That feeling, that surpassing feeling...

...that surpasses all understanding¹....

I've been home sick all week after returning from California. I've mostly stayed inside. But after a change in medication Friday and feeling better yesterday morning, I went outside for a couple of hours. During the unusual experience I had there, I felt as fluent as I have ever felt, and if there existed (and I owned) a machine for dictating from my thoughts, I might at the time have written a truly eloquent description of my "surpassing feeling."

What happened was nothing anyone else could have observed. It was inside my head. All anyone else present might have observed would have been something possibly similar happening inside their head.

It seems to me this morning, in the cold light of reason and remembrance, that the experience I had might simply have been one of those "best ever" experiences, like my experience of that guacamole in the Mexican restaurant. Only, this time, yesterday on a glorious fall afternoon in my back yard, nestled amidst Carolina's Piedmont Forest, I was experiencing nature as best ever. "Best ever" in the sense I formulated in describing the guacamole experience: as something "I can't imagine...being any better than I find it to be at this moment."

Nature. Not some wilderness, some high mountain, some vast plain, just the domesticated nature of a rural residential community. Not that I prefer nature domesticated, but I do like it close in, foresty. Probably because I've been very nearsighted for over fifty years.

Such surpassing experiences may be the only evidence² we have that "God is," whatever we could mean by that. A new young friend we met in Culver City told me (reminded me, actually, since I too believe this) that faith should spring not from dogmatics or reason, but from feeling, like listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony rather than reading a performance review.

But was my feeling yesterday, which I chose at the time to regard as somehow "of God," not, rather, just of nature? Nature seems so all compared to guacamole or even a John le Carré novel. Nature seems so all that maybe we take it as an emblem of "God"? The way Whitman experienced the grass³?

And Whitman concluded that section of Leaves of Grass with the observation (or longing) that:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes forward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Religion, as Harris points out in The End of Faith, seems to be bound up with our concern about, fear over, what happens after we die. It's natural to hope that nature, in its annual rebirth from winter into spring, demonstrates that there is, really, ultimately no death.

Nevermind that we ourselves, individually, might nevertheless really (and forever) die? We're biologically driven to procreate, to further our genes, our DNA. Have we not then always, however unconsciously, known that we ourselves are really, truly going to die and be done with? I admit that my experience outside yesterday did arouse in me a need to experience sexual release. The procreative urge that nature needs for us to feel would only be strengthened by our knowing that we are individually doomed to die.

My October 18 post about the guacamole jarringly ended with the comparison of "best ever" (or surpassing) experiences to an Islamic suicide bomber's blowing up American servicemen (or, I might add, other, improperly believing Muslims). And I am reminded that Harris (and others who have studied the probable psychology of Islamic suicide bombers) points out that the believer in this case seems to think that in his act of "defending Islam" he is instantly ensuring his immortality in paradise...his own, individual life's going "forward and outward."

Yesterday, as I mowed the grass (for that was what I was doing in my back yard), I wondered whether the final experience of such believers, when they detonate themselves, is as surprassing as what I sometimes feel in the Carolina woods?
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1. As I said the other day, Sam Harris is undertaking to study the neurological basis of faith, so maybe someday it won't surpass all understanding.
2. As the burning bush said unto Moses (according to Exodus 3:14), "I AM THAT I AM." That is, we can't confidently say what "God" is, if God is. I quote the Bible on this not because it's the Bible, or because I believe that the Bible is authoritative, but because, after a lifetime of being concerned about God, this is what I happen to believe. (I don't count the existence of holy books as evidence that God is. They're just hearsay evidence that someone else may have had such a feeling. And the Bible seems to agree with me—at least in this one verse in one of its books.)
3. "A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,
   How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
   I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
   Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
   A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt..."