At this moment, Brugh Joy seems to be describing the Awe experience that has been documented by Dacher Keltner (2023). However, the story does not end here. This experience of Awe at the Great Pyramid would seem to be aligned with Joy’s original “twice-born” experience. Something else happened that led Joy (1990, pp. 6-7) to a second birth:
“. . . without warning, I experienced the onset of a quaking within my body. It is a subjective shaking. . . .[T]he quaking was particularly powerful. And within four minutes, everything I held as sacred collapsed into one large heap! Gone was the inspiration of Christ, Gone as the sense of Compassion of the Buddha. Gone were the senses of spiritual upliftment, induction, and specialness I invariably experienced . . . The pain of the vacuum was unbearable, and I involuntarily cried out.”
It is at this moment that we witness the power of nothingness and the void (vacuum). The tensions inherent in Joy’s holding of diverse spiritual believes broke apart and a new vision had to emerge if Brugh Joy was to overcome the pain associated with experiencing the vacuum.
Joy (1990, p. 7) continues:
“My first instinct was to fill this meaningless, painful void with something . . . anything . .. even if I had to make it up. . . It was not the same as the inner voice that spoke to me in 1974 announcing the end of my career as a physician. It was a thought-impression, more like a feeling and it counseled me thus: ‘Don’t fill this painful place with yet another spiritual viewpoint. Let Life teach you what Spirit is!’”
As in the case of most triadic rebirths, this one moved Brugh Joy (1990, p. 7) beyond profound pain to a state of ecstasy:
“The experience was totally and completely renovative, birthing what for me was a creative “new” reality. I felt liberated and peculiarly unburdened. The mystery of the Mystery was again nascent. I could once again apprentice myself to Life and feel the wholeness of its manifestations.”
Much as St. Paul felt following his conversion on the path to Damascus, Brugh Joy found the pathway to a new sense of self and a new set of beliefs about the world (Nock, 1933/1961). As in other triadic shifts from tension to transformation, the experiences of both Brugh Joy and St. Paul led to a profound sense of progress.
