Today, during my daily “recreational” walk, I passed through the food plaza at a local dining/retail center. A small group of musicians were embellishing the moment with languorous country music, while folks were absorbing the atmosphere as they dined at outdoor tables around a softly splashing fountain. Some were my neighbors; and others were strangers sharing the social ambience. And so did I, just passing through.

Sometimes, the mere act of making eye contact with an absolute stranger can breed an indefinite connection. But my walkthrough was not a personal, one-to-one, encounter. Instead, I felt drawn into a shared moment, more a collective than a personal experience. Now there are two things I want to say about this experience. First, in that moment I was very much aware of the “now.” Life, after all, is nothing more than an accumulation of “nows.” To not recognize that fact is to miss the “living” part of living. Secondly, my awareness of the moment was shared, though unspoken and perhaps even unspeakable. What I mean by “unspeakable” is the inability of words to adequately describe a feeling. I can tell you about the incident of my walking through the food plaza, but when you connect with the feeling I’m trying to convey, you recreate it in your imagination after your own fashion. But you can’t truly explain it either, even though you “know” what I’m feeling.

Now if you’ll bear with me, I want to make a leap of generalization. Life, at least as I have experienced it, is all about this collective awareness. As I left the food plaza, the buoyancy of my step was light; my spirit and sense of well-being rose within me; and the realization of my connection with others hit me like an epiphany. Intuitions of this sort are unpredictable: a walk in the forest can suddenly make you feel alive, as can the act of holding your infant in your arms. But sharing a moment in awareness with fellow human beings is different in degree, if not in kind. It can be, and sometimes is, an excursion into the collective unconscious—that enveloping sea out of which all insight seems to rise. In this sense, the term “unconscious” is a misnomer, as any artist or mystic will attest when they describe the source of their insight or intuition. Somehow, you feel that intangible connection with eternity that even the sting of your personal mortality can’t diminish. You are uplifted into a different plane of existence where sheer awareness overwhelms any content of thought. Now, a behavioral scientist would probably scoff at my exuberance and point out the effect of endorphins on my emotional state. But I suspect that we are seeing things from opposite sides of the equation. Do chemicals produce these feeling states, or do these feeling states trigger the chemical reaction in our bodies? I think you can read the equation from right-to-left, left-to-right, or as simultaneous interactions of the mind/body. The incident I’m describing was of the latter type. For the truly contemplative, I suspect, the intuition always initiates the more general awareness and its corresponding feeling state.

If you think my leap has gone too far, then weigh it in terms of our personal mortality. “In that sleep of death, what dreams may come,” asked Hamlet? Normal sleep is still a state of consciousness, though we are generally not aware of it. (A waking dream-state is an exception—often experienced in the moment between deep sleep and full wakefulness.) But, to answer the question, there are no dreams after death. We are mortal. And yet in the “now,” we can feel part of something greater than our very limited time on this planet would seem to allow. We can transcend the moment. For us mortals the “now” is our threshold to eternity.