It’s one of those well known but thoroughly relished feelings again. The last time I felt this was when I had stumbled upon this sublime repertoire of choruses, of which Sicut Cervus soon became a very meditative favourite.

As I played the medieval prayer over and over again, I sunk into this feeling that can only be described as feeling Old. It made me, for lack of a better phrase, muse about the history of humanity as personally as the way one looks back on life. As the layered harmonies of the chorale washed ashore and broke over themselves, a long train of thought ensued. On how far we’ve come as a species, on the many civilisations that have risen and fallen, ideas borne fruit and the sufferings the collective consciousness of the human race has gone through. And it made me feel a sense of protective love for the spirit of mankind as a species, the soul. This is is the closest I can get to describing that “old soul” feeling (if that’s a phrase). It’s fleeting, but powerful and extremely soothing while it lasts. It makes me tear up.

How every one, beginning life as bawling babies, went on through their little journey through life in the best way they could. How we have as a species, created heaven and hell within this one planet we have for ourselves. Fervently seeking God on one hand, fiercely rebuking those who do on the other. Billions of human lives simultaneously living their own triumphs and tribulations every waking moment.

Tonight this mental journey was inspired by this clip of Carl Sagan talking about the Hindu ideas of cosmology. Which served as a trigger to revisit some of the Upanishadic ideas of the soul, the atman as they called it, present in each one of us. (It’s a beautiful idea, one which, combined with some ideas from The Egg by Andy Weir, gave me a perfectly satisfying theory of the universe as simply a place to learn - a system designed for our collective selves to teach a more abstract entity something. But I digress.) The idea of each one of us being a manifestation of the same soul is an idea that often recurs, and it’s always a constructive feeling when it does.

It’s similar to the feeling of connectedness I’ve felt whilst sitting alone on the stone steps of a temple hundreds of years old, trying to picture the countless generations that have used its sanctum as an altar to bare their most intimate thoughts and emotions. It has been the same feeling in the Shivalaya in Arsikere and the St. Stephens cathedral in Vienna. Surely the collective emotions of all of us have left behind an intangible imprint on this earth, perhaps as stories that our forests, mountains and rivers could narrate, if we could listen to them.

I just realise I’ve utterly failed at recreating this feeling with words. I reckon it just is one of those moments where one really feels capable of loving the entirely of humanity and other lives (here’s missing you, forests of the Pacific Northwest), unconditionally and as if we were all part of the same thing. Not merely as an academic or altruistic idea, but springing from an emotion deep within - an emotion awakened perhaps by music or sustained by a train of thought that was allowed to go on uninterrupted into the night.

*****

It has been a rough year. Now, at half past midnight, with all the lamps turned off and the plumes of a soft choral slowly rippling up the walls of my room, I feel at peace. There’s no strife, no ill-will, no anxiety, no restlessness. It’s a beautiful, meditative feeling.

All I feel is love towards everyone, everything. It’s the best way to fall asleep.

A collective hug to the earth. To our collective consciousness. May we get wherever all of us are walking to.