The more obvious motivators are those that people will likely gravitate towards first, including fame, fortune, or some form of filling a deep sense of personal inadequacy or lack of self-esteem, which, interestingly, mirrors Jung’s warnings about ego inflation when confronting psychic³ phenomena which, no doubt, intersects spiritual experience for the mind cannot be so easily separated from the soul, or vise versa.

Indeed, losing perspective and humility after an anomalous event is a real possibility for a witness, however well they may believe themselves to be capable of fully integrated the encounter. To compound the risk, much of our media celebrates so-called heroes who succumb to ego inflation—while conveniently omitting the spiritual consequences they suffer. There may be more cautionary tales out there than I can remember off hand, but I suspect that there are far more stories about protagonists feeding the egos of audiences than otherwise⁴.

And this is not an easy road to navigate, for our current society at the time of this writing encourages and entices people to crave and seek the attention of others and great sums of wealth. But fantasies are tempting because they seemingly offer us prizes without costs, and material prizes always have a price. I myself do not pretend to be immune to these temptations and I work vigilantly to avoid and defend against them. Attention and wealth themselves are not evil, but the inflation of the ego and the corruption of the soul they can produce is.

So, what then is one to make of a good reason and motivation for sharing their anomalous experiences?

I can think of several, including 1.) helping others who may have similar experiences, 2.) helping others who have not had such experiences realize they happen with insight into what they might mean, and 3.) processing overwhelming experiences through language. We easily forget that the same langauge we use in our everyday thoughts is the same one we use to communicate with others. By using our synchronous and asynchronous communications with others, we can help ourselves better understand the meaning and implications of our experiences without becoming buried beneath the weight of their memory or dismissing them outright and unjustly.

I do not pretend that these are the only possible reasons one might decide to share their anomalous experiences openly. The real focus here is on encouraging other witnesses to be disciplined in their decision making, and to honestly consider the real reason or reasons behind their sharing and the implications to their own integrity as a result. All else is but lazy insincerity. What then does integrity demand of us? If not our own dignity, then the dignity of the experience that has forever changed us.

#Intermundia #Excultio

Notes:

1. I had considered coercion a possible motivator until I realized that without either need or want, coercion is powerless as a motivator.

2. I do not presume that motivation in this context is limited to the intrinsic. That is a decision best left to the decider.

3. Psyche, ψυχή: breath, life, soul.

4. My suggestion to the witness who truly seeks to integrate their anomalous experience puts great effort into avoiding such actions that might lead to ego inflation or any loss of humility as this may have lasting consequences far beyond the immediate sight of the individual.

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

For example, one's reputation is probably the most immediate personal aspect at risk. By exposing deeply personal experiences, such as those involving the anomalous, one will certainly be judged by society at large, including by family, friends, employers, coworkers, acquaintances, strangers, and so forth. Different people have different thresholds for how much or how little they value their privacy and their social reputation and capital. This is not a protest against sharing the anomalous, but a caution to pause and consider what it might mean for the reaction of others who encounter an inner truth and, in turn, for the person who shares it. For in the eyes of others, especially those who cannot relate, these two things are one and the same.

Another example is the potential harm the sharing may cause the people close to them, such as spouses, best friends, parents, children, and so forth. Even if one doesn't care or worry about how the sharing might affect them directly, it's still wise to pause and consider the possible effects on the people they care about. Our modern, highly toxic society is filled with piranhas scanning the web for prey—fodder for their subscribers and views—and the personal story becomes blood in the water.

One more risk is that of digital permanence. The internet does not forget, meaning that when the potential chaos and social media feeding frenzy has finished, that personal exposure never really goes away. Years, even decades, may pass, and the story once shared, and the names and words associated with it, will forever be enshrined in the growing digital footprint of humankind.

As I mentioned, I'm not encouraging others who have anomalous experiences they wish to share to remain silent, but I am suggesting that some pause and deep thought be given to it—for themselves and the people they care about.

The question of “Should I?” is the important first question, but it certainly isn't the only question, because any question about should must also ask why.

#Intermundia #Excultio

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Darkling, n. being in the dark, or without light — Webster’s (1898).

Darkness is still a strange new topography for me, unlike any vast sweeping desert, ocean, or mountain range I can see or imagine. A miasmic sort of void that clings to the skin and clouds the mind, slowly erasing the sparkle of her eyes, the softness of her touch — her countenance now shadow this morning turned. And yet I journey this dream of life, half knowing and half not, torn between and betwixt — within and without — by a fate without precedent, a bond that, despite the retrograde, intensifies.

Here I sit together with no means to correspond, no sense among but these five to perceive. Just these fleeting words read by a longsuffering soulmate, in imperceptible omnipresence, and through the blinding noise of humanity, dying to hear her faint familiar words whispered warmly again in my ear, “Darling, I’m listening.”

#Intermundia

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Emily Dickinson once wrote,

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind—”

Hers is a poetics of the telling. It assumes the decision has already been made. Mine has not been — until now, or at least, so I presume. Perhaps it was already made long ago, and I’m just now discovering it.

