What is it to be sublime?
It is to have an experience that is surreal and awe-inspiring.
It is to be in a state of beautiful confusion.
It is to have an experience of something greater than the self and to have an understanding of one's own signifigance and insignifigance at once.
The sublime is to stand in relation to something so that the being perceiving the object is made aware of something awesome.
A sublime experience can be had while standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or in a crater of the Moon looking back at Earth.
The sublime can occur during something as mundane as looking at one's own hand against a bare wall but seeing the hand as something amazing, different, and awe-inspiring because, for perhaps a moment, the hand looks alien and it is awesome how it is "my hand".
If this makes no sense to the reader than take some time to imagine all the other things one could be, and that we happen to be the kinds of beings that can contemplate our very being as this type of being or as a human being.
The sublime experience is an experience that leaves an emotional imprint in the same way other powerful experiences can leave imprints.
But, the sublime experience is not the kind of experience we wish to forget or get over but rather the kind we wish to relive, relish, and bring forth into our consciousness.
For some, the sublime can be a smell or a sight or a sound.
Often, the first experience, or even the repeated experience, of beautiful music, for example, can be sublime.
What is sublime for one individual at one time and place may not be for another or even for the same being at another time and place.
The same experience can be sublime only once if that experience happens in a different psychological state.
Certain psychotropic chemicals can make the mundane sublime because they put the observer in a new and different relation to the observed, be it their own face in a mirror or a glimpse at a white bengal tiger at the zoo.
The sublime is fleeting in that it can often not be repeated or captured well in an individual's experience.
Looking for the sublime is often not the best way to find it but rather it is to be stumbled upon.
What is known to be an amazing experience is not necessarily sublime because this depends on so much that can not be determined before the experience itself takes place.
Sublime experiences are hard to capture or reconstruct in words or pictures because they fail to convey the emotional experience related to the pictures.
A video of skydyving in the majestic, blue ice-capped mountains does not convey the experience of skydiving in the majestic, blue ice-capped mountains.
