A well known and respected journalist and activist, Barbara Ehrenreich, who is now in her early seventies, had what I would call a transcendent experience when she was about thirteen that she is just now revisiting in an attempt to understand what it was that happened to her. She calls the event strange and cataclysmic and it was very similar to my own transcendent experience when I was twelve. The difference between us was that for me, it was neither strange nor cataclysmic but rather familiar and a place to which I felt drawn. For Barbra, it was cataclysmic because she already had an analytical mind and her first impulse was to understand this experience with that mind. Of course, this went nowhere because what she needed to understand with the thinking mind transcends the thinking mind. And so she tried everything she could until finally, of necessity, letting it go and immersing herself in a normal life. For myself, I did not encounter this place again until my first experience with LSD in college and that was the beginning of a lifelong pursuit to try and understand an experience that was, at the time, the most powerful one I had ever encountered and this journey was always primary in my life with everything else just grist for the mill.
I have encountered other people who have had similar experiences and were also not able to put any of it into perspective. They too have just lived their lives with the knowledge that something profound did indeed happen to them but no way to process any of it. If we live in a world where these occurrences are seen as aberrant and invalid then there is no option but to stick it in a box and pretend nothing happened. And we are all the worse for these missed opportunities. This book is important because we need to know that we are not alone in these experiences and that they come upon us for reasons that are worth pursuing. Buy a copy and pass it along because this is how evolution happens.
