One of the most difficult bits of existence for human beings to communicate are epiphanies. In general, it can be pretty tough to explain any experience, but the sudden realization of truth is just that little bit tougher.
It’s no mystery why that should be, really. Epiphanies often come upon a person in a peculiar fashion, where in the space of a moment they completely understand that something or other is absolutely true, without necessarily having any evidence to back it up. It can be a violent, disorienting, side-swipe of emotion. These are things that can not be summed up in words, though many try.
When I was a youngster, I was taken to a motivational seminar. The nice lady who was giving the talk was doing pretty well, if failing somewhat to really convince the teenagers in the audience that their actions would have long term consequences; at least she was fun to listen to, not judgementmental or fear-mongering or anything like that. But, in the midst of describing a near-death experience that changed her life, she paused, and then parenthetically let us know that her next sentence would probably be most important thing that anyone would ever tell us, ever. Which was this:
And then, silence. While she let that sink in to our young minds. While, actually, what we were doing was looking at our neighbors and subtly shrugging our shoulders. We didn’t laugh, didn’t dander up, or do anything more. We, as an audience, shared a collective “Oh…..kay?” That was all. And then the speaker finished her story.
Afterward, after several hours, I heard a lot of people having a laugh over the phrase “everything is everything else”, which didn’t seem fair. It was obviously a big deal to the speaker, a defining point in her existence. Of course we didn’t understand her personal experiences. But to laugh at them seemed cruel. (I didn’t realize, at the time, that laughter is a way to warn people that they’re drifting out of social normalcy.)
Then again, I was busy wending my own way out of fundamentalism, and I was becoming unwilling to denigrate other people’s fantastic experiences. As one who’d believed that I had been, once or twice, nudged lightly by God myself, I knew that if one of us were risible, so the both of us would be.
Which is not to say that I got it, of course. I was just as bemused as my cohorts by the speaker’s Important Sentence.
In a way, it’s the same sort of thing that allows one person to be deeply moved by a piece of music or a painting or a poem that his or her friends think is ridiculous, or at least merely boring. (For example, there are a lot of closet ABBA fans out there.) Beyond art and entertainment, even; it’s possible to feel this way about people, as well. How many times have there been folks whose two best friends can’t stand each other?
It is probably a mistake, then, to share an epiphany. We live in times that are passionately unsympathetic. Not only are you not allowed to complain, or flaunt your undeserved affluence; it would be unwise to attempt to explain your sudden understanding of universal truth.
That’s how it goes, I’m afraid. Because, unfortunately, without all the emotional folderol that accompanies an epiphany, all you’ve got is words, and epiphanies always sound trite when reduced down to that. It doesn’t help that, often, these things get turned into pithy catch-phrases like those you could find in any money-grubbing self-help manual. Unless you’re willing to freak out your victims with drugs, psychedelic music, and a skillfully wielded vibrator, don’t expect their mental states to match your own.
On the other hand, some people are quite good at finding those who might be willing to listen to the life-shaking stories of their own epiphanic experiences. We still have cults, don’t we?
