Mystics often describe the encounter with the ineffable in terms of dread, terror, and awe. We are finite vessels having our experience with the infinite. It’s as if the Pacific Ocean were being poured – at all once, since the infinite exists outside of time – into a thimble. Guess who the thimble is?

There’s a famous quote from the poet and mystic, William Blake – If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear… as it is: Infinite. The Doors – the musical ones – named themselves from this quote.

It’s quite overwhelming when a being of finite dimensions experiences something which is dimensionless. It spills over into us, breaks our expectations. We have no cognates for it.

And we defend ourselves against it. Many of us resist the infinite because it interferes with our agenda of control. Yet the infinite – to the extent it’s conscious – doesn’t try to control us in the way we try to control things. It defies our attempts at control because it transcends them. It disregards them. It doesn’t recognize the boundaries we impose on reality, and reality is boundless.

We don’t recognize what the infinite is, since it doesn’t conform to our expectations. It terrifies us because we most fear that which we don’t know. This might explain our insatiable curiosity and lust for discovery, since we feel that once we know everything, nothing will frighten us. And yet, the infinite transcends discovery, extends beyond knowing. Because we can’t grasp it with the forceps of our intellect, we’re afraid. Hence, the dread, terror and awe.

What can we do about it? Nothing, really. The best we can do after-the-fact is to suspend our judgments about the infinite and our encounters with it. Nothing we can know about it is provable in an intellectual sense, and therefore nothing we can say about it is valid – is falsifiable – either. Language, that great namer and classifier, always seeks to slap boundaries upon experience and shackle reality into categories which end up being arbitrary from the endless perspectives contained in then spectrum of the infinite. Words falls like bricks without mortar when we use them to describe the endless, which language can’t contain.

Since we come from endlessness, we’ll go back to it. Both these prebirth beginnings and post-death endings are, of course, inevitable. This means that we are, in a sense, infinite, too. But not in an egoic sense. The ego is constantly trying to invent its own immortality. The immortal, is unobtainable to an ego, which is a limited system. If we lay down our egos, the mystical experience becomes a nonthreatening one. But then, there’s no one – and no way – to comprehend the experience and to relate this experience back to others.

So we can take our pick: the ego and its limited means of control, language and boundaries, or infinity, which requires us to surrender control, words and the definitions which come from them. We can opt for an uncontainable experience beyond intellectual comprehension, or we can seek to understand that which cannot be understood.

It’s been said that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. From our human perspectives, we’ll never truly grasp the supernal. Yet when we lay our limitations down, we reach into the ocean of the limitless.

© 2024 by Michael C. Just