me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His.
A surprising number of history’s great figures have had mystical experiences while in prison. The experience of being imprisoned takes away everything else—material striving, external freedom, their busy schedules. For at least a few people, inner experience and spiritual states become all that they have. The realization dawns upon them that these inner states are actually the essential experience in life, and everything else is secondary.
Anwar Sadat was imprisoned during World War II for plotting against British imperialism. In his memoir, In Search of Identity, he recalled that in prison, “I was able to transcend the confines of time and place. Spatially, I did not live in a four-walled cell but in the entire universe.” With material things taken away, he felt somehow larger. “I felt I had stepped into a vaster and more beautiful world and my capacity for endurance redoubled. I felt I could stand the pressure, whatever the magnitude of a given problem.” His emotional stance altered. “When my individual entity merged into the vaster entity of all existence, my point of departure became love of home (Egypt), love of all being, love of God.”
Václav Havel grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. The Marxist doctrine spewed out by the state was based on material determinism, the belief that the work a person does and the physical conditions of life determine who he is and how he thinks. When Havel was thrown into prison in 1977 for his dissident activity, he discovered that this was not the case. Material reality is not the fundamental driving force in human history, he concluded; spiritual reality is.
“The specific experience I’m talking about has given me one certainty,” Havel wrote.
Consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim. For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better.
Havel grew quite ill in prison and nearly died. One day, while looking through the prison fence, he saw the top of a tree. As he gazed at the tree, he was, as he wrote to his wife, Olga,
overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I had ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle assent to the inevitable course of events as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced.
A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzying sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning—this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the inapprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the infinite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and with myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and which has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what.
Viktor Frankl experienced life in the Nazi concentration camps as a constant assault on a person’s dignity. He found that he couldn’t control his life, but he could control his response to what was imposed upon him. He could exercise an “inner hold,” which meant enduring suffering in a dignified way. Life became not only a physical struggle but a spiritual one, a struggle to protect his own humanity from the dehumanizing conditions that surrounded him. “In reality there was an opportunity and a challenge,” he wrote.
One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate.