They happen in their own rhythm. Not random, no, but with a strange, supernatural cadence that defies our understanding. Like the digits of pi, or the mysterious roaring of the waves breaking against the plane of the beach-sands.
Maybe you're reading a story, a poem, listening to a song, a symphony, a babbling brook, or the whistling of the wind. Sometimes it's morning, sometimes afternoon, sometimes the dead of night. Warm, cold; wet, dry; bright, dark; loud, quiet. It just happens.
Hold on as long as you can.
Some little part inside your head just clicks. And then you see it. Like magic, only real and unmistakably natural. The world slipped to the side, just a tiny bit, and you can see the man behind the curtain, only it's not a man, and there really isn't a curtain either.
It takes different forms each time, but it rings crystal-clear: you just saw the world as it's really supposed to be. Maybe it's seeing it all as one, maybe it's seeing the one as all. Maybe it's seeing up as down, or left as right, or front as back. But those are just the easy ones. The hard ones comes later.
This lightning always strikes twice.
And you'll never forget its thunder. For days, weeks, months, even years, you'll hunt, ceaselessly trying to recapture it. The quiet times in your day will be taken with probing into those dark crevasses of your mind with the sonar of the soul, dredging up everything, anything that could bring you back to what you caught between eye-blinks.
You won't find it.
Eventually, you'll give it up, file it off into that corner of your mind reserved for the bygones and the pipe dreams, between meeting aliens and learning to fly. Let someone else throw his life away chasing after the music of those ephemeral spheres. You'll go back to your normal life, a little disappointed, but that's just how it goes, sometimes.
You'll learn to stop expecting the unexpected, to quit jumping out screaming from around every corner, trying to catch the world unawares and sneak into enlightenment by the brute force of constant wishing.
It will find you, again.
Then you'll know it; you're not crazy--after all, there's nothing crazy about marching to the right drummer, even if no one else can hear him. Something is there--it's strange; it's unnerving--and it's good. After this, you'll never be able to turn back.
That's okay. The new world is better than the old, after all.