Shimmering Veil of Presence

What a lucky man. He felt fully awake, perhaps more than he’d ever felt before. Time, no longer an abstraction, felt as real as a second skin as the future dissolved and the past let go. All that remained was one long, luminous moment tethered to everything, to an aliveness of simply Being (click: What Brain Surgery Taught Me). Oh, what a lucky man he was.

Lucky, that is, considering that the portal to his exalted consciousness was a pending operation for a lesion nestled deep inside his cerebellum. He pondered the paradox of being so awake while at the edge of an unconsciousness – a nothingness that is stripped of ego, schedule, and ambition. Neither anxious about the past nor hungry for the future, he felt more himself than ever before.

The surgery was successful. Against all odds, the pathology report for the cerebral abscess came back benign, a freak infection they said. He would live to experience the “survivor’s euphoria” that comes with the revelation of a second birth. Beyond the daunting post-op treatment was his immense gratitude for having experienced that “shimmering veil of presence.” How is it that the price for acute awareness is the prospect of its loss?

Tricks of perspective come into play. Time may be little more than a reference point in those early years, as in time to go. Or a commodity, as in time is money, often traded or even squandered. We learned from Seneca that it isn’t so much that life is short but rather we waste so much of it on life's distractions, the subject of MM 10/21/24 Killing Time, the paradox of the reality that time is actually killing us. The only question there is how quickly.

David Brooks framed the matter with the piece we discussed in MM 10/7/19 Second Mountain, describing the life journey in terms of the first phase (First Mountain) -- the period marked by this culture-driven need for success, comparative achievement, reputation and judgment -- and then, having found that to be somewhat wanting, embarking on the second phase (Second Mountain) marked by a certain spiritual awakening and ego dissolution to discover something along the lines of spirit, soul, religion, grace, a purer joy. Like our lucky man.

Others may voluntarily thrust themselves into such an exalted state in the belief that life can be truly appreciated only in terms of its proximity to death. We might pose this question to all you BASE jumpers to otherwise frame the issue. After all, who needs some garden-variety cerebral abscess?

Please note the following RSVP Policy for Member Monday: RSVP sign-up opens up at 11:00am on Fridays via the City Club weekly Newsletter. Seats are first-come, first-served: the first 14 secure a spot at the table, the last 3 on the couch. Cancellations must be made 24 hours in advance or the standard Social Lunch rate applies.