“When we get inside, you must be strong. You must realize you are in your earthbound body, unusual as it is, and your senses will be overwhelmed! You will not be able to endure what you see as you would if you were dead or an angel,” he said.
There was no time to argue. We had passed swiftly across the bridge; giant gates were opening before us. I couldn’t see the summit of the walls.
The sound swelled and enveloped us, and indeed it was like laughter, waves upon waves of shimmering and lucid laughter, only it was canorous, as though all those who laughed also sang canticles in full voice at the same time.
What I saw, however, overwhelmed me as much as the sound.
This was very simply the densest, the most intense, the busiest, and the most profoundly magnificent place I’d ever beheld. Our language needs endless synonyms for the word beautiful, the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.
Once again, people were everywhere, people filled with light, and of distinct anthropomorphic shape; they had arms, legs, beaming faces, hair, garments of all different kinds, yet no costume of any seemingly great importance, and the people were moving, traveling paths in groups or alone, or coming together in patterns, embracing, clasping, reaching out, and holding hands.
I turned to the right and to the left, and then all around me, and in every direction saw these multitudes of beings, wrapped in conversation or dialogue or some sort of interchange, some of them embracing and kissing, and others dancing, and the clusters and groups of them continuing to shift and grow or shrink and spread out.
Indeed, the combination of seeming disorder and order was the mystery. This was not chaos. This was not confusion. This was not a din. It seemed the hilarity of a great and final gathering, and by the final I mean it seemed a perpetually unfolding resolution of something, a marvel of sustained revelation, a gathering and growing understanding shared by all who participated in it, as they hurried or moved languidly (or even in some cases sat about doing very little), amongst hills and valleys, and along pathways, and through wooded areas and into buildings which seemed to grow one out of another like no structure on earth I’d ever seen.
Nowhere did I see anything specifically domestic such as a house, or even a palace. On the contrary, the structures were infinitely larger, filled with as bright a light as the garden, with corridors and staircases branching here and there with perfect fluidity. Yet ornament covered everything. Indeed, the surfaces and textures were so varied that any one of them might have absorbed me forever.
I cannot convey the sense of simultaneous observation that I felt. I have to speak now in sequence. I have to take various parts of this limitless and brilliant environment, in order to shed my own fallible light on the whole.
There were archways, towers, halls, galleries, gardens, great fields, forests, streams. One area flowed into another and through them all I was traveling. Again and again, my eyes were drawn to some spectacularly beautiful sculpture or cascade of flowers or a giant tree reaching out into the cloudless blue, only to have my body turned back around as if I were being kept to a tightrope from which I might fatally fall.
I laughed; I wept; I did both, and my body was convulsing with the emotions.
“Don’t look, because you won’t remember it,” he said. He snatched at my hands as if I were a toddler. I had tried to catch hold of a scroll that was filled with an absolutely astonishing explanation of something to do with atoms and photons and neutrinos. But he was right. The knowledge was gone immediately, and the unfolding garden surrounded us as I lost my balance and fell against him.
I looked down at the ground and saw flowers of complete perfection; flowers that were the flowers that our flowers of the world might become. I don’t know any other way to describe how well realized were the petals and the centers and the colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated that I was unsure suddenly that our spectrum was even involved.
I mean, I don’t think our spectrum of color was the limit! I think there was some other set of rules. Or it was merely an expansion, a gift of being able to see combinations of color which are not visible chemically on earth. I felt blinded by my own senses suddenly, yet I still could make out every vivid detail.
The whirlwind once again surrounded us. I sobbed and beat on his chest. Heaven was gone!
He tightened his grip, straining with all his force to carry me downwards, to make me submit, to force me to begin the descent.
We plummeted, that awful falling, which struck such fear in me that I couldn’t protest or cling to him or do anything except watch the swift currents of souls all around us ascending, watching, descending, the darkness coming again, everything growing dark, until suddenly we traveled through moist air, full of familiar and natural scents, and then came to a soft and soundless pause.
It was a garden again. It was still and beautiful. But it was earth. I knew it. My earth; and it was no disappointment in its intricacy or scents or substance. On the contrary, I fell on the grass and let my fingers dig into the earth itself. I felt it soft and gritted under my fingernails. I sobbed. I could taste the mud.
With a hard, shattering blow, I struck a wall and fell to the floor. Horses went by, the hooves barely missing my head, sparks flying from the stones. A woman lay bleeding and dying before me, her neck obviously broken, blood pouring out of her nose and ears. People fled in all directions. Again the smell of death mixed with blood.
