The Library
He has had the glimpse. The after-period is important. For as he returns to his ordinary self and to the ordinary persons around him, the opportunity is offered to make an adjustment, a fresh start by the light of what the experience revealed.
14.22.7.3Listen The great experience is soon over; the released insight lasts but a few minutes or hours, but its memory lasts long. It is a delectable foretaste and warming anticipation of what his continued spiritual development may bring to man. It lifts him far above himself and out of his ordinary state of consciousness, yielding sharper understandings and creating deeper sympathies.
14.22.7.4He returns from his first initiation into the egoless life with a rich cargo. He carries the stability of peace. A strange feeling of safety takes possession of him at that time. He knows neither care for the uncertain future nor regret for the unpleasant past. He knows that henceforth the life of his being is in the hands of the higher self, and with this he is quite content.
14.22.7.5Listen Once he has attained this inner realization, the student should cling persistently to it, for the world's multifarious forces will come to hear of it and seek to drag him away.
14.22.7.6Listen The holy feelings generated by the Glimpse ought to be protected against the world's disintegrating power and shielded against your own tendency to dissipate them by hasty violent movements or needless irrelevant chatter.
14.22.7.12Listen He emerges from the experience feeling surrounded by peace and protected by supernormal powers.
14.22.7.22Listen The glimpse vanishes, slowly with a few, quickly with most, leaving its effects in his recognition of greater possibilities in life and grander ones in himself.
14.22.7.23Listen If the glimpse does not last, if a man discovers or rather comes back to find that he still is man, he should be pleased that it came at all.
14.22.7.30Listen In those glorious enchanted moments which immediately succeed the glimpse, almost anything seems possible.
14.22.7.32Listen The afterglow of this experience may be a sensation of its curative power, leaving nerves and heart healed of their troubled negative conditions, or of its purifying power, leaving the mind freed of its undesired and undesirable thoughts.
14.22.7.35Listen The closer he comes to the Overself the more reticent he becomes about it.
14.22.7.39Listen Only those who have felt it can know the completely satisfying nature of the love which flows to and fro between the ego and the Overself at such enkindled moments. They may be gone the same day but they will reflect themselves in a whole lifetime's aspiration thereafter.
14.22.7.61Listen A sense of being lifted up from all worldly cares will pervade him for some time as an afterglow of this experience. The gracious feeling swims away again and leaves him not forlorn but forsworn. He will never again be alone. The remembrance of what happened is by itself enough to be company for him the rest of his life.
14.22.7.63Listen Whoever has had this beautiful experience, felt its glorious freedom and known its amazing serenity, has had something which he will always remember… The knowledge that a life of truth goodness and beauty is somewhere and sometime possible will continue to haunt him.
14.22.7.66,Listen The glimpse, when finally it does come, compensates for all the struggles and difficulties of the years that precede it. He can look back upon them with complete detachment, perhaps even smile at them. Even the sufferings seem no longer what they were, but diminish into unimportant little incidents.
14.22.7.67Listen The isolated glimpses will have this effect, that they will not only whet his appetite for farther ones but also for a lasting identity with the Overself.
14.22.7.71Listen If the beauty of his experience penetrates his heart deeply enough, it will not fail to bring about a change in his life. It will also point out the direction in which the change is to be made.
14.22.7.73Listen The insight, once caught, and however briefly, will leave behind a calm discontent with the triviality of ordinary life, a lucid recognition of its pathetic futility and emptiness, as well as a calm dissatisfaction with the man himself.
14.22.7.74Listen The door of his inner consciousness has opened; the regeneration of his moral nature has begun. The truth will come into the innermost chambers of his consciousness, sometimes abruptly but sometimes sluggishly. And because it comes in this way, because it comes from the god within him, it will be dynamic, creative, powerful. As he becomes aware of this sublime influx, so will he soon become aware that character is altering with it, and so will others become aware that his conduct is shaping itself around nobler standards.
14.22.7.77Listen When a man discovers that he himself is the bearer of divine forces, he ceases to run hither and thither in search of other men.
14.22.7.78Listen Once the soul has revealed her lovely self to him, he cannot help adoring her, cannot help the feeling of being carried away in lifelong pursuit of her. The attraction is not of his own choosing. It is as natural and inevitable as the movement of the sunflower towards the sun.
14.22.7.79Listen If we can gain the power to enter the Presence, it will work silently upon the reform and reshaping of our character. Every such entry will carry the work forward, or consolidate what has already been done.
14.22.7.80Listen He begins to look on the world afresh, as if for the first time. But it is the beauties, the harmonies, the inner meanings, and the higher purposes that he now sees. He becomes more attentive to the attractiveness of Nature, observes her colourings and forms with new delight.
