“Children come into the world with that sense of celebration and delight in the awesomeness of life. Then we eat of that wonderful, terrible fruit depicted in the story of the Garden of Eden, and our lives become divided. In childhood we have innocent wholeness, which then is transformed into informed separateness. If one is lucky, a second transformation occurs later in life, a transformation into informed wholeness. A proverb puts it this way: in life our task is to go from unconscious perfection to conscious imperfection and then to conscious perfection.
As we grow up, most of us retain an intuition that heavenly wholeness exists somewhere, however harsh our lives may be. The boundary between the two worlds seems to be particularly thin during adolescence, a condition that does not occur again until we reach the age of forty-five or fifty. Then there is a chance to experience the Golden World again. Unfortunately, adults often dismiss such experiences as ‘only a dream’ or ‘childish talk.’ We tell our children to grow up and face the realities of life. As a result, many people give up on ever finding wholeness.
For me, the essence of life comes from these experiences of the Golden World. Such encounters with the divine have been called visionary, mystical, manifestations of cosmic consciousness, or, in secular language, peak experiences. Such experiences were the goal of life in the Middle Ages, when they were referred to as the Unitive Vision.
I am fascinated by the word ecstatic, which in its original sense means to stand outside oneself. We work so hard to make a personal self, an ‘I’ or ego, with clarity and continuity. This is extremely valuable, but one pays a price for this ‘I’ – we become small, personal, and limited; we are a highly circumscribed entity in our ‘I-ness.’
The ecstatic experience involves escaping from the ‘I-ness.’ This requires that we break the boundaries of our separateness to experience a greater realm, a realm that taxes our fines poets and artists to convey. It is the most valuable experience any person can have. The beauty of the Golden World is that one sees a vastness, something so much greater than oneself that one is left speechless with awe, admiration, delight, and rapture.
After childhood, in our twenties and thirties, we are called upon to fulfill the cultural tasks of the society in which we live. In India this is called the householder stage, the time for building careers, raising families, paying bills, meeting all of our social obligations. But at midlife many people hunger again for some glimpse of the Golden World. By the time most of us become adults, we have lost all contact with this world. I only have to look carefully to see the spiritual hunger in the eyes of most Westerners. Rarely do you see radiance in the faces of middle-aged people. And so instead of reconnecting to the ecstatic realm as adults, we see the infamous midlife crisis in which one tries to fill the emptiness with all the extravagant things we have around us. This is the tragedy of many modern lives.
Most of our neuroses come from hunger for the divine, a hunger that too often we try to fill in the wrong way. We drink alcohol, take drugs, or see momentary highs through accumulation of material possessions. All the manipulations of the outer world carry with them an unconscious hope of redeeming our lonely, isolated existence.
The experience of paradise in the wholeness of youth is our birthright. It is a gift. However, seeing the Golden World again as an adult has to be earned. It requires inner work, a commitment not just to material success but to bringing some sense of meaning and purpose to one’s life. There is a paradox involved here. The Golden World cannot be acquired like a possession, and enlightenment cannot be turned into a project. We do not select an ecstatic experience; rather, it is delivered upon us as a state of grace. However, we can do the necessary inner work so that we are open to and prepared for such experiences when they arrive.”
