Glimpses of God and Reality (Glimpses) is about how to integrate psychedelic experiences of sacredness. Glimpses was put together by Inner Peace Fellowship (IPF). IPF is a group that took psychedelics in the 1960s and since then has been integrating those experiences into our everyday life. We studied eastern religions and listened to holy men and women. Some of us lived with saints while others spent considerable time alone in high, remote mountains. We met in the 1970s when we came together to form a community of several thousand to explore reality through meditation. Many of us have been practicing nondirective mantra meditation now for over 40 years. Some of us have had careers and raised families while meditating two to four hours every day while others have lived in reclusion and meditate 6 hours every day. We are friends and neighbors who have been sharing one another's successes and mistakes for a lifetime, and our community continues to experiment, to learn and to thrive. This book is about what we learned and the mistakes we made. Millions of people in 236 countries and jurisdictions have used the contents of this book on our web site InnerPeaceFellowship.org.
Glimpses provides instructions for a 3,000 year old Vedic meditation technique from India based on original Sanskrit mantras from that time. This meditation has been used and refined by yogis for thousands of years and is easy to learn. Glimpses provides a simple meditation practice for beginner’s that can be expanded into deeper and deeper practice over time. Through regular meditation you become more familiar with the silence and stillness inside of you, which in turn can increase your sense of well being and make you more present. Some call those effects from meditation enlightenment, moksha, liberation, self-realization, awakening or nonduality.
We are made from the dust of stars that exploded long ago. Somehow that stardust came alive 3.8 billion years ago and no one knows what made that happen. The view in Glimpses is that whatever created life cannot be known through words, ideas or beliefs, but rather that whatever created life is known through your experience. Further, the view in Glimpses is that our experience of being alive is the direct experience of our Creator. And finally, the view in Glimpses is that insisting your beliefs about our Creator are the truth – insisting that your beliefs somehow actually own our Creator – is idolatry that is tearing our world apart.
Glimpses describes our relationship with our Creator in terms of science. In terms of science, the story of how Earth was created and how life arose on Earth is much more astonishing and awe inspiring than any story told by religions. Glimpses was inspired by the work of Richard Feynman, David Christian and Edward O. Wilson who said: “Altogether, the results of the neuroscience of religion thus far suggest strongly that a religious instinct does indeed exist … [but] … surely there exist ways to find spiritual fulfillment without surrender and enslavement.” Glimpses expands on Wilson’s view that humans came to dominate Earth through cooperation and goodness. Glimpses describes how to connect with your instincts for cooperation and goodness, and then use those instincts to create balance in your life and in your society.
Glimpses is about gaining self-knowledge and remaining empowered. Self-knowledge comes from the fact that you know better than anyone what increases or decreases inner peace, what is good and what is bad, and what brings you closer to sacredness; that you know better than anyone what works best for you. You gain self-knowledge by learning to trust yourself, your experiences and your instincts. And the self-knowledge gained is what then enables you to retain your power.
