On Christmas morning, 2008, I solved the mystery I had been investigating for over 20 years: Why did a state of rapture arise in me when I was 15 for three months straight, only to fade away?
I spent so much time on this mystery because everything else paled before rapture. Rapture was a quietly intoxicating and continuous communion with the universe. It was not ecstasy, not a peak experience, but one of surfacing. Not drowning anymore, I could breath and see again. Restored to my place in the air, I felt oriented. The communion of rapture felt natural and ordinary; the disruption that preceded it, aberrant. Rapture was, finally, an experience of the normal.
I felt sublime. I thought, this is how life is. Lying on the grass, I would run my hand lightly over the blades in wonder; watch them wave exquisitely in the wind; feel cool, delicious air fall down my throat in slow motion; and say it over and over: life is sublime.
The rapture persisted no matter what was going on around me, what I did, nor what the crazy grown-ups were up to (and they were especially crazy that year). It was clearly how life is supposed to be all the time. So it made no sense when it began to fade. I tried to hold onto it, but it had not come of my efforts, so it would not stay due to them, either. All that was left to me was to find out what had happened. I did.
In a word, I went into remission. The intense biological activity of adolescence had partially restored the integrity of my consciousness, which was otherwise impaired by catastrophic injuries inflicted long before by this brutal culture. For the first time since age five, I became slightly aware of the perfection, beauty, and harmony of the universe. This naturally induced rapture in me. However, once I had a biological foothold in adulthood, I relapsed. In other words, vital energy levels decreased; my unstable consciousness refractured; fearful and defensive habits of personality reasserted themselves; my elevated perspective faded, and with it, rapture.
The experience blotted out everything else that I had ever felt or wanted. None of it mattered much anymore: playing the violin or singing or economics or design or any of the dozen other things I might have pursued professionally. I wanted to be in rapture again. For years, my resolve was, ”There is a way; I will find it.” Mostly I studied and experimented with philosophy while traveling. It has been 25 years of struggle, suffering, and occasionally, exaltation.
Every one of us has had at least a moment of rapture, when the world appears as a paradise. In the conjecture, I am saying that these are moments of lucidity: clear awareness of the world as it is. And that this awareness can be restored. Despite everything that has been drilled into us by school and church, by doctors and the state, by television and jobs, this is how the world can be lived in day in a day out, not just in rare moments.
Because I have never been able to explain what happened till now, most of my family remain bewildered about me and all I gave up on. It all saddens me, too. But I needed an answer, and no one had more than a few pieces of it. Like the author who gave me the word for my experience, Leo Buscaglia.
Now I believe I have discovered a way to restore rapture, to allow consciousness to permanently recover from its chronic contractedness: through extended rest in total darkness.
Under this condition, the organism could restore at least the core of its psychic integrity. This would also clear the way to genuine physical health, among other casualties of our civilized psychosis*. Further, a darkness retreat satisfies my final design constraints for any such process: that it be simple, quick, cheap, pleasant, reasonable, and replicable. From the beginning of my search, I held that the truth is free (as in speech and beer). It must make sense. Or it is humbug.
*I count six: meaningfulness; mental acuity; love; health; conviviality; and ecological harmony.