My second spiritual experience was more arresting and consequential. I can remember the place and time of day quite precisely, but not the year. My family was living in Riverside, California. It was probably my senior year in high school, and it was a balmy evening. We used to go downtown to one of those old-style elegant movie theatres. My friends and I were outside, waiting for the rest of the group to arrive. We were just standing around joking when, suddenly, I was in a world of my own, enveloped by a visual, visceral experience that was total and dramatic. I had a sense of concentric circles swirling around a center, whirling enough to make one dizzy though I was not at all off balance. Just as suddenly, the experience was over.
It would have been hard to describe even then, but its meaning was crystal clear to me. It was about time. In fact, it was as if Time itself had disclosed its essence to me. I did not mention it to my friends, who had not noticed my “absence.” I did not make much of the experience then or subsequently; it was just an odd moment. But, although I am not much of a reader of poetry, I did respond strongly to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which are a deep meditation on the nature of time, and particularly to the lines:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I developed an interest in philosophical questions regarding time and years later published a phenomenological analysis of the experienced “now” that provides a way of understanding Plato’s insight that “time is the moving image of eternity.”
