Chapter 1: A Walk on a Frigid Day

On a chilly January afternoon, I stepped off the sidewalk and onto the street, near the harbor where gulls circled above. The sky was a striking blue, typical of January—sharp and bright, reminiscent of deep ice adorned with wisps of cirrus clouds. As I ambled down a road lined with pruned trees, an unfamiliar yet ordinary path, the low winter sunlight illuminated the terraced houses and glinted off parked cars. In that moment, a profound realization struck me.

What transpired next, akin to a mystical experience, eludes description. It felt as if I suddenly recalled countless lifetimes emanating from those very houses. This wasn’t mere memory; it was nostalgia—an overwhelming, aching love for something both familiar and distant. It was like returning to a cherished place I had long been away from, a moment of déjà vu so exquisite that no real experience could encapsulate it.

It washed over me like the northern lights, but just as quickly, it vanished as someone brushed past me and a car drove by. I was merely standing on an ordinary street on an ordinary day, returning to my parked car, left with a fleeting moment that felt like a dying ember.

Such moments have punctuated my life, and I regard them as some of the most significant experiences I’ve encountered. They serve as orientation points—reminders that reality possesses an inherent strangeness and beauty, a glory that diminishes amid the mundane. The dullness of everyday facts obscures this beauty, and reductionist explanations fail to account for it. Nevertheless, it exists.

The single term I have found that encapsulates such experiences is longing. I’ve discovered I am not alone in my contemplation of this feeling. This sense of longing inspired the romantic poet William Wordsworth’s "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." For Wordsworth, this yearning harkened back to childhood and suggested a hint of pre-existence, a notion that traces of glory accompany our birth and fade as we age:

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy.”

C.S. Lewis also resonated deeply with this notion of longing, referring to it as “joy.” He viewed these transcendent moments of desire as pivotal to his conversion to Christianity. In his autobiography "Surprised by Joy," he explored this theme further in an essay titled "The Weight of Glory," where he connected Wordsworth’s reflections on childhood longing:

“Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”

Lewis’s essay remains one of the most significant pieces I have encountered. I first read it during my university years, and it felt like keys I had been fumbling with finally turning smoothly in locks, opening doors to deeper understanding. C.S. Lewis, drawing on Platonic ideas while infusing them with his Christian perspective, highlighted that our experiences often defy the explanations offered by conventional philosophies:

“Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies of progress or creative evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is.”

Chapter 2: The Nature of Consciousness

Inadequate explanations often arise from evolutionary perspectives that suggest our yearning for transcendence is merely a byproduct of survival instincts. While science has its place, it cannot fully grasp consciousness or its contents. Those who earnestly reflect on their experiences recognize that such explanations fall short. Evolution may dismiss poetry, art, and music as mere cultural mechanisms, but those who genuinely engage with these forms of expression know they stem from a deeper beauty inherent in reality itself.

As poet Shelley articulated in his "Defence of Poetry":

“Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody…”

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose also noted the peculiar nature of consciousness. While studying at Oxford, he realized that consciousness transcends computation because it embodies understanding. He shared this epiphany during lectures:

“From Steen’s lectures it made it completely clear... If you trust the means of proof then you can transcend them. Now what’s going on there? You see, it means our understanding enables us to go beyond any rules of proof that you trust…what we do when we consciously understand something is not computational.”

While we remain far from comprehending this understanding, it’s crucial to recognize that longing itself may represent a form of understanding—a knowledge of the transcendent that is so ingrained in us that we often overlook or deny it. Those who delve deeply into this longing transcend the materialistic belief that “this is all there is.” This pursuit of understanding echoes in Plato’s theory of ideas and Wordsworth’s lines:

“Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”