' The Glimpse '...

Some readers might appreciate further 'definition' of the glimpse. Here are a few amplifying quotes from PB's Notebooks 22.4:

A glimpse is a transitory state of mental enlightenment and emotional exaltation.
It is an experience of self-discovery, not the discovery of some other being, whether a guru or a god.

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. The intention is to arouse and stimulate them into the longing for re-entry into the spirit, a longing which inevitably expresses itself in the quest.

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..

Conventional dictionary definitions fail to convey the higher dimension of meaning that PB intends; which is, the mystical glimpse, or the kind that belongs to the transcendental world; 'transcendental' meaning above or beyond the sensible. It might be further characterized as intuitive as distinguished from discursive.



-David