Two Moments that Don’t Fit into My Rational/Scientific Worldview

This piece appeared as an op/ed in the newspapers in 2023.

************************
In general, I believe in the world as science presents it. I recognize a spiritual dimension to human affairs, but I don’t generally believe in things like angels and devils, or in people seeing into the future or communicating with the dead.

But I’ve had some experiences that seemed quite clearly to point to some sort of reality that, in the phrase from Hamlet, “is not dreamt of in [my] philosophy.”

Something Dark

During a span of time the included the last parts of the Carter administration and the first parts of the Reagan administration, I worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (CSIS) That was a place where many of America’s top experts in international affairs would work when their political team was not running American foreign policy. I got to know a great many former ambassadors, generals, even cabinet secretaries and national security advisors.

But I never had anything to do with the most exalted star in CSIS’s firmament: Henry Kissinger. He was given special handling, and it was not for the likes of me to go a pick his brain, as I did with the others. I never visited his floor.

One day, as I stepped into the elevator I saw that already in the elevator were Henry Kissinger and what was surely a bodyguard.

I’d have expected the experience would have been plus like spotting a rare bird. Kissinger had been a player in world history of a magnitude not matched by many.

But my immediate experience was of something too big to be contained in the elevator, like a dark and powerful and menacing spirit. I’d never felt anything remotely like it.

What was that dark force?

The obvious answer someone else might come up with would be that there was no dark force. It was my own imagination creating that experience. Maybe because I disapproved of how he kept the Vietnam War going. And by now I knew about his role in bring Chile under a fascistic – but pro-American – regime.

But that kind of explanation has never felt right. That’s not where I was at regarding Kissinger.

• For one thing, I also greatly respected him as a strategic thinker, and thought the move to China to put pressure on the Soviets was a brilliant stroke. And I believed in his “détente.”
• For another thing, I’m not a very suggestible person, nor given to imagining things. Had it been just the man, Kissinger, standing in the elevator, I’d have just perceived a man. Nothing like the big darkness that felt palpable.
• Another thing is that I’d already met Kissinger 20 years before, when I was a college student and he was a professor whose lectures I’d sampled. He had some stature then, too, but I was not in awe of him.

I had no explanation for what I’d experienced.

(When it turned out that very soon after that I read that he’d had multiple bypass heart surgery, I wondered if I might have been picking up anything related to his condition. But that didn’t make much sense as an explanation.)

I still have none.

Something Bright

It was at the end of the 1980s that I had a second experience—of that kind, only the opposite.
I was a speaker at a conference in Southern California. Titled “Harmonia Mundi” (Harmony of the World), it had as its central figure the Dalai Lama. He was another figure who loomed large on the global stage, and was held in high regard it seemed by everyone (including, in a perverse way, the Chinese Communists who saw him as a threat to their imperial domination of Tibet).

And including me, as I also saw the Dalai Lama as demonstrating strategic intelligence in how he played his hand as the champion of the oppressed Tibetan people and culture. He had stature in my eyes, but once again I didn’t feel in awe.

So when they rounded up we lesser speakers at the conference to be introduced – one by one – to the Dalai Lama, I was glad but not excited.

When my turn came, the conference organizer introduced me and we made good eye contact. Something entirely unexpected then happened. (Something even less describable than that moment with Kissinger in the elevator.)

I recall there being some sort of light (that wasn’t light,) and some feeling of a benign spirit. It was, at any event, something of a kind I’d not experienced before with anyone.

After my very brief moment in front of the Dalai Lama, it was the turn of next speaker in line. And I was left with that mystery.

(My sense of the uncanniness of that experience has always been enhanced by its being later that very night that announcement was delivered to the world from Sweden, five thousand miles away: the Dalai Lama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.)

Clues to Something
The essential thing about science, to my mind, is not replicability, though that’s important. It is relying on evidence to reach one’s conclusions.

Those two experiences of mine seem like genuine evidence (not seeming dismissible as mere imagination). Clues—but of what, I don’t claim to know.