There's a sense of the endless and time-stop in such moments, and a kind of unity of sensation, perception, and conception. Went there once via meditation. It wasn't easy. Never felt the need or compelled to go again though could see how it would be worth it. Also wound up there once doing the hardest work of my life, in a sawmill as a teen. I thought I knew hard work as an athlete - I did and I really didn't. After a day's work in the sawmill, stacking every bit of wood the mill cut each day, sometimes I would go home, eat, then sleep till work the next morning. More often I could stay up a bit, but sometimes I would come home and not even eat, just go to sleep till work the next morning. So rough it was wholly exhausting. And then one day, on break, we stood at the edge of the open mill during a deluge and the rain looked like liquid translucent bars and it was the most transporting experience in the world, eternal and singular and time stopped. Totally dry, felt like we were underwater looking through thick bars of water. When time stops and things keep moving, it transports. A novel, unique, all-absorbing moment, new experience. I couldn't believe how it kept going on and seemed to go nowhere. Transcendence, I guess, via a sensation, a transportation, and a recalculation. Ultra life. And then you go back to the screaming noise and bone-breaking grind of the mill, but you've seen at least one infinite value of life and it has impressed you to your core, and not only because it's such a unique - seeming - experience. You are touched, imprinted with an impossible vision that for a moment was real and of the highest value. I think there are traces and sometimes plenty of this in our daily interactions with life, with people, if we are sensitive to it. May even be the key to memory. And possibly a touchstone of religion, philosophy, convictions. Sometimes the infinite and eternal concentrates and sweeps aside the temporal and spatial order. Or seems to. Then it passes and there's the day to navigate.
I have been able to experience the Grail Castle many times in my life the way you have described it, I am an older man now so memories add up. Each occasion involved suffering then healing of the spirit through nature which only took a moment in time. I never equated those moments to the Grail Castle, even though I have read the book Parzival by Wolfram Von Eschenbach. But I think you may be correct in that metaphor. I really appreciate you sharing this insight.
Thanks for sharing this contemplative piece. Yes, to your question, it was landscape and also skyscape. Outdoor wandering and mountain climbing in the western US has provided me with a few such transcendent experiences. It is my firm conviction that nature provides these much more readily than our insulated man made world.
Yes! When these moments happen, one can see beyond the real to the true. And then, you seek them continually again and again. It’s as if things which might have lain hidden forever are now in clear sight, an opening beyond the tangible.
When I was 20 (a very long time ago), I was thrilled to be sent to the Libyan Desert to work on a seismic survey crew collecting geophysical data for the oil and gas industry. One afternoon, I jumped into a pickup truck and drove away from the camp site for some peace and found a very large dune which I drove/climbed to the top and sat to enjoy the view across the desert which was vast and seemingly endless. After a few moments, it felt as though my whole being was flooding out into that expanse of wilderness and sky, filling it and becoming one with the whole. So that is what we call the Holy Grail..thank you.
Loved this. Not sure if I've seen my grail castle yet! I do remember the most visceral encounter I had at a place, when I was at Lake Como and I just couldn't stop looking at the lake and giggling, with the sense that this was exactly what I'd wanted it to be like and how I always pictured travelling and yet it usually didn't hold up this way. I've never giggled before at something that wasn't actually funny but couldn't stop.
So interesting. Sometimes when I sit quietly just watching a calm sea and the horizon I can lose sense of the reality that is around me and briefly there is only me and the sea and the sky. Is this a kind of meditation? Or contemplation? Or just a moment of fleeting nothingness?
I’ve never heard that experience of oneness called the grail castle, but I Iike it. I’ve had it a few times, mostly out in nature but once early one morning on Sunset Blvd. Here’s one I wrote about from my first experience of the Grand Canyon. (You can disregard everything after the first part, which becomes an argument.) https://larryhogue.substack.com/p/do-we-need-to-re-enchant-the-world?r=1hfx9
This past spring, I went on a retreat in Big Sur, California, and without getting too into the weeds, it was draining both physically and emotionally (all very safe though). Weather led to us having to leave a day early, and after a good night's sleep in a hotel I started my drive home the next day. It was the most glorious spring weather, the skies blue, the hills bursting with the vivid green that comes and goes very quickly in this state. I chose country roads over highways as much as possible, reveling in the beauty of landscape, often moved to just shout with glee at the beauty of it all. I don't know if I experienced the profundity of a "grail castle" but I did experience joy and awe that I could not contain. I wonder if these moments come at crossroads where our strength as humans has been tested and drained, where we have come face to face with our limitations, and then the landscape (in all its dimensions) rolls out before us, glorious and eternal, sweeping us into its embrace.
