Reflection

The greater and more profound the experience, the more the Subject will not only be compelled to memorialize but later reflect upon his own memorialization; reflection that, according to the height of emotional grandeur that the underlying experience initially evoked, will – as the distance between experience and reflection lengthens – eventually give way to conceptualization, abstraction, and “universality”, those latter stages that will, in the end, resemble only a translucent, false residue of the great experience and – emotionally and linguistically removed as it is from its source – will thereafter actually bar the original Subject who endured the feeling in the first place from ever emotionally reconnecting to its genesis and the wellspring of its beginning.

…

The more obscure, indecipherable, inexplicable, groundless, and “cryptic” the language one employs to express an original experience, the more general, common, and undistinguished the experience not necessarily was but now most certainly is {1} and the more rapidly it will devolve into an abstraction, unfit for personal and even public use; “generality” which is seldom the fault of the experience – existentially neutral as all experiences are – but rather the fault of the undisciplined, unprincipled, unhealthy and imbalanced bodily, mental, emotional, linguistic, and spiritual fitness of the Subject who believed he felt it; fitness or else, “one’s capacity to habitually sacrifice and forego the immediate needs and incessant wants of the body, mind, will, and emotion for the potentiality of some future transcendence”, which is the greatest determinant of whether an experience, however comparatively mundane or tremendous, will be able to attain the commensurate level of meaning, purpose, and life-orienting significance that all experience intends and longs to fulfill in man, if intend and long they even can.

As has been stated elsewhere by this pen, comparatively benign experiences had by those who, on the one hand, possess a particularly high degree of spiritual, emotional, and physical fitness (often demonstrated by one’s ability to endure physical pain, ailment, disease, and injury) and, on the other, are also capable of communicating their experiences in a manner that most individuals cannot, will always be far more profound, insightful, beautiful and “true” than those potentially monumental experiences had by those who are unfit, inexact, emotionally one-dimensional and therefore incapable of communicating profundity.

{1} Upon reflection, the Writer now doubts the veracity of this statement.