The God Experience

Our first experience, remarkably enough, is that of loss.

A moment before, we were everything, undifferentiated, indivisibly part of some kind of being - only to be pressed into birth.

Henceforth a tiny residue of the whole must strive to avoid contracting into even less and less, must stand up to a world which rises before it with ever-increasing substantiality, a world into which it has fallen, from universal fullness, as into a deprivating void.


We feel that earlier state as something at odds with the present.

What we will later refer to as our first "memory" consists simultaneously of shocked disappointment at the loss of that state of being, and a residual awareness that it should still exist.

- Lou Andreas-Salome
from Looking Back

Human life - indeed
all life - is poetry.
It's we who live it,
unconsciously, day by day,
like scenes in a play,
yet in its inviolable wholeness
it lives us,
it composes us.
This is something far different
from the old cliche "Turn
your life into a work of art";
we are works of art -
but we are not the artist.

- Lou Andreas-Salome

I was far away, where the angels are,
On high, where the light dissolves to nothingness-
But God darkens deeply.

Then angels are the final breeze
at his his very top;
to them it seems a dream
to flow through his branches.
There they trust in light
more than in God's darker power,
and Lucifer has fled
to join their company.

He is the prince in the land of light,
and his forehead is raised
so sharply against nothingness' great gleam,
that his face is burned,
and he must beg for darkness.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
from the Book of Hours

A Prayer to Life

Indeed, I love you life, as friend
Loves friend, in all your mystery-
Whether I wept or laughed again,
Whether you brought me joy or pain.

I love you even for the harm you do;
And if you must destroy me,
I'll tear myself away from you
As I would leave a friend.

I embrace you with all my might!
Let your flames set me on fire,
And in the glow of that last fight
I will explore your riddle's depths.

To be for centuries! to live!
Wrap your arms about me once again:
If you have no more joy to give me-
At least you still grant pain.

- Lou Andreas-Salome