As I stood under and gazed upon the inky expanse of Saharan night sky speckled with the glitter of a stellar diamantine raiment, an immense upwelling of awe overcame me. The vast horizon of nameless rolling and shadowy dunes extended around us save for the faint flickering flames of torches some distance from our camp.
I was not alone. We were three.
Though we had only briefly ventured a few minutes walk from our campfire, it felt like we had crossed a threshold of sorts, some kind of portal into mysterious and sacred territory.
As we paused for a moment, one friend recited a line from a ritual we both knew:
"Show they star splendor, O Nuit / Bid me within thy house to dwell."
Nuit is a reference to the primordial Egyptian goddess of the night sky, depicted as a woman arching across the dome of the sky in a pose resembling yoga’s downward-facing dog.
Upon hearing that line, the third among us invited us two to perform the complete ritual which follows the course of the sun and divides the day into four quarters -- sunrise, noon, sunset and midnight. It is an exercise in mindfully orienting oneself to space and time. On an aside, I appreciated its similarity to the Islamic practice of praying five times a day.
Though it was well before midnight, it may as well have been. We were firmly in the nocturnal domain.
In this particular setting, at this particular moment, the words felt more literal than merely figurative.
Whether it was coincidence or not, shortly after concluding our invocation, an intersubjective event transpired.
I can only describe it as the precipitation of mystical experience.
And while each of us was enjoying our own, we seemed to be experiencing it together.
I felt a surge of vitality course up and through my right leg, into my hips and abdomen, up into my chest and heart, ascending my neck and into and out of my head.
I describe it as a paradoxically cool warmth tingling and suffusing different parts of my body. To use subtle anatomical terms, it felt like different chakras and meridians were being activated intermittently, like a somatically blinking Christmas tree.
I noticed my friends were deep in their own experience: one part of my mind was honored to witness and share this experience while another expressed slight concern.
Were we okay? I checked in with them and they reassured me.
I glanced back towards the camp and its faint orange flickers that represented the known, the safe and the familiar. Without them, we were lost.
It seemed interminably distant.
Standing was difficult as my legs quivered with energy. It felt as though my center of gravity had transposed up a few energy centers and my visual field seemingly had a slightly violet tinge. My interior experience was remarkably quiet, still and spacious, as though it had assumed the very qualities of the desert.
Walking was deliberate and effortful, like a newborn foal.
After some reflection, I inquired why I needed to continue standing at all?
So I knelt in the sand and meditated for a while. For whatever reason unbeknownst to me, I had the presence of mind to enact a sequence of spiritual practices.
The purity of the nocturnal spacious silence evoked a sublime peace as deep as the sky was wide.
As I recall an observation I made during this pilgrimage to Egypt, "Awe is the currency of the sacred."
I became acutely aware of all the tension I held in my physical body.
It became intuitively obvious to me how I needed to shift my posture, how I held so much unnecessary tension in my right neck and shoulder.
It was as though my physical body was suspended in an energetic cocoon, and the salience of this envelopment predominated my awareness.
Some time later, I found myself back at camp sitting around the fire, staring into the hypnotizing dance of its lurid amber, orange and yellow light. As I let go even further, an even more profound stillness pervaded my bodymind.
And then, it felt as though my persona took a backseat while some otherworldly presence emerged to the foreground in this trance-like state.
It is difficult to describe, though the sheer absence of any trace of neurotic anxieties, worries or doubts was relieving beyond compare. An abiding confidence in the simple suchness of existing presided.
There was an invitation to dialogue with the others present. Words came from elsewhere that punctuated and constellated the utter silent backdrop of experience, akin to the celestial relations among the stars and night sky.
The moment came, stayed a while, and departed with a subtle shift back to my persona, though a decidedly non-ordinary state of consciousness lingered on.
And so it was.
Beautiful words, brings my right back but from a different perspective than my own, which widens the experience further inside me.
"Why do humans move so fast?" :p I am currently working through this question as I slow down in the Philippines.
I really appreciate "awe is the currency of the sacred." I will continue to build my wealth with daily awe and celebration.
<3 <3 <3 !