Deep Inner Calm

During my spiritual awakening years ago, I regularly experienced something very profound. Every night after work, I got into my car, and put the sound track of the TV series “Cosmos” into the player. Being in the late fall, it was dark enough for the street lights to be on. As I settled into the car seat and listened to the wonderful music of “Cosmos,” a deep and intense calm came over me. It was like nothing I ever experienced before.

I drove home, and during the half hour the drive took, I experienced a state of profound and deep, even mysterious peace. When I reached home, I resume my regular life, and the extreme sense of peace melted away. I experienced this peace every work-evening for weeks. These happenings occurred during a period when my creativity was surging.

I did not experience this deep sensation again until last year. One evening it welled up in me spontaneously while driving home. Again after that experience, my creativity in everything was stronger than normal.

Recently, I found something that reminded me of these happenings in an article published in 1910 by Carry Farmer. He described what it was to leave the “little self” and experience “spirit.” After looking inward through contemplation, he says:

“The Union of spirit is indescribable; it is not a state of excitement, of religious frenzy, or enthusiasm; but a feeling of intense calm; of joy, which no pleasure of the senses can give, or even be compared with; a feeling of security, a something quite as real as eating and drinking.”

I suspect that my experience is what in Christian tradition is called “the peace that passes understanding.”

Quote from Woodhead and Heelas 2000.

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