The proximity of death, the ultimate unction, the last reveal, the inescapable enlightenment, seems to open us all up, in this special way, as Dostoyevksy described in his novel “The Idiot.”
That is when Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote a thinly veiled account of the time the czar played a terrible joke on Dostoyevsky and his circle of revolutionary intellectual friends.
The czar had them all arrested. And then one morning they were awakened at dawn and told they were to be executed.
As Dostoyevsky rode to the execution with his friends in an open wagon, a strange sensation began to overcome him.
He felt a spacious, oceanic sense of time. He felt as if the limits of time had opened wide. In a few minutes he would die, but he felt as if he had all the time in the world to do what he needed to do.
What he needed to do, he now realized, was to say goodbye to his comrades for the final time. He did this in a full and leisurely way, the great love he bore for his companions welling up to the bursting point.
And then he decided to spend his last moments on earth looking around at the world for the last time. As he did so, he found himself gazing at the tin roof of a nearby barn. A brilliant morning sun was shining, and a great burst of sunlight shone off the tin roof.
Suddenly he knew for certain that this was what he would become. In a few minutes he would die, and he would become this blazing, radiant light. This knowledge filled him with an ecstasy so intense he thought that if it went on for even another minute, he wouldn’t be able to bear it.
It was then that the czar’s captain told them it was all a joke. The czar had only wanted to frighten them. They wouldn’t die after all.
Dostoyevksy was changed forever by this experience.
It showed him what he really was.
It took him to the core of his being, and he was a different man for the rest of his life…
Yours,
Dr Churchill
PS:
What would you feel if such a moment as this, came into your life ?
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