The Library
These brief flashes bring with them great joy, great beauty, and great uplift. They are, for most people, their first clear vivid awakening to the existence and reality of a spiritual order of being. The contrast with their ordinary state is so tremendous as to shame it into pitiful drabness…
14.22.4.3,Listen All our ordinary experience comes to us through sense responses or intellectual workings. But here is a kind of experience which does not come through these two channels. It is not a series of sensations nor a series of thoughts. What is it, then? Philosophy says it belongs to the transcendental world.
14.22.4.5Listen The glimpse may be best compared to a moment of wakefulness in a long existence of sleep.
14.22.4.7Listen That God is present in each person's life may seem unbelievable to so large a number of us. Yet it is for those undergoing the experience certitude, not theory…
14.22.4.38,Listen Even to ordinary persons moments can come which can pass very easily into glimpses. But their importance is not recognized and so the opportunities are missed. It is pitiful and pathetic that anyone should be so close to the diviner self and not take advantage of the propinquity by a pause of activity and a surrender to the delicate feeling which would develop of itself into a glimpse. It is pathetic, because these moments are in the nature of clues leading to the inward way; pitiful, because such people are living in a kind of blind alley and must one day retrace their steps.
14.22.4.39Listen Although he is normally quite unconscious of this connection with the Overself, once at least in a lifetime there is a flash which visits him and breaks the unconsciousness. He has a glimpse of his highest possibility. But the clearness and intensity of this glimpse depend upon his receptivity. They may amount to little or much.
14.22.4.46Listen Those who have followed the Quest in previous lives will generally receive a glimpse at least twice during the present one. They will receive it in early life during their teens or around the threshold of adult life. This will inspire them to seek anew. They will receive it again in late life during the closing years of the reincarnation. This will be bestowed as a Grace of the Overself…
14.22.4.48,Listen ... Those aspirants who bemoan the loss of their early glimpse should remind themselves, in hours of depression, that it will recur before they leave the body.
14.22.4.48,Listen Even those men who assert or lament that they have never had a single glimpse during their whole lifetime will get it at the end. For it is a divinely ordained part of the process of dying.
14.22.4.50When the genuine mystical experience comes, it presents the student with the rare chance to know for himself a state in the evolution of consciousness which still lies far ahead of mankind generally.
14.22.4.51Listen This mystical glimpse comes to most men only at death, or at the fraction of a fraction of a second during the highest pitch of sexual intercourse.
14.22.4.54Listen At present this mystic experience is a fugitive one in the human species. But because it is also the ultimate experience of that species, there is no reason why it should not become a common one in the course of evolutionary development.
14.22.4.55Listen What today is believed abnormal will, in a civilization ahead of ours, be regarded as quite natural. I refer to the transcendental experience.
14.22.4.59Listen There are individuals scattered here and there who have found the Overself... Therefore it is certain that the whole race will also one day find the Overself.
14.22.4.60,Listen Many people pass through these experiences of the glimpse and do not really know what is happening to them because they have never studied or been taught anything about such experiences.
14.22.4.63Listen To enter into Heaven is to enter into the fulfilment of our earthly life's unearthly purpose. And that is, simply, to become aware of the Overself. This holy awareness brings such joy with it that we then know why the true saints and the real ascetics were able to disdain all other joys. The contrast is too disproportionate. Nothing that the world offers to tempt us can be put on the same level.
14.22.4.79Listen We cannot know God in the fullness of his consciousness but we can know the link which we have with God. Call it the soul, if you must, or the Overself if you prefer, but to catch a glimpse of this link is to be reborn.
14.22.4.86Listen The glimpse gives him a journey to a land flowing not with milk and honey, but with goodness and beauty, with peace and wisdom. It is the best moment of his life.
14.22.4.87Listen When a man's consciousness is turned upside-down by a glimpse, when what he thought most substantial is revealed as least so, when his values are reversed and the Good takes on a new definition, he writes that day down as his spiritual birthday.
14.22.4.88Listen In these moments of a glimpse, he discovers the very real presence of the Overself. They provide him with a joy, an amiability, which disarms the negative side of his character and brings forward the positive side. These are precious moments; they cannot be too highly valued. And though they must pass, some communication with them is always possible through memory.
