Have you had a peak experience? Peak experiences have been described by many authors, for example, Kendra Cherry in Verywellmind.com (2023).
Fulfillment: Peak experiences generate positive emotions and are intreinsically rewarding.
Significance: Peak experiences lead to an increase in personal awareness and understanding and can serve as a turning point in a person’s life.
Spiritual: During a peak experience, people feel one with the world and often experience a sense of losing track of time
This feeling of being one with the world, along with the sense of timelessness, was also described by the science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, back in 1961, in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which described a person born and raised on Mars, where he learned to ‘grok’ or understand things in a different way from Earthlings. Part of his description of grokking was to “understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you.”
So Sixties people like myself went around trying to grok things. A common expression, instead of ‘Do you understand?”, was “You grok?” Are you old enough to remember those days?
A lot of people, myself included, have had peak experiences at Angkor Wat, that marvelous temple rising out of the jungle. That combination allows the viewer to merge (i.e. grok) with nature (the forest) and human spirituality (the temples) at the same time.
I went there shortly after the coup d’état in 1997, when Angkor was closed to tourists. I scored a pass from a friend who had been working there, so I had the entire park virtually to myself. I even went swimming in the lake in front of the main temple at sunset. That was a peak experience.
On another occasion, I simply walked back into the forest surrounding Angkor Wat and came across a small, moss-covered temple, where I sat for… hours(?) as I lost track of time feeling at one with the forest, the birds singing, and the ancient history of the temple.
Many tourists experience the magic of the Angkor temples, and assume that the feeling comes from the temples. But maybe not. Just maybe the place itself was magical, and the Khmers recognized this and built the temples there. New-Agers will recognize this idea from the books of James Redfield, like The Celestine Prophecy (1993). There are simply places of magical spiritual energy that we must train ourselves to locate.
I experienced this phenomenon when visiting the ruins of Carthage in Tunisia in the early morning. I felt a wave of history that gave me a peak experience there. But I wonder whether my feelings would have been any different if I had not known about the historical significance of Carthage. Was the site magical in and of itself?
Carlos Casteneda, another Sixties favorite, was into these sorts of ideas. In one of his books, Don Juan instructs the novitiate to ‘find’ his spot in a room, that is, the place with the magical energy that is in tune with the person’s own wavelengths.
Another good description of the phenomenon is that of Vincent Guerry, a French monk in the Ivory Coast in the 1960s and 70s, who wrote La Vie Quotidienne dans un Village Baoulé. Guerry described the Baoulé tribe of central Ivory Coast as ‘knowing’ things in a different way from Westerners. It could almost be a definition of grokking. The Baoulé ‘know’ something by entering into its spirit. That’s just the opposite of Western analytical knowledge, whereby to know something is to describe from outside its color, shape, and external properties. You might say that the Baoulé are more right-brained than the left-brained Westerners.
Small wonder that ‘primitive’ or animist societies worship the spirit in each living thing, or even non-living things. This is an art that we moderns have lost. That is also why I have been attracted to animist societies in Africa or Papua New Guinea. I feel they have a way of thinking that they can teach me.
I used to criticize the missionaries with whom I worked in Africa, because they were there to ‘teach’ their wonderful knowledge to the benighted heathens who lived in spiritual darkness. The missionaries had nothing to learn from the Africans because they had all the answers. [I admit that I knew a few missionaries who got the hint that these primitives might have something to teach them.]
Sadly, grokking is out of fashion these days. However, the poet William Wordsworth understood this dual way of thinking way back in 1807, when he wrote:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
.… Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan in a creed outworn….