I'm reading Lev Grossman's "The Bright Sword" right now, which is an Arthurian novel, and I'm sure this post will make me think about the Grail quest parts of the story in a very different way!
Nice piece, but I think a little too Romantic, even young. If you want to talk about landscape -- an interest of mine -- this is all too dramatic. Too scales fell from eyes. Not Zen enough. Landscapes often work much more subtly to ask existential, fundamental, questions. A lot of my photography, especially on the high plains, endeavors to grasp why this, why here, why anywhere? Which is not the same thing as for a moment I perceived the totality. But you cannot, should not, limit revelation to thunderclaps. Though thunderclaps are nice. Keep up the good work.
I once had a sort of reverse Grail Castle experience, while flying home after suffering a complete health collapse while working overseas. My plane was lifting off from Chicago's O'Hare airport and I was watching out the window, trying to distract myself from my extremely painful breathing. It was early winter, sunset, a snow storm was brewing over Lake Michigan, and I could see the wheeling layers of planes landing and taking off from the airport. It suddenly seemed as if the landscape and sky were part of a fantastical scene, a world threatened by dark forces. I describe the experience in the third person here: https://hollyaj.substack.com/p/dragons-a-testing-post
"Grail castle" experiences, I refer to them as mist-clearing moments: the fog thins, our thought-filled neuronal connections are stunned into stillness, and we hear the Creator whisper, "I am here. Seek me."
There's a sense of the endless and time-stop in such moments, and a kind of unity of sensation, perception, and conception. Went there once via meditation. It wasn't easy. Never felt the need or compelled to go again though could see how it would be worth it. Also wound up there once doing the hardest work of my life, in a sawmill as a teen. I thought I knew hard work as an athlete - I did and I really didn't. After a day's work in the sawmill, stacking every bit of wood the mill cut each day, sometimes I would go home, eat, then sleep till work the next morning. More often I could stay up a bit, but sometimes I would come home and not even eat, just go to sleep till work the next morning. So rough it was wholly exhausting. And then one day, on break, we stood at the edge of the open mill during a deluge and the rain looked like liquid translucent bars and it was the most transporting experience in the world, eternal and singular and time stopped. Totally dry, felt like we were underwater looking through thick bars of water. When time stops and things keep moving, it transports. A novel, unique, all-absorbing moment, new experience. I couldn't believe how it kept going on and seemed to go nowhere. Transcendence, I guess, via a sensation, a transportation, and a recalculation. Ultra life. And then you go back to the screaming noise and bone-breaking grind of the mill, but you've seen at least one infinite value of life and it has impressed you to your core, and not only because it's such a unique - seeming - experience. You are touched, imprinted with an impossible vision that for a moment was real and of the highest value. I think there are traces and sometimes plenty of this in our daily interactions with life, with people, if we are sensitive to it. May even be the key to memory. And possibly a touchstone of religion, philosophy, convictions. Sometimes the infinite and eternal concentrates and sweeps aside the temporal and spatial order. Or seems to. Then it passes and there's the day to navigate.
“And then it passes and you have a day to navigate.” Funny how the infinite and the mundane seem so close to one another
I have been able to experience the Grail Castle many times in my life the way you have described it, I am an older man now so memories add up. Each occasion involved suffering then healing of the spirit through nature which only took a moment in time. I never equated those moments to the Grail Castle, even though I have read the book Parzival by Wolfram Von Eschenbach. But I think you may be correct in that metaphor. I really appreciate you sharing this insight.
Thanks for sharing this contemplative piece. Yes, to your question, it was landscape and also skyscape. Outdoor wandering and mountain climbing in the western US has provided me with a few such transcendent experiences. It is my firm conviction that nature provides these much more readily than our insulated man made world.
Yes! When these moments happen, one can see beyond the real to the true. And then, you seek them continually again and again. It’s as if things which might have lain hidden forever are now in clear sight, an opening beyond the tangible.
