Log24

Barbara Ehrenreich in today's online New York Times :

"…in 1959… I stepped out alone, walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world— the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings— suddenly flame into life.

There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with 'the All,' as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of."

Ehrenreich mentions a psychiatrists' paper, "The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered," that was published on September 1, 2012.

See also Log24 posts of September 1 and September 2, 2012.

"May you be in heaven a full half-hour
before the devil knows you're dead ."

Related material:
Yesterday's posts of 12 PM and 8 PM,
and the life of Philip Seymour Hoffman.