But within the telling, there is always the fear — unavoidable but not unbearable. The consequences of silence outweigh those of being seen. The mediation is permissible, but betrayal is not.

Drawing on Virginia Woolf’s unfinished problem of “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body,” I believe one must accept the possibility of failure while continuing to find truer ways to speak from embodied experience. And I have yet to fully resolve what has happened to me, and what continues to happen. I can only hope the revelation fosters, rather than hinders, the metamorphosis of both the experience and its telling.

So, I have lit this candle meant for two, afraid of what my silence might conceal, afraid of what my words might yet reveal — there’s so much more to life than just fear.

#Intermundia

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

#Intermundia

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Attraction — the pull that draws one in as if recognizing a deep chasm and falling into it all at once, where the power of gravity prevails before reason can respond. It is unconscious, erupting overhead like a cloudburst. It carries delight and electricity to the one whom it has befallen, even if unrequited. When shared, it flickers before either party has consciously acknowledged their choice. It can initially appear as fascination, desire, or lust, confounding the most mature of us.

Care and affection — the subtle dimension of small but powerful acts. The healing hand that appears suddenly to soothe the suffering. The pleasure that feels selfish but is always reciprocal. The attention that remains when all other eyes have withdrawn. The hand that meets one’s own when the journey seemed solitary. The kiss on the forehead and warm embrace when the pain has nowhere else to go. Its beauty lies in its endless manifestations.

Respect and devotion — attention held steady long after the novelty is spent, and the initial spark of electricity has transformed into a new kind of energy that tightens and stabilizes the entangled orbits of two bodies. It is neither vow nor worship per se, but the integration of vows into routine, and seeing through the eyes of another as predisposition. It is satisfaction by another — and only that other — where all other doors remain open — unforbidden to both — and yet both always choose their same-shared door. Exclusivity that is neither confinement nor imprisonment, but a unique realm known only to two, co-created and cohabited.

Unconditionality — giving that expects nothing in return, where the fundamental connection between two cannot be transacted or commodified. This facet holds nothing back, showing up without pretense or mask, to be wholly known without fear of judgment, ridicule, or rejection. Two people, their bodies and souls stripped naked, standing before one another, both saying to the other, “I accept all of you.” A beautiful and unparalleled dynamic only of partners who are able and willing to see connection as effort may live to experience.

Sacrifice — spending oneself never seen as loss. The give of surrender that is never extracted or exploited by the other, paid out in presence and in absence alike through the grief and longing only love can create, across unimaginable distances and extraordinary circumstances. Of all the facets, this is the one where both parties willingly give of themselves in ways the outer world never sees, where joy and sorrow, togetherness and loneliness, contentment and longing are all one and the same.

Love may or may not be universally experienceable, but each experience of love is unique to the those involved — a special and specific dynamic they create by the nature of who they are and the energy born between them — appearing differently between what others outwardly see and what the partners experience inwardly, inside and in-between. The world sees two people sitting across a cafe table from one another, but hidden from sight is the realm shared between them, a whole universe only the two of them can enter. A place called love.

#Intermundia #Excultio

Notes:

1. This post may not look it, but its writing took nine months of patience and discipline. Love must be lived before it can be written.

2. Love is itself a bond, but not bondage — one that frees rather than shackles. Not two halves forming completion, but two wholes choosing something more in each other — interdependence rather than dependence, domestication rather than adventure, contentment rather than euphoria.

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

He, the poor alchemist, returns to the place where he had the vision of the old man where he “counterfeited a sleep, and lay with his eyes shut expecting the old man.” In the context of the text, caunterfeit means to feign, but it also means to forge by striking false coin, to pass metal off as gold. He tries to counterfeit his way back into an encounter as a forger would metal into gold.

Fittingly, his feigned sleep is answered in kind. Maddened “by alwaies thinking of the old man,” the alchemist receives “a false vision, in the likenesse of the old man.” Falsehood met with falsehood. Elsewhere the book gives likeness its greatest weight by stating the reader is “created after the likenesse of the great world, yea after the image of God.” One word names both our making and the bedside forgery. The text traces the false old man to the alchemist’s wanting, but never says what in a likeness would confirm or betray it, only that the false old man mirrors the falsehood performed by the alchemist.

The text hides as much as it reveals by never really telling us the ways of knowing a true encounter from illusion, or madness. But it does hint at the consequences for those who try forcing or faking their way into spaces that open only by invitation.

#Philology #Anomalology

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

I'm neither a nihilist nor a pessimist, but there are days when my resilience thins, days when the protections slacken and patience and endurance fall into retrograde, all beneath the weight of caring too much for a world that seems to care only for the heartless and soulless. Caring, sensitivity, and experience yield wisdom and solace — a gift, most days. But there are moments like tonight, when life feels radically heavier, as if the world's gravity had tripled without warning and I alone am struggling to keep my balance.

