Observations placeholder
Schelling, F W J - Clara or On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World – The effects of hypnagogia
Identifier
025659
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
NOTES
The minister in question is Lavater. In Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, in a series of letters discussing the transition from life to death, Lavater (1778, vol. 4, letter 41, 110-111) writes,
"This . . . condition seldom lasts more than a second, although countless moral and metaphysical ideas radiate through me with clarity one after the other. . . . I am- placed into new points of view from which I can see everything quite differently from usual and yet so incontrovertibly clear, so true and with such conviction and with such a view and feeling of truth and harmony. It is as if I were capable of thinking without pictures or signs . . . everything can be cognized immediately and in their true similarities and relationships . . . every usual way of existing seems to be only a dream, a slumber, a death in comparison”
A description of the experience
Clara or On Nature’s Connection to the Spirit World – F W J Schelling
A famous minister, whom we all know and whom we cannot deny has a gift for observation, Clara said, often recounts how, at the moment of falling into one's final slumber, an indescribable joy flows from one's entire being, and here the soul is in its finest moral and spiritual activity at the same time.
Then all one's mistakes pass before one in a most humiliating way and, by contrast, the purer one's heart is, the more blessed this mid condition between waking and sleeping is.
This condition is so infinitely different from anything that we call a dream that its clarity surpasses even the most vivid waking thoughts, and any normal mode of existing seems to be only a dream, a slumbering, or a death by comparison.
This condition is then transposed into a completely different point of view, into a kind of watching without pictures, wherein everything is nevertheless differentiated in detail and is completely without confusion. This condition, however, usually (as the minister says he knows from various signs, regardless of whether or not it appears to be so short to the person himself) lasts only a second.