A Walk in the Park with Doubting Thomas: the stormy epiphany
by Tom Endress
December 2, 2007
During the past several months, several HUU members and attenders have talked about significant spiritual experiences in their lives. Some short, some long.
I am commandeering a whole morning, possibly two, for mine because the spiritual experience I am about to describe, as best I can, occurred early in my adult life. I have spent almost a half century trying to understand that event. Accordingly, I may need extra time to give you a taste of the many paths and blind alleys I have taken in this effort. I suspect a lot of of the experiences and struggles I have gone through parallel those of many of you.
Relative to the title printed in the bulletin I was affectionately given the nickname “Doubting Thomas” as a child by my mother. She thought I resembled Jesus’ doubting disciple Thomas! The nickname came about because I frequently questioned her Christian beliefs on such things as the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of Jesus. In our home I felt free, even encouraged, to ask her what she believed, why she believed it, and how it was that she knew a particular belief to be true. This has resulted in a life-long curiosity on my part about the what, why and “how do you know?” of peoples’ religious beliefs.
There seems to be a common belief that the discovery of spiritual truths only occurs after one has invested considerable effort laboring along some sacred path or other.
By way of contrast, my more or less formal journey began with a deep experience, albeit an accidental one. Subsequently, I have spent the decades since exploring countless spiritual, philosophical, and psychological paths in an effort to understand that erstwhile event.
But please don’t be fooled by my wordiness in describing it to you. It is the direct experience of something ineffable that I will be dancing around with my descriptions, not my personal beliefs about what the ineffable might be. An accurate portrait of the phenomena that occurred during this direct experience is what seems important here in order for you to understand what I am going to say about it later. This direct experience is about an instance when my alleged self called “Tom” that is full of memories, thoughts, feelings, plans, judgments, and expectations disappeared, for the moment. So, what should I call such a moment of “no-Tom”?
Well, such moments could go by many names, peak experience, existential shift, oneness, awakening, Samadhi, Satori or the “capacious eye” as John Irvine referred to it recently from this lectern. I definitely shy away from using the term “Enlightenment” because, as I alluded, many people think of “enlightenment” as something that is gained once and for all as well as being something that is only acquired after years of assiduous practice along some spiritual path or other.
But that’s not-I repeat– not what I will be talking about here. I am referring to an event, a moment, which occurs in an instant, out-of-time. Not something long and drawn out. When this moment occurs it is accompanied by an immediate and dramatic shift in a person’s perception of the world, life, and self. It may even be precipitated by an unforeseen event that has little or nothing to do with spiritual paths. Here’s one of two examples that, hopefully, will illustrate what I mean.
Back in July this year, I heard David Gessner, a naturalist, speaking on NPR’s All Things Considered. His topic was “Experiencing A Feeling Of Wildness.” He quoted Thoreau who said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Gessner maintains people often get the quote wrong and substitute the word “wilderness” for the original word “wildness”.
Be forewarned. The following are powerful quotes taken from what Gessner himself said, and although I am reading in the first person, they are NOT my experiences. My experience comes later.
Gessner said, “While wilderness might be untrammeled land along the Alaskan coast, wildness can happen anywhere – in the jungle or your backyard. And it’s not just a place; it’s a feeling. It rises up when you least expect it. In fact, it was while observing my own species, my own family, that I experienced the two wildest moments of my life.”
This first happened while Gessner was holding his father’s hand while he died. Gessner described it poignantly:
“I listened to his final breaths, gasping and fish-like, and I gripped his hand tight enough to feel the last pulsings of his heart. Something rose up in me that day, something deep, animal, unexpected, something that I didn’t experience again until nine years later, when my daughter Hadley was born.”
Before Hadley’s birth, everyone warned Gessner that his life was about to change, the implication being that it would become tamer. But there was nothing tame about that indelible moment to Gessner.
He said, quote, “during the C-section, when the doctor reached into my wife, and a bloody head appeared, straight up, followed by Hadley’s full emergence and a wild squall of life as her little arms rose over her head in victory. And it was somewhere around then that I felt the great rush come surging up. Sure it was physiological – goose bumps and tingling – but it was also more than that: a wild gushing, both a loss and then a return to self.
Gessner concludes the following…. quote:
“I believe that these moments of death and life give us a reconnection to our primal selves, a reminder that there is something wilder lurking below the everyday, and that, having tasted this wildness, we return to our ordinary lives both changed and charged. So, while I’ll continue to seek out wild places, I know I don’t need to travel to the Amazon or Everest to experience the ineffable. It is here on Cape Cod, on the domestic beach where I first walked holding my mother’s hand, and where I later spread my father’s ashes, that I learned that my wildest moments are often closest to home. And it is where I now bring my daughter Hadley for our daily walk, secretly hoping that the wild will rise up in her when she least expects it.”
End of quote.
