I’ve had three special moments in my life, unique moments of transcendent realization that lifted me above the clouds of thought and individual limitation for just a moment and gave me a prophetic view across history. Unfortunately, describing what I saw in thoae moments is rather difficult. The nature of such revelations is that they present the world as it is, in its wholeness. And to try to break it down to a particular perspective, to say any single thing about it, it to pull those fundamental mysteries down to our level and restrain them and limit them.
I’m not saying these experiences are beyond reason or irrational. Rather, they’re super-rational. They’re actual tangible realities, not merely ideas, that cannot be accurately or completely expressed or understood by a single human perspective, a simple definition. They’re the sort of things that it takes all of us collectively, working at the truth, adding to it, complimenting, correcting, counterbalancing one another, to say of them what is true.
Prophecy, to me, is that brief moment when you lift your head above your own individuality and limited perspective and for just a moment get a tiny glimpse of things as they are in themselves. It comes when you truly put your mind to solving a seemingly insolvable problem and seek it with all your heart, enough that you’re willing to let go of yourself and your own smallness so something larger, more transcendent, can for a moment find its way into you. And then maybe, once in a lifetime, or for some more often, you see it. Then the vision fades, it can’t be maintained, because it’s like trying to be and contain many souls at once, and you hope to bring back some part of what you saw to enlighten and transform the limited and specific perspectives you hold and encounter.
My first vision was in college, when I suddenly grasped how all theology and philosophy fit together, the nature of truth (and beauty and goodness, all the subjects of both disciplines). That one was the most pleasant of the three, but it gave me a headache, and it was the most brief. I was walking along, working my brain harder and harder. Trying to make my view on the world fit together by adding more and more pieces and more and more layers, more and more angles. I was on a sloped lawn near some bushes next to one of the dorms close to the English building. And suddenly, for just a moment, it all came together and locked, and I saw how all truth converged on a single point. A sort of reverse big bang, seeing backward to the point of origin, a great reassembling. Just one quick glimpse. And then it was gone. And all I could really say of it was that I knew that it was.
My second experience was around the time of graduate school, when I was pondering some questions of science and puzzling over some intractable fundamental concerns about the nature of biological life. And suddenly it seemed to me that I saw through it, that the structure of things around me literally became transparent and I could see through them to what they really were, to what the fundamental structure of the world was and how it worked, what its true nature was and what the nature of life was. That one was the clearest and easiest to hang on to, and the longest. I wrote a message to myself about it as fast as I could, just notes, as it was happening. It was like seeing behind a curtain. Like the veils that divide the levels of reality, material and understanding, were parted for just a while and all were finally seen as one and and the same.
My third experience was when I was almost 38. And I was wrestling with some question about people and how they see themselves, and all the twists and turns of history, and trying to see people of different times and different perspectives as they saw themselves, to see the world as they saw it, and figure out how all those different owrso ctives could possibly fit together, to preserve my critical faculty so I could see the common elements. And it was like a wind suddenly took me and lifted me bodily and bodilessly into the air, into a wild and windblown perch where my eyes could look across the landscape. And I looked, and I suddenly perceived the nature of the human mind and heart, what it was in its essence, and I could see its history and the movement of human thought and belief and knowledge and perspective, and how it went back and forth in an endless sesaw, growing, changing, striving, coalescing, devouring itself, reinventing itself, correcting itself, overbalancing itself. I saw us all as shards of a single connected whole, repeating in each one of us its whole story and living that story across time in all that live. It was marvelous and maddening.
That experience was the most depressing. That made me so depressed for months that I briefly started cutting again and had constant suicidal thoughts. Seeing into the nature of what we are and how we work individually and through history was rather horrifying, at first. A vision of something amazing somehow gone horribly wrong. I had a hard time coming to terms with it.
I express all these experiences with words and ideas, because that’s all I can do. But a sculpture or painting or film would do it better. They were experiences, visions. Seeing, not thinking. Thought attends to one specific thought or aspect, draws one perspective out into a crystallized facet from which to view a thing. This was more like an encounter.
God, the world, and the human heart, I suppose, are what you could summarize the content of those glimpses as. The only time I ever mentioned these moments of transcendent prophecy and understanding to someone, they looked at me like I was genuinely crazy. And I would have done the same and been quite incredulous and dismissive. But I think this might be what prophecy actually is and how it works. I think it squares with accounts of prophecy given. I think it makes sense from a philosophical and psychological and spiritual standpoint.
Socrates had his moment of personal prophecy and mission. He was so puzzled by the oracle given about him at Delphi. He couldn’t solve it. And then suddenly he saw, he had his vision, a vision into the nature of wisdom and truth and his own heart. Something happened to him. It awakened something in him that pulled him right out of the world of Athens that he daily inhabited. And as a result he invented modern philosophy and was made a martyr. He had a mission from God. And he even died for it, and predicted that his death would not silence his oracle, but only expand it across time and space. And he was darn right.
I think the nature of his revelation was very similar to that of Solomon (who clearly saw a vision of the struggle of the life of mankind across time, in Ecclesiastes). I don’t think the content was the same, but the way they both got at their visions was similar.
In Athens Socrates found a world much like the inner world of Solomon: luxurious, powerful, bursting with opportunity, and brilliant beyond compare. Yet the oracle declared Socrates to be the wisest of all men. And Socrates wrestled and wrestled with that idea, trying to make sense of it, and he suddenly got it; he saw it. He had the vision of his wisdom. And he realized that the greatness of his wisdom was that he was the only one in all that excess of brilliance and power who was truly aware of how foolish he was. His wisdom was knowledge of his own smallness, his ignorance, and the need to seek truth and wisdom in something (a process, a thing, maybe both) larger and more transcendent than himself. He was able to see himself and the wisdom of great Athens, and the wisdom of God (or however you express it) for what they truly were, and what the relation between them truly was.
Solomon summarized this same idea exactly by saying “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”. The realization of the not-God, limited, perspectival, fallible nature of us all. The need to seek out the true source and come to it by any means possible. That’s the beginning of Solomonic wisdom. Realizing that you yourself are not its source and being willing to empty yourself and become more than what you are, to let some of the larger, more complete reality reach you and touch you and instruct you and correct your excesses and fill your voids and destroy your illusions. Without that bit of realization, we can never be more than what we are. We may revolve, but we will never evolve.
That is the wisdom of Solomon, and it is the same as the wisdom of Socrates. It was the gateway that opened the path to everything they learned and became. It showed them a landscape to traverse and explore. It oriented them in life. They had a real desire to seek the wisdom that transcended themselves. And they didn’t always know what to think or what to make of it. Socrates often speculates and doubts. Solomon also speculates and doubts and ponders truths that tear at the walls of his narrowly defined reality. There is almost a sense of injury from this wrestling with God, with the spirit and truth behind existence. Socrates paid with his life. Solomon did not, but he seems to have lived a life of no small amount of internal struggle and torment. Neither seems to have been willing to forget or forgo their experiences. As many difficulties as they present, they are still the things that structure their whole lives. Socrates chose his over life itself. Solomon was willing to choose his over wealth and power and long life.
Making Nobody Happy 