The BxM1 express bus edged its way sedately through heavy traffic along the Major Deegan. Bailey Avenue, the unlikely birthplace of hip hop, an international music phenomenon, ran parallel on the left, then the faux grandeur of the new Yankee Stadium. To the right, Harlem arose from the East River, and to the south sprawling skyscrapers competed for space and air in midtown Manhattan.

There’s a trade secret among those who shoot movies, the best light anywhere is New York City winter sunlight for it has a unique quality, an effulgence, an intensity, a vibrant luster all its own. The sunlight, from a cloudless sky, refracted and diffused through the dirty windows of the bus, and the patterns reminded Abe of how J.M.W. Turner saw light, as in his painting The Fighting Temeraire.

The thought came to him that this place was not unlike Ancient Rome in the days when the first Christians first lived there, that a few hundred like him, who appeared to an uninformed glance to be as unremarkable as the rest of the populace.

Ever since his maternal grandmother had thrown him crumbs, numinous titbits, with comments such as, “Wud ye look at him? He’s been here many times before!” Or, “Ye can see this is her first time here,” She’d also made offhand allusions to a higher state that might be attained. Abe had known that there was more going on than meets the eye and he was convinced that if there was such a thing, the truth of it was to be found in books.

Looking back, at so many years distance, why this might be so made no sense at all for he’d never seen his grandmother with a book, indeed, that he was aware of, she’d never been known to read one. Since then, he'd read many thousands of books himself, and although there were occasional references in them, it wasn’t through books that he’d at last found what he was looking for. For, what he’d sought was not capable of being articulated, captured by mere words, by inadequate, paltry description as, for example, even within the genius of Eliot.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always--

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

This was the best attempt at explaining it that he'd come across, but it was vibrationally clear that while Eliot himself felt that he’d understood it, it was at the level of the mind, and thence he'd neither known or experienced for himself whereas Luca, Abe’s one year old grandson, knows, experiences and understands it perfectly, for he is already there, in that higher state of consciousness that comes with the fire connecting to the rose. For Luca it was a source of joy, the most natural thing in the world.

How was it that Abe could know for certain that genius though Eliot was, he was not himself at that state?

Imagine trying to navigate from New York to Chicago without a map or GPS? And the change that follows when these tools become available? So it was with vibrational awareness, a tool from a higher state, a tool that like any other needs learning and practice, but once you know how to use it the answers to all kinds of absolute questions are answered.