Spiritual impressions described by Truman Madsen

      I am sharing something that I ran onto, in which Truman Madsen attempts to put into words descriptions of kinds of spiritual impressions, especially some that he concludes that seem to confirm that our inner self is the eternal intelligence made into a spirit child of God the Father.  This attempt to describe, to me seems unparalleled and intriguing.  Do any of these ideas seem meaningful to you?
    “Here is an attempt to capture the flavor of the Latter-day Saint “experiment in depth,” revelatory touches with the self that seem to disclose the longer-than-mortal sense.  (Inevitably we veer into the oblique but somehow more expressive language of simile and metaphor.)  There are:
    – Prayer flashes, when our words outreach thought and we seem to be listening above ourselves, completely at home while we are surprised at hints of hidden spirit memories within.
    – Familiarity of persons, immediate luminous rapport – this face or that gesture or motion –  that elicits the sense of recall, a premortal intimacy, especially in the environs of teaching and being taught.
    – Haunting sensations, usually visual, sometimes auditory, of a landscape of life or a bitter predicament in the soul, that call up simultaneous feelings of “again” and “for the first time”; like being thrust, as leading actor, into the last act of a play without knowing, and yet almost knowing, what occurred in the first two.
    – Numbing protests from below sometimes of unrelievable urgency or guilt, that are ruthless in unmasking our pretense.  These are not simply the yeas or nays of “conscience” about acts, but bell sounds of a whole self that will not be muffled, that ring with presentiments, thrusting us toward ends that seem tied to an elusive but white-lighted blueprint inside.
    – Shades of consciousness that occur just at awakening or just before sleep, unpredictably impressing while they express, in images or silent words or free association.  By the sanctity of their feeling-tone, these are different than our usual helter- skelter menagerie of thought.
    – Dreams and illusions that seem not to be mere dreams or mere illusions, catching us quite off-guard and lingering in their after-effect, as if life were a game of internal hide-the-thimble and we were “getting warm” to our own potential.
    – Unaccountable reverberations (e.g., in tear-filled eye or tingling throat or spine) from a phrase or sentiment (which, for the speaker or writer may be merely parenthetical), or from a strain of music, or some trivial stimulus in the midst of drudgery, bearing a holy atmosphere of spontaneous and total recognition.
    – Reflections of our faces in the mirror when we look in and not just at, our eyes.  As if light were coming to the surface, and a curious recovery, and even awe, of the self occurs. There lurks an autobiography, a soul-story that is foreign, yet intimate, unfolding a more-than-I-thought-I-was.
    – Right-track feelings, the sense of the foreordained, like emerging from a fever to find that roughshod or happenstance trials have been presided over by some uncanny instinctual self who knows what he is about.  Just before or just after turning a crucial corner, this someone nearer than you, that is you, holds a quiet celebration that injects peace into the marrow of the bones.
    Such flashes and drives are tied to the whole gamut of complex mental life and may have neat and utterly mundane naturalistic explanations (such as the chemistry of the occipital lobe). Yet the joy that comes from these uprisings, rooted, as they seem to be, in some more primal creative being and that, in turn, in God, supersedes any of the pleasures of human possession or external manipulation.”
(Truman G. Madsen, “Eternal Man,” Deseret Book Company: Salt Lake City, UT, 1970, pp. 75-76)