Haven’t we all undergone such intense experiences of wildness that seem to come out of nowhere– looking at a new born baby– ours, a grandchild, or a close friend’s– and become caught up in the love and universal mystery of that profoundly meaningful moment? Or perhaps you were hiking through a forest and topped a hill to see a beautiful valley open up before you. At that instant your senses opened completely as you fell totally silent in your awe of the oneness and sheer power of nature. And then there are those powerful moments that occur for some while listening to music, studying a work of art, reading poetry, or meditating.
I guess most of us spend a great deal of our days preoccupied with such activities as going to work, getting family members here and there… …. paying bills…. shopping, attending endless meetings… the Iraq crisis…. health concerns…. You know…. all the usual everyday pressures.
But what might happen if our pressured lives did not call us back to our responsibilities for a while and we stayed in heightened awareness once encountered? Or what would happen if we really got a strong jolt of it?
Let me give you an example from my own life– when I found myself wholly outside these everyday pressures for an extended period. An extended period of “wildness” if you will. This incident occurred a long time ago. But first I have to set the stage:
David, Ginny, Jim, Bernie, Michelle, or any one of a number of you can do this so much more dramatically than I…. but here goes…..
It was a dark and stormy night. Deeply despondent, I had been trudging aimlessly for what seemed hours through the darkened streets of Kassel, Germany late into the evening on May 18, 1958. The weather had varied between sunny and cloudy all day. I started my walk wearing only a light jacket because I had anticipated the spring weather that day would remain mild. However, as I walked past the Haupt Bahnhof, the city’s main railroad station about a mile from Kassel Haus where I was living, the temperature dropped precipitously with an advancing weather front and a breeze began pelting me with a light rain. But I barely noticed. For my liking too many people were still coming and going from the train station, either because of late train arrivals or the station’s all night cinema. Moving toward the center of town I found the streets there also contained too many people. In those days, not far removed from World War II, people relied more on walking, bicycles, and street cars to get around rather than cars. They tended to be outside on the sidewalks instead of being isolated from each other in those small cylinders that move up and down our streets, clogging them. You know-cars. Seeking solitude I entered one of the city’s major parks. This was Karls Aue off Frankfurter Strasse, located at the eastern edge of Kassel.
You entered the park at that point by descending a long, curving flight of stairs down a steep hillside that overlooked the park and the river Fulda beyond. This hillside was blanketed with beautiful flowers, shrubs, and grass. This aesthetic display was designed to hide the debris hurriedly dumped there a little over a decade earlier from Kassel’s horrendous firebombing by the British in October, 1943. But I took little notice of the deceptive hillside as I navigated the poorly lit staircase into the park. I was too preoccupied with my dark thoughts and feelings.
Once inside, I lumbered hither and thither among the meandering paths between the hillside and river. Ordinarily I would have appreciated the beauty of the shadowy park’s illumination at that time of the evening with its unique gas streetlights spaced every 150 feet or so. I had been there often to enjoy the Orangerie, statues, flower gardens, and Sieben Bergen pond area. But that evening I was lost in grave thoughts. Mostly these involved hideous things I had learned while serving as a conscientious objector in a boy’s refugee camp in Sandbostel, Germany. This camp, not far from Hamburg, processed young males who had escaped from East Germany through Berlin prior to the construction of the infamous Berlin wall. They simply walked across the border between East and West Berlin to escape from Communist East Germany.
I was filled with stories of their difficult lives under communism as well as their experiences during the horrendous bombing of their cities during World War II, especially the firebombing of Dresden, which lay in East Germany. The deliberate killing of massive numbers of civilians by Allied firebombing as well as the extent and carnage of these bombings was not yet known to the general US population in the 1950s, including me.
My thoughts jumped from there to images of a remote 20 X 80 yard area of sunken ground near the Sandbostel refugee camp. It was a hidden mass grave. Germans, by and large, desired at that time to keep such things out of sight. It was shown to me on the sly by Dieter Jaeger, my German roommate for about a year in the German YMCA barrack at the refugee camp. He had learned about it secretly from one of the nearby villagers.
Sandbostel had been known as Stalag 10B during the war and the sunken ground contained the bodies of up to 60,000 Russian and Polish prisoners of war who had perished in the camp. My heart also ached for the 10,000 civilians who had died in the firebombing of Kassel with magnesium and phosphorous bombs on a single night of October 22, 1943 and the description of that ghastly night by my Kassel friends who had miraculously lived through it.
All these thoughts and feelings whirled around and around in my head pulling me ever deeper into despair.
Okay, this is pretty heavy for a Sunday morning isn’t it?” Well… all right… to be perfectly honest there was something else…. The trigger for all this melancholy was a rejection earlier that day by the girl with whom I was head over heels in love. Yes….. she had said “no” to my proposal of marriage. I was devastated. Absolutely devastated. The pain of this rejection swirled around and around in my head entangled with all these other dark thoughts.
The darker my mood, the more I began turning against myself. I focused on my perceived failures in life, my inadequacies, my lackluster performance during my first two years of college as a premed student prior to volunteering for alternative service. My awkwardness with people. I was painfully shy and felt socially inept. What was the point of my trying to accomplish anything? I was a complete failure in my estimation. And to boot– the world was a mess. It was filled completely to the brim with violence and suffering.
