A clear an account of seeing not an objective thing but the intrinsic reality which underlies surface appearance is found in Robert Pirsig's novel Lila. Pirsig named the philosophy of Phaedrus Dynamic Quality. The exterior static constructs of the left brain fail to provide the flexible perspective which recognizes goodness as it appears in all its aspects.
Robert Pirsig's second novel: read Lila as pdf
From the end of Chapter 26:
"Once when Phaedrus was standing in one of the galleries of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he saw on one wall a huge painting of the Buddha and nearby were some paintings of Christian saints. He noticed again something he had thought about before. Although the Buddhists and Christians had no historic contact with one another they both painted halos. The halos weren't the same size. The Buddhists painted great big ones, sometimes surrounding the person's whole body, while the Christian ones were smaller and in back of the person's head or over it. It seemed to mean the two religions weren't copying one another or they would have made the halos the same size. But they were both painting something they were seeing separately, which implied that that 'something' they were painting had a real, independent existence.
Then as Phaedrus was thinking this he noticed one painting in the corner and thought, There. What the others are just painting symbolically he is actually showing. They're seeing it second-hand. He's seeing it first hand.'
It was a painting of Christ with no halo at all. But the clouds in the sky behind his head were slightly lighter near his head than farther away. And the sky near his head was lighter too. That was all. But that was the real illumination, no objective thing at all, just a shift in intensity of light. Phaedru stepped up to the canvas to read the name-plate at the bottom. It was El Greco again.
Our culture immunizes us against giving much importance to all this because the light has no 'objective' reality. That means it's just some 'subjective' and therefore unreal phenomenon. In a Metaphysics of Quality, however, this light is important because it often appears associated with undefined auspiciousness, that is, with Dynamic Quality. It signals a Dynamic intrusion upon a static situation. When there is a letting go of static patterns the light occurs. It is often accompanied by a feeling of relaxation because static patterns have been jarred loose. He thought it was probably the light that infants see when their world is still fresh and whole, before consciousness differentiates it into patterns; a light into which everything fades at death. Accounts of people who have had a 'near death experience' have referred to this 'white light' as something very beautiful and compelling from which they didn't want to return. The light would occur during the breakup of the static patterns of the person's intellect as it returned into the pure Dynamic Quality from which it had emerged in infancy.
During Phaedrus' time of insanity when he had wandered freely outside the limits of cultural reality, this light had been a valued companion, pointing out things to him that he would otherwise have missed, appearing at an event his rational thought had indicated was unimportant, but which he would later discover had been more important than he had known. Other times it had occurred at events he could not figure out the importance of, but which had left him wondering.
He saw it once on a small kitten. After that for a long time the kitten followed him wherever he went and he wondered if the kitten saw it too.
He had seen it once around a tiger in a zoo. The tiger had suddenly looked at him with what seemed like surprise and had come over to the bars for a closer look. Then the illumination began to appear around the tiger's face. That was all. Afterward, that experience associated itself with William Blake's Tiger! Tiger! burning bright.'
The eyes had blazed with what seemed to be inner light."
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