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
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
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