It was a city at war, the soldiers looting and dragging the innocents from out of archways, screams echoing as if off endless ceilings, the flames coming so close they singed my hair.
A soldier’s foot came up and kicked the side of my face hard, and I went sprawling on the stones.
I looked up. I wasn’t in a street at all. I was in a huge domed church, with gallery upon gallery of Roman arches and columns. All around me, against the glitter of gold mosaics, men and women were being cut down. Horses were trampling them. The body of a child struck the wall above me, the skull crushed and the tiny limbs dropping like debris at my feet. Horsemen slashed at those fleeing, with broadswords hacking through shoulders and arms. A violent explosion of flames made it as light as midday. Through the portals men and women fled. But the soldiers went after them. Blood soaked the ground. Blood soaked the world.
All around and high above, the golden mosaics blazed with faces which seemed now transfixed in horror as they beheld this slaughter. Saints and saints and saints. Flames rose and danced. Piles of books were burning. Icons were smashed into pieces, and statuary lay in heaps, smoldering and blackened, the gold gleaming as it was eaten by the flames.
“Where are we?” I cried out.
His voice was right beside me. He was sitting, collected, against the stone wall.
“Hagia Sophia, my friend,” he said. “It’s nothing, really. It’s only the Fourth Crusade.”
I reached out with my left hand for him, unwilling to let go with all my might.
“What you see is the Roman Christians slaughtering the Greek Christians. That’s all there is to it. Egypt and the Holy Land have for the moment been forgotten. The Venetians have been given three days to loot the city. It was a political decision. Of course they were all here to win back the Holy Land, but the battle wasn’t in the cards, and so the authorities have let the troops loose on the town. Christian slaughters Christian. Roman against Greek. Do you want to walk outside? Would you like to see more of it? Books by the millions are being lost now forever. Manuscripts in Greek and Syriac and Ethiopian and Latin. Books of God and books of men. Do you want to walk among the convents where the nuns are being dragged out of their cells by fellow Christians and raped? Constantinople is being looted. It’s nothing; believe me, nothing at all.”
I lay against the ground, trying to close my eyes and not to see, but unable not to see-flinching at the clang of the horses’ hooves so perilously close, choking on the reek of the blood of the dead baby who lay against my leg heavy and limp like something wet from the sea. I sobbed. Near me lay the body of a man with his head half severed from his neck, the blood pooling on the stones. Another figure tumbled over him; knee twisted, bloody hand grasping for anything that would give him purchase, and finding only the naked pink child’s body which he threw aside. Its little head was now nearly broken off.
“Would you like a change of scenery? We can move on. We can go to Madrid and treat ourselves to an auto-da-fe, do you know what that is, when the torture and burn alive the Jews who won’t convert to Christ? Perhaps we should go back to France and see the Cathars being slaughtered in the Languedoc? You must have heard those legends when you were growing up. The heresy was wiped out, you know, the whole heresy. Very successful mission on the part of the Dominican Fathers, who will then start on the witches, naturally. There are so many choices. Suppose we go to Germany and see the martyrdom of the Anabaptists. Or to England to watch the Queen Mary burn those who had turned against the Pope during the reign of her father, Henry. I’ll tell you an extraordinary scene that I have often revisited. Strasbourg, 1349. Two thousand Jews will be burned there in February of that year, blamed for the Black Death. Things like that will happen all over Europe…”
“I know the history,” I cried, trying to catch my breath, “I know!”
“Yes, but seeing it is a little different, isn’t it? As I said, this is nothing. All this will do is divide Greek and Roman Catholics forever.
“And as Constantinople weakens, then the new People of the Book, the Moslems, will pour past the weakened defenses into Europe. Do you want to see one of those battles? We can go directly to the twentieth century if you like. We can go to Bosnia or Herzegovina, where Moslems and Christians are fighting.
“And while we are considering all the People of the Book - Moslems, Jews, Christians - why not go to southern Iraq and listen to the cry of the starving Kurds whose marshes have been drained and whose people are being exterminated? If you want, we could just concentrate on the sack of holy places - mosques, cathedrals, churches. We could use that method to travel right up to the present time.
“Mind you, not one suggestion I’ve made has involved people who don’t believe in God or Christ. People of the Book, that’s what we’re talking about, the Book which starts with the One God and keeps changing and growing.
“And today and tonight, documents of inestimable value go up in flames. It is the unfolding of Creating; it is Evolution; it is sanctified suffering on somebody’s part surely, because all these people you see here worship the same God.”
