Said Joan Didion at the beginning of a lecture. Writing is often about perception, a reflection of our grasp pf the world around us, unfortunately it’s an understanding which is filtered, contorted through the twin lenses of ego, of I ness and superego.

Consider how Keats and Wordsworth describe a reality that’s beyond the understand of most, and it’s beyond because they were at a level of consciousness beyond that of the common man or woman.

In this regard, read and savor John Keats’ masterful Ode to a Grecian Urn:

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

And in the midst of this, Keats in a short phrase, introduces us to the concept of a higher consciousness, “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought,” He’s showing us that when we look at this urn, it’s beauty, by some energy, some means of transmission we neither understand nor indeed has science yet detected, that takes us to a different state. It is described as Nirvichara Samadhi by the ancient Vedic writers of antiquity. A state that might be called as thoughtless awareness, where thoughts cease and our awareness increases.

Wordsworth goes there too in his poem - Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798

And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

It’s fascinating that if one researches what academics make of these poems, they acknowledge that both are masterpieces, but they have nothing to say about “doth tease us out of thought” and at best they might comment to the effect that the above stanza is “spiritual”.

Keats and Wordsworth show us an energy that has, as yet, no name in Western thought or science but has been well understood and articulated in Eastern countries. Wordsworth, writing at the height of the Age of Enlightenment, where science, that most honest of disciplines, had blown away the absurdity of religious dogma, e.g. that the Earth is flat, that it is the center of the universe, that everything revolves around it etc. And yet, here, he courageously says that he has experienced a motion, an energy, that rolls through all things - for to say that, for example, a rock, is something that has this energy in it, was to deny the science of the time, and in doing so he opened himself to ridicule. But the science of our time proves him right, for within a rock is a mass of energy, within each molecule, in each atom, the sub atomic particles are in constant motion.

There is energy all around us that we see, recognize yet don’t understand. Consider the power of love. A human baby quickly comes to recognize its mother and the love that’s shared between them is exceptional and unique. The same is true in most of the animal kingdom, and mothers of all species, will put their lives on the line to protect their babies. What is this energy, this energy of love, for it’s not the love of romance, of moons in June? And by what means is it transmitted.

Similarly, what is this heightened state? And by what means does Keats enter thoughtless awareness, just by looking at the beauty of this Ancient Greek urn in the British Museum? How is this elevated state transmitted, how is it effected?

And yet, it is something we each and all of us have experienced at some points in our lives. As a small boy, I ran across a main road, tripped in the tram lines and fell. I looked up to see and large black limousine bearing down on me. At that moment, I was in thoughtless awareness, there was no sense of past or future, merely the imminence of deadly danger. And when I played saxophone in soul bands, occasionally, the band would hit the zone, we’d look up at each other and realize that we’d reached a place, together, that was beyond or normal abilities to reach, a place where everything was perfect, melodies, rhythms and harmonies were flawlessly aligned. And when I walked around Red Square in Moscow, with a woman who’d traveled seventeen hours to meet me, and within five minutes or less, recognized that she was the love of my life, and being with her was blissful. It was an extraordinary experience. She only had a few hundred words of university English so conversation was limited but I sensed something I’d never known before. I had always felt incomplete, unbalanced, that something was missing and I never knew what it was until this moment. There was an enveloping sense of satisfaction and completion. And when I asked her to marry me that evening, her English was up to understanding my proposal. Twenty-three years later, nothing has changed.

These states happen when the I ness takes a back seat, when the ego and superego diminish and when we are conscious, aware and present to our spirit, our higher self.

And it’s worth pondering that this was well understood many thousands of years ago in India, when we in the West were mostly wearing animal skins and living in caves or primitive structures.