John’s habit (nothing similar is known to have been done by Jesus) of baptizing by immersion in water those drawn to his spirit is an important and symbolical one. No feeling is so homogeneous with the desire for the infinite, the longing to merge into the infinite, as the desire to immerse one’s self in the sea. To plunge into it is to be confronted by an alien element which at once flows round us on every side and which is felt at every point of the body. We are taken away from the world and the world from us. We are nothing but felt water which touches us where we are, and we are only where we feel it. In the sea there is no gap, no restriction, no multiplicity, nothing specific. The feeling of it is the simplest, the least broken up. After immersion a man comes up into the air again, separates himself from the water, is at once free from it and yet it still drips from him everywhere. So soon as the water leaves him, the world around him takes on specific characteristics again, and he comes back strengthened to the consciousness of multiplicity. When we look out into a cloudless sky and into the simple, shapeless, plain of an eastern horizon, we have no sense of the surrounding air, and the play of our thoughts is something different from mere gazing. In immersion there is only one feeling, there is only forgetfulness of the world, a solitude which has repelled everything, withdrawn itself from everything.

G.W.F. Hegel: The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate