Dear Haran,

Thank you for your letter, valuable to me also as a further stimulus to my (spiritual) experience. Permit me to reply in stages. I need to think for a few days about my answer which I will mail to you within a week. Meanwhile I again send you and Rasya my wishes for your health and happiness, today, tomorrow and in the future.

Jochen

Dear Haran,

As I read your letter over and over again, I get some idea of what spirituality means to you. From my perspective, spirituality has two phases. There is an inward, individual spirituality which is literally unspeakable, which I denominate as subjective; and there is an outward public spirituality, which I call objective. Subjective spirituality can be communicated, if at all, only indirectly. Objective spirituality is a term perhaps applicable to poetry, music, and art to the extent that these become inwardly, individually meaningful. 

I cannot write that, except as expressed in poetry, music and art, objective spirituality seems to me a contradiction in terms, without apologizing to you for seeming to disparage missionary efforts like those in which I believe you to be involved. Not so. I very much repect the spirituality to which you subscribe as I very much respect the person you are. I would never presume to criticise your spiritual experience or the spiritual experience of anyone else, because I am convinced that for each of us such experience is uniquely his or her own.

If I comply with your request to comment on spirituality, I can do so only by telling about my own experiences. Such accounts seem unduly egotistical and narcistic. But I know no alternative. This morning when I awoke my mind was again suffused with the thought that unavoidably spirituality has a different meaning for each individual, and it is inevitable that reciprocal accounts of spirituality should conflict, and there is a risk that my description of my experience of spirituality should be hurtful to you. I ask you therefore to keep in the forefront of your mind that what I write about my experience of spirituality can in no way impugn the experience of spirituality which though denominated by the same word, is uniquely your own.

              Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
   This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

                                            Shakespeare

My threshold question: Please tell me whether you endorse my thesis
that this poem is a compelling example of spirituality, and if not,
why not.

Jochen