"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the emotion of the mystical. It is the power of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in awe is as good as dead. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty … this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all true religiousness."
– Albert Einstein
The Flash, The Vibe & The Rush
"Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his wonderful light."
–Peter 2.9
It seems this generation felt the need to add a few words to the English language, words that dealt with the central experiences of the generation. Words like flash, suss, vibe and rush.
Put it this way: a flash is that ripple of understanding that sometimes shoots like quicksilver across your brain, as you grasp some long hidden secret. Einstein must have flashed on relativity, there must have been a moment when it first dawned on him. He once remarked that the main elements in his thought were "certain signs and more or less clear images, visual and sometimes muscular …" He is describing flashes.
Then again, Einstein must have mulled over the consequences of that first vision, and grokked it in fullness. Grokking is a matter of completely tasting, savouring and accepting an individual or a situation. The word was coined by Robert Heinlein for his book Stranger in a Strange Land. Einstein must have grokked, must have soaked up the implications of relativity, long before he spelled out his understanding in the language of mathematics. Einstein describes his relationship with the cosmos as "a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law." Rapturous amazement is a reasonably accurate translation into early twentieth century idiom of grokking.
So now Einstein has grokked the universe, has been rapturously amazed by it. What does he do next? He susses the whole thing out. He makes sure he understands every last detail. When he has it sussed, when he has the whole thing completely at his fingertips, he lays his suss on people. He publishes. The General and Special Theories of Relativity.
And then there's the vibe. The way he went about the whole thing. The feeling. How was his violin playing, while he was struggling with the details of Special Relativity? Did he play like a man possessed, stumbling over his notes in his eagerness to get to the end of everything? Or was he as calm as a Buddha, drawing sweet harmonies out of the air to delight his guests, so that no one.so much as suspected he had ever had a thought in his life? How was Einstein? Was he feeling nervous and overwrought, or happy and relaxed? What was his vibe? (Actually, Einstein's vibe was one of the best.)
The last word on our list is the rush. Everyone must have experienced a rush of excitement at Hanukkah or Christmas, opening the perfect pre sent. A rush is a swift boost to the spirit, a warm message from the heart to the crown of the head. You go out in your Volkswagen in carpet slippers to take a friend home one night in a storm. The car breaks down on the way back, and you have to walk five miles home in the snow. When you get home, you draw yourself a hot bath, and climb into it gingerly, toe first. When the warmth of that bath reaches you, and you shiver off the cold of that long walk in carpet slippers, it's what's known in Yiddish as a mechaieh. It's a rush.
What do I mean to say? What's so special about these words? Only that they all deal with inner experience, with warm feelings and clear understandings. Warm feelings and clear understandings are what this generation is all about. And that leads me to the clearest suss of all. Guru Maharaj Ji teaches us to meditate on the perfect vibe that's in back of all creation.
Do you read me? Over and out.
"The only duty and destiny we acknowledge was that each one of us should become so completely himself, so utterly faithful to the active seed of nature within us … that the unknown future should find us prepared and ready for whatever it might bring forth."
– Hermann Hesse
"Will you seek afar off? You will come back at last to things best known to you, finding happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but in this place – not for another hour, but this hour."
– Walt Whitman
The human heart cries out for help; the human soul implores us for deliverance; but we do not heed their cries, for we neither hear nor understand. But the man who hears and understands we call mad, and flee from him."
– Kahlil Gibran
We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell
– Thoreau
