texts (John 10:34-36 and Psalm 82) have been subjected to a considerable amount of “exegesis.” The main efforts have concentrated around the idea that the members of the divine assembly depicted in the Psalm were not really “gods” but the judges of Israel and that they were being reproached by God for their misjudgements. The name “gods” would only mean that they were Yahweh’s deputies, acting on his behalf. Of course, this interpretation turns Jesus’ reply into a mere act of sophistry, a heavy price that indicates the importance of what is thus being disguised… in full light!

In the precise passage to which Jesus alludes, God is saying to the members of his divine assembly: «"I said, 'You are "gods"; you are all sons of the Most High.'» (Psalm 82:6.) Now, remember the point he was making with his reference to the Psalm 82: «Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, 'I am God's Son'?» (John 10:36.)

What Jesus is saying to his accusers is as clear as water if one refrains from exegetical intoxication: you are the sons of God as much as I am. The same way that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), you and the Father are one.

Finally, we should not forget that, in spite of its literal meaning, the word “Elohim,” is one of the two “names” of the Hebrew god in the Old Testament, the other name being “Yahweh.” As a rule, both are translated as “God,” with the exception, of course, of the 6^th verse of the Psalm 82. If the exception were not opened, we would not have: “You are gods” but “You are God.”

Even more astonishingly, the undivided whole or, at least, its “human face” (remember the Hebrew were not prone to cosmological considerations), is openly indicated in the words of Jesus at the last supper: «Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.» (John 14:19-20.)

If you do not assume that the logical relations described in the last sentence are mere figures of speech not to be taken “literally,” you realize that they point to something similar to what I have been referring as the undivided whole.

From a strictly logical standpoint, the mutual inclusion of Jesus and his disciples could only be true if each of its terms was, at the same time, the whole and a part of the whole. The parallel between the mutual inclusion uniting Jesus and his disciples, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the physical phenomena of entangled particles, is obvious: both constitute an undivided whole in which the distinction between the parts and the whole is “only” an appearance. Otherwise, the mutual inclusion of Jesus and his disciples would be a logical non-sense and the virtually instantaneous co-dependency of the two particle’s behaviours would not be observable.

Regarding the Father, the “nonseparability” of Jesus and his disciples clearly indicates that Jesus’ relation to the Father is identical to the disciples’ relation to the Father, which is clearly convergent with Jesus straightforward reference to the sixth verse of the 82^nd Psalm (John 10:36) and with the unambiguous statement: “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30.)

Oneness, non-divisiveness, wholeness, such seems to be the universally transitive relation between the apparent terms “Jesus,” “disciples,” and “Father” which, as an apparent term, stands here for the undivided whole as such. If we pursue the analogy with quantum entanglement, the Father’s correlate in the field of physics would be what I have been calling the “quantum wave sea.”

As with my presentation of Hegel’s intuition, this is an intellectual reconstruction of what was an essentially intuitive understanding. I no moment did I buy into the exclusive monotheistic ideas forcefully welded to the perception of wholeness in the gospels, nor did I fell tempted to enter into some kind of privileged identification with the Christian Jesus. On the contrary, my only “misperception” was to conclude that, since such a widely read document presented an obvious picture of the unspeakable we-all-and-everything-always-and-everywhere, there should be a considerable number of people who knew exactly what I knew. In my inexperience and enthusiasm, I did not immediately realize the rarity (in the West, at least) of my “vision.”

I enjoyed and feared this vision. It was like walking on the edge of a cliff. The view was as grand as anyone could ever imagine. It was also closely escorted by a sense of immeasurable danger, the danger that, suddenly and definitively, the “commas” surrounding my vision, would fall off:

“It is I”

One moment in particular keeps coming back to me, only to fade away before fully revealing its secret (something for which I’m grateful).

It was late in the afternoon and I was in my home town, on the sidewalk of an avenue along the coastline. The sun was still a couple of hours from sinking into the sea, but a reddish haze, possibly from some fire outside town, suggested an implausible early sunset and gave a bronze tint to the still sea.

As I watched the scene, with the cars passing by and the people strolling along the avenue, entering a store or rushing to some rendezvous, I experienced what I could better describe as a pulsating perception, oscillating between the seamless whole and an unspeakable, animated but silent and overwhelming Presence that I could almost sense as different from me-the-people-and-the-sea, as if in the background but, at the same time, pervading it all, with no outside, no before, no after.

I felt an immense sorrow for all the people, sorrow for their worries and sufferings, sorrow for their not knowing about this, about themselves, sorrow because it would all go on, every illusion, every hope and every despair, repeating itself again and again with no end in sight other than the forgetfulness that alternates with each new reappearance.

In the midst of these feelings, I was not looking at the world from the outside. All the worlds from afar, as all the worlds from the past and the future, were in this Presence… as was the full responsibility for each happening, and, yes, a sense of joy, one’s joy, as time unravelled all to all.

Thank you for giving me a good reason to write this.

Take care,

Miguel Montenegro

13-23 February 2007

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