14.22.4.93”He that loseth his life shall save it.” Those who would translate Jesus' words into generous emotion and not into metaphysical insight have never known the real meaning of those words. For the philanthropic service of others is a noble but secondary ideal, whereas the mystical union with the Overself is a priceless and primary achievement.
14.22.4.99Listen These glimpses come upon us unawares, inadvertently as it were. There is no higher experience in our past to compare with them, and no lovelier.
14.22.4.109Listen Some kind of awakening is the usual prelude before people take to the Quest in real earnest. The glimpse provides it.
14.22.4.116Listen What we know is so little that it ought to make us intellectually humble. But that little is nevertheless of the highest importance to us. For we know that the Overself is, that the passage to its stillness from the ego's tumult is worthwhile, and that goodness and purity, prayer and meditation help us to find it.
14.22.4.121Listen The knowledge that no two human beings are alike refers to their bodies and minds. But this leaves out the part of their nature which is spiritual, which is found and experienced in deep meditation. In that, the deepest part of their conscious being, the personal self vanishes; only consciousness-in-itself, thought-free, world-free, remains. This is the source of the ”I” feeling, and it is exactly alike in the experience of all other human beings. This is the part which never dies, ”where God and man may mingle.”
14.22.4.121Listen How many have asked in puzzlement why the glimpses of reality cannot remain with them, how many have deplored its brevity! Plotinus long ago gave them his answer: ”Man can cease to become man, and become God; but man cannot be God and man at the same time.”
14.22.4.126Listen He can hold himself in this egoless state for a brief while only. The ego soon rises up again and the glorious presence retires, for the two are incompatible.
14.22.4.127Listen Such periods are short and uncommon but they lift us up and draw us in. We feel then that there is peace and joy for us as ultimate possibilities…
14.22.4.128,Listen These glimpses of Reality which wake us out of the world of illusion come to us only at intervals. We cannot hold them, but we can repeat them.
14.22.4.131Listen The glimpse lasts a moment, a minute, an hour, or a week--who can say, for it is a mysterious grace? But in that while, the oscillation of human thoughts is stilled and time takes a rest. It cannot be shared with others--although they may notice or sense some of its fruit--and to that extent it is a private experience.
14.22.4.133Listen Psychologists and psychoanalysts are beginning to find a minority among their ranks who put a high value upon these glimpses which they call peak-experiences. Academically qualified, professionally trained, and science-oriented just like their colleagues, they yet differ in appreciating and studying such experiences as being important to an adequate knowledge of the human being.
14.22.4.142Listen The light streaming from a table lamp proves the existence of electricity. The light streaming into the mind in these exalted moments proves the existence of the Soul.
14.22.4.155Listen If he can hold himself in the Light steadily and unfalteringly, his consciousness will be raised to a higher plane.
14.22.4.161Listen The inner light will give him a glimpse of an ennobled and purified life and inspire him with the urge to realize it.
14.22.4.162Listen One who beholds the Light may be grateful for several reasons. First, it is the only occult experience of which it may be said that it is entirely without risk or peril. Second, it is the loftiest of all clairvoyant visions. Third, it confers the feeling of perfect felicity, not in the worldly sense, but of an ethereal unearthly kind. Fourth, it is a direct manifestation of God to man, being the first of his outpourings, hence an uncommon blessing, a grace. Fifth, if it appears in consciousness as Power, the recipient may feel a tremendous force, unknown otherwise, throbbing all around and within him, or a sudden lightning-like flash of complete comprehension...
14.22.4.168,Listen If only Churches would encourage worshippers to look within as the only place to find God!
14.22.4.198Listen Professor Edmond Szekely, an authority on the Essenes; is qualified in Aramaic and Greek. His writing is based on ancient scripts in the Vatican and other libraries. In his translation, Essene Gospel of John, I found phrases which were not in apocrypha nor in the Bible. One para vibrated waves of golden light from the pages to me. In it Jesus forbade slaughter of animals for food. I forthwith stopped eating flesh. Even the desire was taken away at that moment…
14.22.4.198,Listen … During this rare experience the man feels that he is free from earthly attachments and worldly desires, that the intense peace he enjoys is the true happiness, that God's reality is the overwhelming fact of existence…
14.22.4.203,Listen Seeing the Light in front of him is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior.
14.22.4.204Listen
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