14.22.7.81Listen These experiences if taken aright will lead him not to spiritual pride but to spiritual humbleness.
14.22.7.87Listen Because he has been once illumined, the darkness can never again be total darkness. He will know that the possibility of light flashing across it always exists.
14.22.7.88Listen No one can know in advance how long it will stay with him. It is here out of nowhere and nowhen, and then gone away the next hour. The visitation may or may not be repeated but because it is nothing that he has achieved, the repetition is outside his reach to control. Thus begins a lifelong haunting by what becomes his dearest wish--to repeat, and especially to continue in, this magical transformation.
14.22.7.89Listen The glimpse is impermanent, its satisfactions fugitive; but it leaves behind a residue of hope and revelation which the impermanent and fugitive pleasures of the world can never do.
14.22.7.90Listen The man who tries for years vainly to transcend his human nature is released by this experience. He no longer tortures himself practising excessive asceticisms.
14.22.7.94Listen The glimpse is a spiritual miracle, for it not only transforms his character but also releases some latent powers.
14.22.7.99Listen Because it gives new hope, fresh encouragement, and the prospect of eventual relief from trouble, the glimpse is like a rainbow in the sky. It reminds him that a providential love is still behind the world and his own existence.
14.22.7.100Listen Here is goodness and beauty which worldly objects and worldly creatures do not possess. The man who has once glimpsed them can never again be completely satisfied with the world's offerings, for this reason, but will again and again be haunted by, and attracted to, the vision of this higher possibility for man.
14.22.7.116Listen The glimpse has several results: it awakens sleeping minds, it encourages questing minds, it inspires earnest minds, and it quickens growing minds.
14.22.7.118Listen Even if it happens only once or twice in a lifetime, such a glimpse acts as a catalyst which pushes the man into making changes.
14.22.7.123Listen The glimpse will always be an incandescent memory in his life, a token of grace to prove that reality does dwell somewhere behind the seeming fatuity and illusoriness of the world's life.
14.22.7.124Listen He may have to weep for a mere glimpse of the soul. But this got, he will certainly weep again for its return. For he knows now by unshakeable conviction and by this vivid demonstration that the durable realization of the Soul is what he is here on earth for.
14.22.7.130Listen The glimpse gives a man the feeling of a newness as if he were beginning a new kind of life with a new attitude and a new ethical code.
14.22.7.138Listen The simple discovery of what he really is leads to large implications. He sees his aims in life, his goals and ambitions, his desires and attitudes, under a different light …
14.22.7.148,Listen At the very least the glimpse leaves a beautiful memory, at the most a divine inspiration.
14.22.7.150Listen In our best moments, we discover that we are not really alone, for with them comes our best self. It is our guide and comforter.
14.22.7.151Listen The experience may seem to happen by chance, its duration may be little more than momentary, but the impression left may last a lifetime.
14.22.7.152Listen When the Overself takes full possession of him, it will change his personality and outlook completely.
14.22.7.156Listen Life will be very different for man when, at long last, he recovers the sense of his own divinity.
14.22.7.158Listen A few minutes of the glimpse compensates fully for the lengthened years of dull mediocrity and triviality, reconciles him to the past’s sufferings.
14.22.7.168Listen Out of the inner quietude have come the great decisions, the miraculous healings, the memorable awakenings, and the end of sorrows.
14.22.7.170Listen It is real, it is present and active in our very midst, its power and its guidance can be felt and recognized.
14.22.7.172Listen A Glimpse gives him the confidence that he is walking the right road and encourages him to go forward.
14.22.7.179Listen Even if the glimpse does not heighten the feeling that here is a signal from something real, his own further or deeper study and the testimony of historic figures will show him that he is on the right track.
14.22.7.191Listen The Glimpse is in very truth a magic spell cast over a man’s whole being so that he neither feels nor reacts as he did before. For a short time he is born again, a new person.
14.22.7.197Listen What are the signs whereby he shall know that this is an authentic glimpse of reality? First, it is and shall remain ever present. There is no future in it and no past. Second, the pure spiritual experience comes without excitement, is reported without exaggeration, and needs no external authority to authenticate it.
14.22.7.199The glimpse also does in part for a man what initiation did in some ancient mystical institutions. It sets him on the road of a new life, a life more earnestly and more consciously devoted to the quest of Overself. It silently bids him dedicate, or rededicate anew, the remainder of his life on earth to this undertaking. It is a baptism with inner light more far-reaching than the baptism with physical water.
14.22.7.200Listen The old self which he has left behind and which once so occupied his interest now seems ugly, bad, and dull. So great is the change in him that it also seems like a stranger, not entitled to bear his name.
14.22.7.208Listen However cynical and blasé may have been his attitude in earlier days, it will yield to and melt in the sunny light of this second birth.
14.22.7.209Listen Those who have experienced a glimpse of this blessed Reality or, better, established themselves in it, may share its atmosphere with others in silent communion. But on a lesser level, they may also share with them in phrased speech the thoughts it provokes.
14.22.7.210Listen You have been given a glimpse of the goal. Now you must strive to attain that goal…
14.22.7.215,Listen Merely to enjoy such a glimpse is not enough. It must be turned to use, made into a standard for thought and living, applied to every situation in which he finds himself. He must let its beneficent memory shed peace, goodwill, and kindliness on all around.
14.22.7.216Listen The illuminatory experience may come to one who is without previous preparation, seeking, effort, or self-discipline. But if it comes so unexpectedly it leaves just as unexpectedly. The visitant is transient. The effects are permanent. If it be asked why it should come to such a person, who neither desired nor strove for it, when others are unable to secure it despite years of seeking, the answer must be that he worked for it in earlier lives. He has forgotten himself for an interval but the illumination recalls him to the quest even though it passes away: hence the permanency of its moral and mystical results.
14.22.7.217Listen What he sees in that sudden flash is to be slowly worked out in his character and conduct during the hours and months of subsequent years. Indeed, every minute offers the chance to transform himself by the smallest of degrees.
14.22.7.218Listen What we are ordinarily conscious of are the thoughts and feelings of the ego, but there is much more in us than that. There is the true self, of which the ego is only a miserable caricature. If we could penetrate to this, the fundamental element of our selfhood, we would never again be satisfied with a wholly egoistic life…
14.22.7.221,Listen …It is through such rare glimpses, such exalted moments, when they become conscious of a presence, higher and more blessed than their ordinary state, that men are drawn to the Quest in the effort to recapture those moments and those moods…
14.22.7.221,Listen Another purpose of these glimpses is to show him how ignorant of truth he really is, and, having so shown, to stimulate his effort to get rid of this ignorance. For they will light up the fanciful or opinionative nature of so much that he hitherto took to be true.
14.22.7.222Listen The bestowal of a glimpse is not merely for his pleasure and satisfaction: there are certain self-cleansing duties and self-improving obligations which follow in its train. The light it throws into him is thrown on his sins and weaknesses too. He sees them more plainly for what they are, as well as the amendment he must make. But he sees also the forgiveness which grace grants.
14.22.7.223Listen A single glimpse will offer all the evidence his reason needs, all the proof his judgement demands that there is a kingdom of heaven and that it is the best of all things to search for.
14.22.7.225Listen During the glimpse he left himself and found a being within which transcended it. After the glimpse he has the chance to create a conscious relationship between them. His outer life ought to carry the mark of this extraordinary event.
14.22.7.229Listen The glimpse is a memorable experience, but it is not enough. It shows him a possible future, gives him a new world-view, but he must henceforth bring all that into his everyday life and into his whole being. This needs time, practice, patience, vigilance, self-training, and more sensitivity.
14.22.7.232Listen Sometimes the glimpse may pass unrecognized for what it really is, but in later years this is usually rectified.
14.22.7.237Listen These glimpses are only occasional. They take us unawares and depart from us unexpectedly. But the joy they bring with them, the insight they bestow, make us yearn for a permanent and unbroken attainment of the state they tell us about.
14.22.7.244Listen
24 Sep 2015
7 Apr 2011
10 Aug 2014
28 Dec 2018
4 Apr 2019
21 Oct 2018
6 Nov 2014
3 Oct 2020
3 Sep 2023
16 Apr 2016
20 May 2024
22 Dec 2013
31 Dec 2017
9 Mar 2019
5 Jan 2016
25 May 2013
3 Mar 2018
14 Mar 2022
13 May 2017
5 Jun 2018
26 Jan 2023
7 Nov 2013
23 Jun 2018
16 Jan 2021
31 Jul 2020
8 Mar 2016
4 Jul 2013
21 Sep 2023
12 Dec 2013
21 Nov 2013
21 Feb 2017
10 Jun 2018
26 Feb 2022
2 Dec 2015
10 Jul 2011
1 Dec 2022
5 May 2021
30 Jul 2024
3 Jan 2024
16 Aug 2018
27 Nov 2022
1 Apr 2020
12 Jun 2022
11 Feb 2019
22 Aug 2020
16 Mar 2023
12 Jul 2022
8 Jul 2023
18 Oct 2010
14 Aug 2016
31 Mar 2012
18 Oct 2022
14 Dec 2015
28 Jul 2014
11 Aug 2019
25 Mar 2015
25 Sep 2022
12 Jun 2012
3 Jun 2019
14 Sep 2019
4 Aug 2021
16 Jun 2012
5 Aug 2014
15 Nov 2014
8 Sep 2013
8 Feb 2012
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