SPIRAL STAIRCASE

Not long after I turned 39, I dreamed that I was with my mother when we visited a powerful Spiritual Teacher. But afterward we both agreed that the visit had somehow been disappointing. Later in the dream I found myself walking down a stairway. To my surprise as soon as I stepped onto the stairs I discovered that the steps quickly became very narrow and turned into a spiral staircase. My shoes were smooth and the stair surface was slippery, so I immediately felt myself losing control and falling down. In terror I woke up.

In the dream vision Lonergan's book turned out to be a complex mosaic of many fields, many kinds of knowledge. Surprisingly, the final chapter of the book consisted of the text of a musical score for Bach's B Minor Mass, long a favorite of mine: specifically, the "Credo" section. As I traced out the notes of the score and heard the music in my mind, I saw something and felt something I had never grasped before and I suddenly began to weep with the deepest feeling until I woke up.