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Warner Allen, Herbert - The Timeless Moment - An answer came
Identifier
021633
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
We have studied this experience for some time and have concluded that Herbert was wishful thinking if he thought this was ecstasy. The convoluted language alone is a clue, no one who has been through this, uses language this pompous and long winded. Nor do they ever claim Illumination or Enlightenment, because to do so is effectively saying there was no union, I am as separate and egotistical as I always was. Enlightenment is more a process not a state.
And if his book is anything to go by he was not Enlightened.
But his experience was genuine, so what was it?
Aside from the dream, we think for the first time he had had an experience of enhanced perception, in which music has meaning beyond being pleasant to listen to.
A description of the experience
H. Warner Allen - from The Timeless Moment
When the writer was on the threshold of fifty, it occurred to him, as it must have occurred to many another ordinary journalist, no less hostile to the apparent sloppiness of fashionable mysticism than he was, that he had lived for nearly half a century without discerning in life any pattern or rational purpose. His views on the matter might have been roughly summed up in a vague notion that the meaning of the universe was shrouded in impenetrable darkness by the Powers of Life and Death, for fear that life should lose its savour as a brave adventure, if the mystery of death and suffering was solved and uncertainty was exchanged for the assurance of future beatitude.
A curiously vivid dream shook his faith in this tentative explanation of human ignorance, though he could not possibly have said what the appearance in his sleep of a light brighter than the sun had to do with the matter.
Almost before he knew it, he found himself involved in the task of recalling everything he could remember of his past life in the hope of tracing some pattern and design that underlay its outward incoherence and fitting the disjointed episodes of his thoughts, feelings and actions into the unity of a rational purpose. This quest of truth led through paths of unforeseen darkness and danger, but within a year of clock-time an answer came.
It flashed up lightning-wise during a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony at the Queen's Hall, in that triumphant fast movement when 'the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy'. The swiftly flowing continuity of the music was not interrupted, so that what Mr. T. S. Eliot calls 'the intersection of the timeless moment' must have slipped into the interval between two demi-semi-quavers. 'When, long after, I analysed the happening in the cold light of retrospect, it seemed to fall into three parts:
- first the mysterious event itself which occurred in an infinitesimal fraction of a split second; ….;
- then lllumination, a wordless stream of complex feelings in which the experience of Union combined with the rhythmic emotion of the music like a sunbeam striking with iridescence the spray above a waterfall-a stream that was continually swollen by tributaries of associated Experience;
- lastly Enlightenment, the recollection in tranquillity of the whole complex of Experience as it were embalmed in thought-forms and words.
Since words are the only currency in which a writer can deal, it might seem impossible for him to go outside the third stage of the Vision, when the simplicity of the original event amalgamated with other Experience has been measured and divided by thought and language into the arbitrary sections defined by words. Memory, however, preserves not only the final representation in its clear-cut shape, but also the more or less shadowy traces of the process which led to it.