The first time I crested a dune and saw the ocean it changed the way I understood and fathomed space and my physical sense of the world. I can't tell you the why of it, but something in the experience broadened my understanding on a foundational level. This is part of the difficulty in attempting to translate a transcendent moment into the artifice, helpful as it often is, of language.
:think: I'll keep attempting it then...My wife once asked me, irritably and in the midst of an illness that had us both hacking feverishly about our home, how I managed to remain in good spirits. I responded that it isn't something one does, but something one is...how is that applicable here? The answer is that there you appear to be looking for a mechanism to the thing when the thing and mechanism were one and the same. Just as the confrontation/observation was a clear impression of God in the moment that required nothing of me but recognition, so the nature of His expression was unmistakably, integrally a part of the experience.
I rather like approaching it in fits and starts this way. Each time I do I think I capture something different but true to the experience. It will never be a traditional narrative. I don't think it can be. What happened to me in the moment and over the course of my long, dark night isn't the stuff of simple chronological telling and neatly tied epiphany. I don't see how it could be.