Repeatable metaphysical experiences

Lent 2020 - Day 22

Working from home, my routine has settled down - physical exercise in the morning (press-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups weights, plank), at the laptop and phone until 17:00, then out for some paces. Out in Jeziorki, social distancing is easy as population density is low. I can walk for 90 minutes and pass within a tiny handful of people, a safe two metres apart.

The sun sets at quarter to six, so the Magic Hour - half an hour before and half an hour after sunset is encompassed by my constitutional stroll.

Last summer, I wrote about the notion of the replicable joyful experiences. Building your own religion, what would be your recipe for repeatability - being able to get that precise sensation exactly right, that moment of joy...?

A walk at dusk was one of these. Not just any dusk; the sun must be seen to be setting, the sky marbled with thin cloud to catch the iridescent afterglow of the last rays.

I found it, just as I'd left it

Here we have my Sublime Aesthetic; that precise 'This is not America' moment when all of a sudden I am transported to another time, another place. That old familiarity, that congruent moment when the current qualia of my subjective experience match a memory so perfectly that *PAFF!* I'm there again, but to a moment not of my lifetime. The flavour lingers for a few moment, before barking dogs and speeding cars return me to the here and now.

And there is a consistency linking the landscape (spirit of place) and the feeling. Digital photography gives me the tools to recreate what I saw and felt with great precision.

Crystalline and Pure. March 2018

The Sky and, beneath it, The Road. Summer 2015

Heaven's drama. Autumn 2011

Around the corner from home, and the old familiarity. Summer 2007

I am always looking to replicate the feeling so I can refine it, define it better, put it into words that will strike a chord with others. These are sensations I felt in my grey jumper'd childhood, but they squared not with suburban West London under leaden skies. It was only in Poland that I found that those childhood dreams and inexplicable flashbacks squared with what I was seeing for real.

This has triggered a search for the metaphysical links which in turn suggested a deeper mystery at play, a connecting thread between an unfolding universe and one's deepest intuition.

Can this be the basis for a personal religion?

FOOTNOTE:

The following morning (19 March), I had the following dream... It is Florida, the mid-1950s. High summer. There's some kinda parade, down by the beach. There's a succession of pedal-powered quadricycles with fringed canopies; ladies dressed as Southern belles are pedalling them along the boardwalk, four to a conveyance. I'm in the crowd watching. Excitement breaks out when someone whispers that Lucille Ball from the I Love Lucy show is among the ladies in the parade! However, I move on to the car park. There's a bright red 1955 Fire Department Oldsmobile, I join the guys who are moving it to the main road, the junction with the turn-off for the car park. They are going to park the car along the middle of the road, to marshal the traffic. There's a guy in Ancient Egyptian attire selling hot-dogs at the crossroads; we tell him we're going to be parked up here, would he mind moving his pitch a few yards back - he's cool with this because, he says, traffic will be moving slower... CUT!

Exactly like this one.

Yet another dream that squares with Another Time/Another Place.

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki's temporary level crossing almost complete
(Three years on, there's not a trace of it left.)

This time five years ago:
Swans, dusk, Jeziorki

This time six years ago:
Joe Biden in Warsaw for talks after Crimea invasion

This time eight years ago:
Motive power for the coal and oil trains that pass Jeziorki

This time 11  years ago:
Sleet, snow, no sign of spring