True Reality Lies Beyond the Surface

A transcendental experience [is] something that appears to be while it is not. It could be an experience of looking at a tree, looking at a flower, looking at a bumblebee and having a sense of its eternality — seeing beyond its simple physical form, seeing the universe within it, seeing, in other words, that other perception, that divine ground, that endless reality that it comes forth from and sustains it and transmutes it, as a solid part of that reality. 

This physical world we see in front of us and around us is only a tiny suggestion of what is.

I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.