Have you ever drifted into that loose, hypnagogic state just before sleep and been ambushed by the sudden strangeness of some completely ordinary fact of your life? “Wait — I have children?” “I’m allowed to just drive anywhere I want.” One that caught me recently: “How is it that I can see out of these two small orbs in my face?” For a moment, something utterly familiar becomes astonishing, wondrous, faintly impossible. Nothing has happened. And yet everything has shifted. Everyone has felt this at least once. The question is why.
Philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel had a term for this way of being: “radical amazement” — a refusal to take existence for granted, a sense of perpetual surprise at the fact that there are facts at all. There is such a superabundance of extraordinary things going on that the quasi-miraculous has become a dime a dozen. We barely notice it.
Normally, Heschel said, we look at reality “through the latticework of our memorized knowledge” — everything filed, labeled, sorted into the already-known. We’re trained to ignore most of the astonishing features of ordinary life; it’s considered efficient, pragmatic, adult. Radical amazement is what happens when that lattice slips. For reasons and at times that are hard to explain, the routine is interrupted, and for a few moments it’s as if we’ve crossed into a parallel world — one that seems brighter, happier, more essential. But this wonder isn’t just a pleasant jolt of awareness. Heschel thought of it as a doorway. To what?
According to the religious historian Mircea Eliade, the door opens onto the sacred. He coined a term for it — hierophany, from the Greek for “the sacred shows itself.” His idea is that the sacred is present within the ordinary, always there to be noticed. “A sacred stone remains a stone,” he writes; “apparently, nothing distinguishes it from all other stones.” Most of the time we walk right past it. But in rare moments — the lattice loosened — any of us might be stopped cold by some ineffable quality in the thing, and left wondering why it felt so charged with meaning.
I think this is what happens in my near-sleep realizations. The sacred — the transcendent hiding in plain sight — briefly becomes obvious. It’s jarring and exciting and mysterious all at once. Nothing is added; something essential is simply revealed. The lattice slips, and the hierophany that was there all along shines through.
Interested in trying this yourself? With the caveat that it can’t be forced — but that the ground can be fertilized — there are a few techniques available to anyone.
One is called deliberate defamiliarization. Take a run-of-the-mill object — a tree, a cloud — and contemplate it as if you were seeing it for the first time. Study the detail. Ask questions: How is this here? What is it, really? Spend enough time and it may suddenly strike you as the most incredible thing you’ve ever seen.
Another, which we all tried as kids, is semantic satiation. Repeat a word dozens of times until it dissolves into raw sound and the label peels off the thing. It’s easy, and it’s a direct demonstration that the lattice really is removable. You can also try to push your waking awareness a little further as you drift toward sleep — the most natural place for these realizations to arrive. Keep a notebook by the bed, if you’re inclined, and jot down impressions as they come.
My own mini-awakenings haven’t (yet) left me reveling in the sacred bliss of all things. But they’ve moved the needle. The more they happen, the easier it becomes to slip back into that zone where everything is a lot more than it seems. The world hasn’t become less astonishing. We’ve just gotten better at not noticing. The good news is that noticing is a skill — and skills can be relearned.
I was 3 or 4 and supposed to be taking an afternoon nap. This was before the polio vaccine.Doctors believed then that exertion and not enough sleep could contribute to getting or worsening of the viral disease. Perhaps I was in that twilight space before drifting into sleep. All I can still remember is that I had an ineffable awareness of connection with everything, associated with a feeling of inexpressible joy. I simply let myself be bathed in that experience when my physician father walked into the room and asked why I was not sleeping. I told him something was happening that I could not explain. He came over and sat on the bed. He asked me to try. I said without thinking ‘I am God.’ He slapped my face and told me to never say such a thing. When he left the room, I told myself I did not care what he said that that was what I felt.
That was the best that a 3 or 4 year old could say when asked to explain a transient ineffable awareness of non-duality. I think the slap helped me remember that experience all these 70 plus years.
“the lattice loosened.” “the label peels off the thing.” Nice phrasing.