In the following lines, drawn from his longer poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, William Wordsworth offers a vision of manifest phenomena (in this case, a human body-mind) “trailing clouds of glory” — i.e. emanating the fragrance of their Divine origins — as they emerge into the field of space-time. Children tend to be more knowingly aware of this inner Light, which by and by — via the cultural conditioning that creates adults — “fade[s] into the light of common day.”

Intimations Of Immortality

What Wordsworth articulates in relation to a human life can be experienced also at more micro levels: each moment of phenomenal experience — each sight, sound, thought, image, feeling — also emerges “trailing clouds of glory” — fully infused with its inherent Divinity. And to refine our perception in the direction of  knowing this directly, is a central aspect of nondual spiritual traditions.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

~ William Wordsworth

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