Chapter Two

A Moment of Knowing

When I was 19 I had an epiphany, a profound experience that came completely out of the blue.

I was at RADA – the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art – the most prestigious place to study acting. Back then only one in 200 girls was accepted each term, and on top of that I was awarded a scholarship. The gods were already holding my hand.

RADA was vibrant, busy, demanding and thoroughly challenging. I knew I was really lucky – I’d found what I wanted to do with my life and I’d landed in the best place to do it. I was completely immersed. Mime, music, dance, speech, diction, fencing, studying playwrights – and balancing a budget. I could afford either a lipstick or cigarettes or lunch. On the days I chose lunch, to save time I used to pour soup on top of mashed potato on top of a salad, gobble it up and get back to studying. I never drank and I didn’t know of the existence of drugs. My life was down to earth and full.

One day, hot, sweaty and in my leotard, having just finished a movement class, I went up to the roof for some fresh air before voice class. It was an ordinary day of back-to-back classes, enjoyable but nothing special.

I was on the roof in the sunshine, when suddenly from nowhere I was overcome with the most overwhelming and all-encompassing sense of such sweetened joy and peace. It shimmered towards me as a wave. Everything around me became brilliant and beautiful. It was a feeling of such heightened intensity that it took my breath away. I was elated. I felt euphoric.

With this feeling of ultimate peace and joy came a sense of knowing. A deep understanding that everything was one, and that I was an intrinsic part of all that is. I was not separate from the world. I was not separate from the whole universe.

I had no sense of difference, no feeling of being apart from anything. The molecular form of my body and the molecular make-up of everything around me, and of the whole universe, was all the same. I was connected to everything and, in turn, everything was connected to me.

And there was life in everything: the ladders on the roof, my handbag, the ground I was standing on, the windows of the buildings I could see across the street – those supposedly inanimate objects were alive and I could feel their vibrancy. I could feel the molecules moving in my shoes. Everything around me vibrated with life.

As this wave of understanding washed over me I gave up the sense of my own self to a greater force. I was still present, I could still see and feel myself, but I was conscious that who I was, wasn’t the body I was in; this vessel of blood and bones. I was the life that was within me. It flowed through my soul, and it reflected my soul everywhere and in everything.

I was one with the entire universe, and limitless. In that instant, I realized I wasn’t a separate entity but part of the whole. I was important, but no more important than anyone or anything else. I was just a tiny speck in the vast totality of the universe, but deeply woven into its fabric, and I realized that my life had purpose.

I knew the mystery and miracle of life itself, of how everything was interconnected. The air that I breathed, the ground beneath me, the trees in the distance, the people on the street below; absolutely nothing existed in isolation – everything joined up.

The joy and the peace were so intense – so palpable. I just let it all flow through me and fill me up. I had been touched by a divine wand and I felt blessed – truly blessed. God, the absolute truth of the universe, blasted through my every cell. I saw a beauty in life that I had never seen before. I felt a sense of peace that I had never known before. My heart was filled with the greatest joy and I didn’t want it to end.

In the miracle of that moment I saw perfection in all things. In that moment I was allowed to rest because I was part of that perfection. I’d arrived; the search was over. I felt a sense of total relief.

I can’t say how long it lasted.

That experience had the most profound impact on me. Why had I been given this gift? Is the universe random in its munificence? Where had it come from? Ever since then, I have been left with a huge feeling of gratitude, and an unrelenting longing.

I had glimpsed the presence of God – I didn’t make it to voice class.

Nearly 50 years later, the memory of that moment on the rooftop at RADA remains pure and intact. To me it is, and always has been, completely moving, because it is the answer. It’s what you search your whole life to understand: the fabric of everything is the same.

You can be told this, but you don’t really believe it. Just as you don’t really believe that the molecules that make up matter are moving. It’s something you’re told. You understand it as a concept, intellectually – but when you experience it, you’re beyond words. For the first time I can see you as you are, because you are me and I am you. Suddenly I can touch you; I can feel all things, and all at once. There are no divisions between us.

Since then, I’ve understood emotionally that there is no contradiction between the findings of quantum physics and the Hindu Upanishads. For that short space of time, all was opened up to me. It was on the level of the soul bank of cleansing, renewing and restoring; of the golden threads of DNA. It was the tapestry of the universe, the essence of what we are beyond this mortal coil – pure spirit.

I believe a time will come when physicists are able to weigh the soul. Is the body a whisper lighter after its last breath; exited by a departing physicality that we don’t understand? Like dark matter in the universe: totally unseen, yet its effects apparent. Like the neutrino, hurtling from the sun to pass undetected through our bodies and on through the Earth, observable only through the effects of its impact on other particles in cathedral-sized detectors. The soul is there in the geometry of the fractal-like golden matter of the universe; known but not always acknowledged.

Ever since, I’ve been a starer at sunsets and sunrises; wistful for that moment of knowing.

Sunset on the beach with Nutrina and Sienna