Excerpt from The Two and the One

Mircea Eliade

Here now is an account of a contemporary experience recorded by W.L. Wilmhurst, author of Contemplations. It occurred to him in a village church during the singing of the Te Deum. "I caught sight," he writes, "in the aisle at my side, of what resembled bluish smoke issuing from the chinks of the stone floor. Looking more intently, I saw it was not smoke, but something finer, more tenuous - a soft, impalpable, self-luminous haze of violet colour, unlike any physical vapour. Thinking I experienced some momentary optical defect or delusion, I turned my gaze farther along the aisle, but there too the same delicate haze was present... I perceived the wonderful fact that it extended farther than the walls and roof of the building and was not confined by them. Through these I now could look and could see the landscape beyond... I saw from all parts of my being simultaneously, not from my eyes only. Yet for all this intensified perceptive power there was as yet no loss of touch with my physical surroundings, no suspension of my faculties of sense... I felt happiness and peace -beyond words. Upon the instant the luminous blue haze engulfing me and all around me became transformed into golden glory, into light untellable... The golden light of which the violet light seemed now to have been as the veil or outer fringe, welled forth from a central immense globe of brilliancy... But the most wonderful thing was that these shafts and waves of light, that vast expanse of photosphere, and even the great central globe itself, were crowded to solidarity with the forms of living creatures... a single coherent organism filling all space and place, yet composed of an infinitude of individual existences... I saw moreover that these things were present in teeming myriads in the church I stood in; that they were intermingled with and were passing unobstructedly through both myself and all my fellow-worshippers... The heavenly hosts drifted through the human congregation as wind passes through a grove of trees."

... This vision was followed by another in which everything of time and place and form vanished from the consciousness and only "the ineffable eternal things" remained. "My consciousness," he wrote, "leapt to its utmost limit, and passed into the region of the formless and uncreated." Then he was no longer conscious of the physical world around him. But this rapture lasted only a few seconds, for when he came back to himself the Te Deum had not concluded. The rapidity of the change from one mode of vision to another, from the perception of physical light to that of a pure, transcendent world beyond Time and Space, is most remarkable. It is like a rapid mystical initiation running at full speed.

[Mircea Eliade (J.M. Cohen, trans.). The Two and the One. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965 (orig. France, 1962). p.70-71.]