When I was 20 (a very long time ago), I was thrilled to be sent to the Libyan Desert to work on a seismic survey crew collecting geophysical data for the oil and gas industry. One afternoon, I jumped into a pickup truck and drove away from the camp site for some peace and found a very large dune which I drove/climbed to the top and sat to enjoy the view across the desert which was vast and seemingly endless. After a few moments, it felt as though my whole being was flooding out into that expanse of wilderness and sky, filling it and becoming one with the whole. So that is what we call the Holy Grail..thank you.
That’s a great description of the feeling. Josiah Royce described almost exactly that when he encountered the Sierra Nevada.
Lovely story
Loved this. Not sure if I've seen my grail castle yet! I do remember the most visceral encounter I had at a place, when I was at Lake Como and I just couldn't stop looking at the lake and giggling, with the sense that this was exactly what I'd wanted it to be like and how I always pictured travelling and yet it usually didn't hold up this way. I've never giggled before at something that wasn't actually funny but couldn't stop.
So interesting. Sometimes when I sit quietly just watching a calm sea and the horizon I can lose sense of the reality that is around me and briefly there is only me and the sea and the sky. Is this a kind of meditation? Or contemplation? Or just a moment of fleeting nothingness?
All of the above, I think.
You are a Grail Castle..I read it in your words^^
The Grail Castle. Transcendence. Nirvana. Reality beyond delusion. Thanks!
Absolutely resonant. It is the Joy that CS Lewis wrote of, I believe. I think it can be recovered by outward attention, rather than inner.
Or rather, inner attention is a means, and the end is outer.
I’ve never heard that experience of oneness called the grail castle, but I Iike it. I’ve had it a few times, mostly out in nature but once early one morning on Sunset Blvd. Here’s one I wrote about from my first experience of the Grand Canyon. (You can disregard everything after the first part, which becomes an argument.) https://larryhogue.substack.com/p/do-we-need-to-re-enchant-the-world?r=1hfx9
This past spring, I went on a retreat in Big Sur, California, and without getting too into the weeds, it was draining both physically and emotionally (all very safe though). Weather led to us having to leave a day early, and after a good night's sleep in a hotel I started my drive home the next day. It was the most glorious spring weather, the skies blue, the hills bursting with the vivid green that comes and goes very quickly in this state. I chose country roads over highways as much as possible, reveling in the beauty of landscape, often moved to just shout with glee at the beauty of it all. I don't know if I experienced the profundity of a "grail castle" but I did experience joy and awe that I could not contain. I wonder if these moments come at crossroads where our strength as humans has been tested and drained, where we have come face to face with our limitations, and then the landscape (in all its dimensions) rolls out before us, glorious and eternal, sweeping us into its embrace.
I'm reading Lev Grossman's "The Bright Sword" right now, which is an Arthurian novel, and I'm sure this post will make me think about the Grail quest parts of the story in a very different way!
That’s lovely, and sounds like it does count, but I guess only you can know that.
We are here to (re)learn to see.
Nice piece, but I think a little too Romantic, even young. If you want to talk about landscape -- an interest of mine -- this is all too dramatic. Too scales fell from eyes. Not Zen enough. Landscapes often work much more subtly to ask existential, fundamental, questions. A lot of my photography, especially on the high plains, endeavors to grasp why this, why here, why anywhere? Which is not the same thing as for a moment I perceived the totality. But you cannot, should not, limit revelation to thunderclaps. Though thunderclaps are nice. Keep up the good work.
I once had a sort of reverse Grail Castle experience, while flying home after suffering a complete health collapse while working overseas. My plane was lifting off from Chicago's O'Hare airport and I was watching out the window, trying to distract myself from my extremely painful breathing. It was early winter, sunset, a snow storm was brewing over Lake Michigan, and I could see the wheeling layers of planes landing and taking off from the airport. It suddenly seemed as if the landscape and sky were part of a fantastical scene, a world threatened by dark forces. I describe the experience in the third person here: https://hollyaj.substack.com/p/dragons-a-testing-post
"Grail castle" experiences, I refer to them as mist-clearing moments: the fog thins, our thought-filled neuronal connections are stunned into stillness, and we hear the Creator whisper, "I am here. Seek me."