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Cohen, Dr Sidney - The Beyond within - Sees the world for the first time
Identifier
002764
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The Beyond within – Dr Sidney Cohen
I have just come back from seeing the world for the first time. A little over 2 hours ago by watch time I went out to eat dinner, and I’ll be damned if life isn’t beautiful. I sat in the restaurant just enjoying living. Everything seemed so clear and beautiful. It was like looking at the world for the very first time and thinking to yourself, how beautiful, how sensuous!
The people in the restaurant must really have thought me queer. I watched the ice in the ice water, the water on the counter top, the reflection of the ceiling in the water, I watched the waitresses, the busboys, and above all else, I watched the cheese melt on the top of my hamburger. Have you ever watched the foam on a glass of beer? What a world of delight can exist in such a common thing. I looked at the people sitting around, all grouchy and grumpy, and felt sorry for them. Can’t they see how beautiful life is?
I remember looking down the street and thinking to myself how many lights there are in the city and nobody to look at them. I think that I’m coming back to being myself now, whatever that means, but I hope that some of the joy which I have felt in just existing can stay with me and help me through the humdrum world which I fear I am going to fall back into shortly.
Funny, but all the time while I was walking around on the streets and seeing, I was thinking about when I said that all this was ‘too much’. I remember now that I said or felt, ‘It’s too much for me, I’m just a kid’. But as I walked and looked at the sky and the trees, at the shadows, the cars, the lights, just everything, I suddenly realised what I had meant by saying it’s too much. I had the wrong slant on it. The world looked to me like it must to a little child, all big and beautiful. And I was experiencing it without the imposed controls that we have to slap on the world in order to become adults. I think I was afraid that my hold on the difference between the child’s and adult’s world wasn’t too firm – and all those sights were just too overwhelming. As I was walking I was, literally, experiencing the world as a child would and I loved it