When We Lose Mental Faculties, Do We Shine with Being?

My brother had AIDS that attacked his brain, and his mind wasn’t functioning anymore. But when I told him ‘I love you’, the smile would come. This shows me that being understands and doesn’t need the separate self anymore. When I was a very small child, I suddenly realised I was losing something very important – something I knew that was going away and I couldn’t grab what it was. All my life I’ve wondered what that was. Do other people have this experience? Rupert says: ‘There’s a passage from William Wordsworth: “But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy . . .” You’re talking about that time in your early life when heaven lay around you in your infancy. In other words, you were still in touch with your being. The apparent evidence of sense perception had not obscured the recognition of your own being. But then as you grow older, the evidence of sense perception emerges into the foreground of experience, and your being begins to vanish into the background of your experience. And as a result of that, in the growing boy, there is this pain in his heart, because he’s lost his connection to his source.’

From event 07 - 14 September, 2025 Seven-Day Retreat at Mandali, 7–14 September 2025 – ‘Meister Eckhart and the Love of God’

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