Observations placeholder
Eliade, Mircea - Experiences a fragment of time devoid of duration
Identifier
000441
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Eliade’s early spiritual ideas, were formed by his experiences during World War I, when he witnessed events such as the bombing of Bucharest by German zeppelins. When he was about ten he experienced an ‘epiphany’. Recalling his entrance into a drawing room that an "eerie iridescent light" had turned into "a fairy-tale palace", he wrote....
A description of the experience
"I practiced for many years [the] exercise of recapturing that epiphanic moment, and I would always find again the same plentitude. I would slip into it as into a fragment of time devoid of duration—without beginning, middle, or end. During my last years of lycée, when I struggled with profound attacks of melancholy, I still succeeded at times in returning to the golden green light of that afternoon. [...] But even though the beatitude was the same, it was now impossible to bear because it aggravated my sadness too much. By this time I knew the world to which the drawing room belonged [...] was a world forever lost."