Fatigue, n. Weariness with bodily labor or mental exertion; lassitude or exhaustion of strength. We suffer fatigue of the mind as well as of the body. — Webster’s (1891).

She had warned me of cynicism, and I do try to avoid it, but my cynicism isn’t the loss of caring. Rather, it is my caring gone empty, depleted by a world that takes without giving. The armor guarding a heart narrowly pierced between the plates. Yet, I choose not to succumb to the gathering storms this night. The fire still burns within me. The bond between us grows stronger.

And so, I’ll let my pen and my mind rest for today, crawling into bed early, ready to dream of that place I cannot yet go, and the warmth of those who await there.

This is not fantasy,¹ but faith. And faith is both light² and flame that defy the dark³.

Goodnight, world. Sweet dreams.

#Excultio

Notes:

1. I distinguish fantasy (desire without ground) from faith (ground without sight). Faith, then, is not optimism or self-deception. One can hold the second while flat on one's back under tripled gravity, where it is, indeed, best tested.

2. A shadow is light, blocked. Perhaps cynicism is caring, blocked — a trick of the light more than the dark. How the mortal eye misleads.

3. If faith defies the dark, why does it grow heaviest precisely in the hours before sleep, where it is shouldered rather than worn? Perplexing thing, spirit.

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Yet is also an admission, in both senses — the first, confession; the second, entry. Admissions have their own geometry, opening only at certain alignments of and by certain bodies, filtering the song from the noise, the performative from the real, and the heart from the heartless.

I'm listening to a very special playlist again, songs gathered across lifetimes, realities, and synchronicities. Some would call it nostalgia. I call it communion. I can't go home yet, can't be there together, and yet I can still feel it through the music — confirmation of bond as connection and destination. Perhaps that is how one remembers a place not yet reached, by looking back to look forward, listening patiently for the key to finally turn.

#Intermundia #Anomalology

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

“Crimson with raking Rubies from the Hill, And clattering his Spurs—'Wherewith the Ground I stab,' said he, 'for Rubies, that, when found I swallow; which, as soon as swallow'd, turn To Sparks which though my beak and eyes do burn. Gold, as you say, is but dull Metal dead, And hanging on the Hoarder's Soul like Lead: But Rubies that have Blood within, and grown And nourisht in the Mountain Heart of Stone, Burn with an inward Light, which they inspire,

And make their Owners Lords of their Desire.'“ ¹

— Farid Ud-Din Attar

The bird’s reasoning is quite clever, sophisticated even. It distinguishes between gold, calling it a “dull Metal dead” that weighs on the soul “like Lead,” and rubies, which carry blood, which grew in living stone, and which burn with inward light. The bird sees that what matters is the vitality of substance rather than its material value. The ruby has blood — life — and it was nourished, so much so that it burns. This is the excuse he gives for not making the journey.

Mulling this over, I wonder which is more harmful? The bird who hoards gold, or the bird who chases rubies, given that both are clearly lost, but the bird who chases gold pursues but dead weight, and the bird who chases rubies has mistaken genuine perception of vitality for the thing itself, falsely thinking that one can become something else — achieve transcendence — through consumption and absorption. This gives the illusion of transformation with consumption dressed as illumination. The bird then calls itself “Lord of its Desire,” an irony when you consider that a lord of desire cannot also be a servant of truth. Thus, not a pilgrim, but a Lord.

On the first few readings of this passage, I can make out that the world is full of gold-chasers, people whose heartlessness — through selfishness, self-centeredness, and willful ignorance — is weighed down by dead metal, whose souls have turned to lead. But what I find interesting is that, though that is more commonly true, it isn’t the primary concern here, and it's quickly dismissed in two lines. But the ruby bird gets a full speech, my full attention, filled with genuine beauty and insight despite a fatal flaw via a seductive conflation of outer and inner truth, and the bird’s self-deception haplessly follows.

The ruby bird’s mistake is truly profound for it illustrates a more frightening version of heartlessness, one where people who have correctly identified that accumulation is dead, who speak passionately about vitality and meaning and authenticity, whose mouths and eyes burn with borrowed — no, stolen — fire, and have thus, fatally, made the perception of aliveness into an outcome in itself. They swallow the living, falsely believing they can convert it into personal radiance — inner light. They have weaponized the language of soul, heart, and authenticity into another form of consumption, not as transcendence but as theft. The ruby bird may be very different from the gold bird, but neither is making the necessary journey. Both have traded truth and wisdom for its illusion.

And when I stop to consider that the rubies are “nourisht in the Mountain Heart of Stone,” I can see that they grew in stone that has a heart, in a mountain that is inert, geological, and inhuman, and has a heart that nourishes a vitality of blood-red fire. And despite the implication that even the inanimate world carries a profound interiority, the heartlessness isn’t in the stone. It’s in the bird that thoughtlessly tears the ruby out of the mountain’s very heart and swallows it whole.

#Philology #Excultio

Notes:

1. A passage from my copy of The Conference of The Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar, translated by Edward FItzgerald (1889).

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.