And love is a figment of your lollipop, rainbow, and cheese filled brain—
Young, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, studies the neurobiology that underlies pair bonds — what nonscientists might call love.
In an essay in the journal Nature last month, he laid out evidence that scientist have been able to tie the emotion “love” to a mere biochemical chain of events, and might someday even be able to develop drugs that enhance social bonding — in much the same way that pharmaceuticals today can help regulate emotions like anxiety and depression.
In his lab at Yerkes, Young studies rodents called prairie voles. Unlike 95 percent of mammals, prairie voles mate for life.
“They form a lifelong bond,” Young said. “They nest together, they raise a family together, they have another litter. So they have this really intense bond between them.”
For females, that hormone is oxytocin, in a series of studies, Young found that the hormones that produce that bond are the same ones that promote parent-child bonding in many other species, including humans. “We can take a prairie vole female, inject her with oxytocin, and she’ll bond with whatever male is around,” Young said. For males, a related hormone called vasopressin promotes both pair bonding and fatherly behaviors, like grooming young voles.
But like humans, some voles are more suited for monogamy than others. In one recent study, Young found that male voles with a particular variant of a gene called AVPR1A had fewer of those receptors than usual. And so, perhaps not surprisingly, voles with that gene variant were less likely to bond with females than voles without it.
In another study, Young found that implanting a version of the AVPR1A gene in meadow voles — a related species that does not mate for life — produced never-before-seen monogamous meadow voles.
After an initial attraction is established, infatuation may set in. Characterizations of infatuation include sweaty palms and a pounding heart, which are caused by higher than normal levels of norepinepherine. This is a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands, which are located above the kidneys. Norepinepherine works alongside epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, to give the body a sudden boost of energy and feel good feelings.
The exhilaration of falling in love is due to a rush of phenylethylamine and dopamine, which are chemicals found in the brain. Phenylethylamine, which acts as a releasing agent of norepinephrine and dopamine, quickens the pulse, raises blood sugar levels, and produces a giddy state of well-being. Dopamine is produced in several areas of the brain and is secreted by the hypothalamus. The functions of dopamine are many and include playing important roles in behavior, cognition, voluntary movement, motivation and reward, sleep, mood, attention, and learning. That “feel good” stage of falling in love where your partner and you seemingly can do no wrong.
An established love relationship offers the benefit of stabilized production of serotonin and oxytocin. Serotonin is often called the brain’s ‘feel good’ chemical and has many functions, including the regulation of mood, appetite, sleep, muscle contraction, and the cognitive functions of memory and learning. Oxytocin is a hormone best known for its role in female reproduction because it is released in large amounts during childbirth. Current studies have linked the role of oxytocin to orgasms, anxiety, trust, love, social recognition, and maternal behaviors.
Something has to turn the exhilaration of a new partner into what can approach an obsession, and that something is the brain’s nucleus accumbensl. Thrill signals that start in the lower brain via not just dopamine but also serotonin and, importantly, oxytocin. If ever there was a substance designed to bind, it’s oxytocin.
New mothers are flooded with the stuff during labor and nursing—one reason they connect so ferociously to their babies before they know them as anything more than a squirmy body and a hungry mouth. Live-in fathers whose partners are pregnant experience elevated oxytocin too, a good thing if they’re going to stick around through months of gestation and years of child-rearing. So powerful is oxytocin that a stranger who merely walks into its line of fire can suddenly seem appealing. They have found that after a break up, in the “recovery” stage, both male and females have elevated levels of oxytocin, possibly to quickly and easily bind to a new partner. Hence the “rebound” relationship.
The last major stops for love signals in the brain are the caudate nuclei. It’s here that patterns and mundane habits, such as knowing how to type and drive a car, are stored. Motor skills like those can be hard to lose, thanks to the caudate nuclei’s indelible memory. Apply the same permanence to love, and it’s no wonder that early passion can gel so quickly into enduring commitment. The idea that even one primal part of the brain is involved in processing love would be enough to make the feeling powerful. The fact that three are at work makes that powerful feeling consuming.
Any overwhelming emotional experience that ratchets up your sensory system can distort your perceptions, persuading you to take a chance on someone you should avoid.
Psychologist Arthur Aron of the State University of New York at Stony Brook says people who meet during a crisis—an emergency landing of their airplane, the death of a loved one, the dissolution of a marriage—may be much more inclined to believe they’ve found the person meant for them.
“You think someone made you feel good,” Pfaus says, “but really it’s your brain that made you feel good.”
