The Sense of the Ineffable

I lie on the seashore, the sparkling flood blue-shimmering in my dreamy eyes; light breezes flutter in the distance; the thud of the waves, charging and breaking over in foam, beats thrillingly and drowsily upon the shore---or upon the ear? I cannot tell. The far and the near become blurred into one; outside and inside merge into one another. Nearer and nearer, friendlier, like a homecoming, sounds the thud of the waves; now, like a thundering pulse, they beat in my head, now they beat over my soul, wrapping it round, consuming it, while at the same time my soul floats out of me as a blue waste of waters. Outside and inside are one. The whole symphony of sensations fades away into one tone, all senses become one sense, which is one with feeling; the world expires in the soul and the soul dissolves in the world....



Perception is a breaking apart, a forming, a separating, and then again a joining together. The unity of the spiritual and the sensual, of the subject and the object, is experienced in feeling. The divisiveness of perception is broken by the welling up, even the overflowing, of feeling. Whoever eats of the tree of perception divorces himself from the paradise of feeling.



                                                                                      --Karl Joel