As a born-again-agnostic my focus turned to God, that is,…. well…., if there was a God. How could a God allow this misery and suffering to happen to people? I seethed with rage and yelled, “If you are real, God… if you really exist… how could you allow people to suffer like this? I have tried my best! Give me some direction!! Otherwise I am going to quit trying and just accept whatever life has to offer.”
It was as though I had committed mental, emotional, and volitional suicide. I gave up and stopped trying to figure out anything– anything at all! I resolved to face each day and every moment, starting this instant by accepting whatever possibilities presented themselves to me. If there was a God who wanted something of me in life — some plan-any plan— let him show it to me! Otherwise I considered myself completely free– free to do whatever I wanted. No more plans or planning. Nothing. Nothing!! Finally the anger toward God and myself simply dropped away in my resignation to accept whatever fate had to offer me.
It was 11:00 PM as I stood there completely alone in the park. In that instant an unexpected transformation took place that I have tried to put into words ever since. Suddenly I felt completely free and in the midst of a tremendous calmness that enveloped me.
Simultaneously I had the sensation of a loving hand being placed firmly but comforting on my right shoulder. â– With that touch, any remaining tension drained from my body and I no longer felt chilled, but rather, warm inside despite the fact my clothes were soaked through from the rain and the temperature hovered in the upper 50s. In that moment the surrounding trees, bushes, and flowers burst brilliantly into life with all their beauty and splendor. The soft rain trickled gently from the leaves of the low hanging tree branches onto the bushes and flowers underneath. All this was watched with delight. Everything was very natural and ordinary â– as though one were standing in a completely familiar garden that one had rediscovered after a long absence.
There was loving presence in the rain drops giving sustenance to the plants, affectionately touching them. The plants reached up to the sky to welcome the falling rain, which, in turn, gave itself freely to the plants. They were interacting. The ground was alive– giving its nourishment to the vegetation it supported. Everything was one loving, sentient presence expressed as manifest forms that continually touched and enfolded tenderly around each other. My fingers gently stroked the leaves of a nearby plant. It felt so gentle, shiny, so unique, so absolutely perfect. Its dampness sent refreshing currents of energy up my arms and throughout my body. The plants, rain, sky, and physical sensations were all parts of one loving, aware, organic whole that was tenderly reaching out and embracing itself.
I was ecstatic and jumped and danced around in water puddles getting my shoes and socks completely soaked. I playfully sat down with a thud and a splash on a nearby wet park bench. The shock of the cold water soaking my derriere sent waves of delight up my spine. I leaned back, opened by mouth widely and let the raindrops tumble into my mouth tickling my tongue. I laughed out loud in sheer joy. I listened to the soft music the rain drops made as they pelted the shades on the gas lamp nearest me, the notes changing in timbre as the breeze subtly twisted the shape of the shades back and forth.
Arising, I turned around and looked upwards toward the street high above the park. A streetcar, probably the last for the evening, was slowly making its way from the direction of Wilhemshoehe, another city park, toward the center of town. The faces of the sleepy people within were brightly illuminated by intermittent flashes of light from the tram’s sparking overhead collectors as they glided along the power wires. I felt close to these people still recovering from the effects of the war as they were attempting to rebuild their lives, families, city, and nation. Presently I left the park, affectionately touching many of the trees beside the path as I left as well as the street lamps along the couple of miles back to Kassel Haus. To passers by on the streets I must have looked somewhat like Gene Kelly dancing in Singing in the Rain-except I didn’t have an umbrella.
The intensity of the epiphany lasted about 36 hours, an afterglow endured well over a month, and a joyous freedom followed that continued for many months until long after I returned home to the United States later that year. That was perhaps the most pivotal experience in my life. I no longer felt badly about my rejected proposal of marriage, felt an instant deep friendship-bond with the rejecting girl, but quickly became interested in and dated other girls while still in Europe. If you want to know the outcome of this phase ask Nancy. She was also there in Germany-actually being a key player in the drama.
Since then I have labored to understand what happened to me in that park. Was it a religious experience, a mystical one, a nature-centered “oneness” that is experienced by many naturalists, a psychological event, an illusion….. what? What was the reality of that event?? What?
But I am out of time. The perspectives encountered concerning the Karls Aue experience over the next half century will have to wait until another time. Then I plan to discuss how certain Buddhist concepts, such as Dukkha (suffering/dissatisfaction), and Samudaya (attachment/desire), as well as Affect Psychology’s negative affects, Jacques Derrida’s “deconstructionism” Albert Camus’ rebelism, and certain non-dualist Western thinkers have all helped me to address my plaintive “What?” reaction that has persisted since 1958.
OK, now is the time for questions, comments, or experiences of your own you would like to share.
RELATED POST: A continuation of this talk was given on June 23, 2008 – Letting Go.