 Lecture 16 of the Varieties of Religious Experience This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James Lecture 16 Mysticism Over and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them open and unfinished until we should have come to the subject of mysticism. Some of you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiterated postponements. But now the hour has come when mysticism must be faced in good earnest and those broken threads wound up together. One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of consciousness. So for us, who in these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of mystical states will shed more light or darkness, I do not know. For my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely and I can speak of them only at second hand. And though forced to look upon the subject so externally, I will be as objective and receptive as I can and I think I shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in question and of the paramount importance of their function. First of all then I ask, what does the expression mystical states of consciousness mean? How do we part off mystical states from other states? The words mysticism and mystical are often used as terms of mere reproach to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and sentimental and without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers, a mystic is any person who believes in thought transference or spirit return. Employed in this way, the word has little value. There are too many less ambiguous synonyms. So to keep it useful by restricting it, I will do what I did in the case of the word religion and simply propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way we shall save verbal disputation and the recriminations that generally go therewith. One, ineffability. The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced. It cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity, mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony. One must have been in love oneself to understand a lover's state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment. Two, noetic quality. Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all in articulate though they remain, and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time. These two characteristics will entitle any state to be called mystical in the sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply remarked but are usually found. These are three, transiency. Mystical states cannot be sustained for long except in rare instances half an hour or at most an hour or two seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory, but when they recur it is recognized, and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance. Four, passivity. Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe, yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no significance for the subject's usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states, strictly so called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, however, difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures. These four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of consciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for careful study. Let it then be called the mystical group. Our next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples. Professional mystics at the height of their development have often elaborately organized experiences and a philosophy based thereupon. But you remember what I said in my first lecture. Phenomena are best understood when placed within their series, studied in their germ, and in their overripe decay, and compared with their exaggerated and degenerated kindred. The range of mystical experience is very wide, much too wide for us to cover in the time at our disposal. Yet the method of serial study is so essential for interpretation that if we really wish to reach conclusions we must use it. I will begin, therefore, with phenomena which claim no special religious significance, and end with those of which the religious pretensions are extreme. The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. I have heard that said all my life, we exclaim, but I never realized its full meaning until now. Luther said, quote, when a fellow monk one day repeated the words of the creed, I believe in the forgiveness of sins, I saw the scripture in an entirely new light, and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had found the door of paradise thrown wide open. Close, quote, this sense of deeper significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single words and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned to right. Footnote. Mesopotamia is the stock comic instance. An excellent old German lady who had done some traveling in her day used to describe to me her Zenzucht, that she might yet visit Philadelphia, whose wondrous name had always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster, it is said that, quote, single words, as calcedoni, or the names of ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him. At any time, the word hermit was enough to transport him. The words woods and forest would produce the most powerful emotion. Close, quote, end footnote. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young. Irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us, but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility. A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which sometimes sweeps over us of having been here before, as if at some indefinite past time in just this place with just these people, we were already saying just these things. As Tennyson writes, quote, Moreover, something is or seems that touches me with mystic gleams like glimpses of forgotten dreams, of something felt like something here, of something done I know not where, such as no language may declare. Close quote. Footnote, In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of himself as follows, quote, I have never had any revelations through anesthetics, but a kind of waking trance, this for a better word, I have frequently had, quiet up from boyhood when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till, all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality. Individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility. The loss of personality, if so it were, seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description, have I not said the state is utterly beyond words? Close quote. Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition, quote, By God Almighty, there is no delusion in the matter. It was no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind. Close quote. End footnote. Sir James Crichton Brown has given the technical name of dreamy states to the sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent consciousness. They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of perception which seems imminent, but which never completes itself. In Dr. Crichton Brown's opinion, they connect themselves with perplexed and scarred disturbances of self-consciousness, which occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that this learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an intrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along the downward ladder to insanity. Our path pursues the upward ladder, chiefly. The divergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of a phenomenon's connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to the context by which we set it off. Somewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with, in yet other dreamy states. Such feelings as these, which Charles Kingsley describes, are surely far from being uncommon, especially in youth. Quote. When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then, with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes. Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision except in a few hallowed moments? Close quote. A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J. A. Simons, and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to it from their own experience. writes Simons. Quote. Suddenly, at church or in company, or when I was reading, and always I think when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly, it took possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from anesthetic influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract self. The universe became without form and void of content. But self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then? The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that this state was the last state of the conscious self, the sense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the abyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal maya or illusion, stirred, or seemed to stir me up again. The return to ordinary conditions of sentient existence began by my first recovering the power of touch, and then by the gradual, though rapid influx of familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At last I felt myself once more a human being, and though the riddle of what is meant by life remained unsolved, I was thankful for this return from the abyss, this deliverance from so awful an initiation into the mysteries of skepticism. This trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I reached the age of twenty-eight. It served to impress upon my growing nature the fantasmal unreality of all the circumstances which contribute to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient being, which is the unreality, the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical self from which I issue, or the surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner self and build a self of flesh and blood conventionality. Again, are men the factors of some dream, the dreamlike unsubstantiality of which they comprehend at such eventful moments? What would happen if the final stage of the trance were reached? Close quote. In a recital like this there is certainly something suggestive of pathology. Footnote. Crichton Brown expressly says that Simon's quote, highest nerve centers were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental states which afflicted him so grievously. Close quote. Simon's was, however, a perfect monster of many-sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic gives no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save that Simon's complained occasionally, as all susceptible and ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to his life's mission. End footnote. The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him, for the moment, one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered, it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature, and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent, should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole. Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes at the moment of coming to, and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the various nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists, and I know more than one person who has persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation. Some years ago, I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whist all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question, for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region, though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world whose contradictoryness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles were melted into unity. Not only do they, as a contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, it itself, the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot totally escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear. To me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind. Footnote. What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected being with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept subliminal. The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level, the alfgaba of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel's intellect by mystical feeling. And footnote. I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anesthetic revelation. For them too it is a monastic insight in which the other in its various forms appears absorbed into the one. Writes one of them, quote, into this pervading genius we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all in God. There is no higher, no deeper, no other than a life in which we are founded. The one remains, the many change and pass, and each and every one of us is the one that remains. This is the ultimatum. As sure as being, whence is all our care, so sure is content beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is not above. Footnote. Mr. Blood has made several attempts to adumbrate the anesthetic revelation in pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately printed and distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Zenos Clark, a philosopher who died young at Amherst in the 80s, much lamented by those who knew him, was also impressed by the revelation. He once wrote to me, quote, in the first place Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if anything, non-emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood says, the one soul and sufficient insight why or not why, but how the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late. It is an initiation of the past. The real secret would be the formula by which the now keeps exfoliating out of itself yet never escapes. What is it indeed that keeps existence exfoliating? The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer. We simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two four? Because in fact four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a going. But the revelation adds, it goes because it is and was a going. You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts, the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it. But at the moment of recovery from anesthesis, just then, before starting on life, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting. The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out, and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in our destination, being already there, which may occur vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile upon the face of the revelation as we view it. It tells us that we are forever half a second too late. That's all. You could kiss your own lips and have all the fun to yourself, it says. If only you knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got round to them. Why don't you manage it somehow? Dialectically-minded readers of this ferago will at least recognize the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes as familiar. In his latest pamphlet, Tennyson's Trances and the Anesthetic Revelation, Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows. Quote, The Anesthetic Revelation is the initiation of man into the immemorial mystery of the open secret of being, revealed as the inevitable vortex of continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive is inherent. It is what it has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy, nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of. It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things, but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent, as if it should have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof. Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directly such a matter of course, so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs, that it inspires exaltation rather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identified with the Aboriginal and the Universal, but no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial, addemic surprise of life. Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise, the subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import with only this consolatory afterthought, that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, and destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in spiritual things. The lesson of one is central safety. The kingdom is within. All days are judgment days, but there can be no climacteric purpose of eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement. So may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity for which each of us stands. This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my first printed mention of it, I declared, the world is no more the alien terror that was taught me. Spurring the cloud grime and still sultry battlements went so lately Jehovah and thunders boomed. My gray gull lifts her wings against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye. Until now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know, as having known, the meaning of existence, the same center of the universe, at once the wonder and the assurance of the soul, for which the speech of reason has as yet no name but the anesthetic revelation. Close quote. I have considerably abridged the quotation. End footnote. This has the genuine religious mystic ring. I just now quoted J.A. Simons. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform as follows. Quote. After the choking and stifling has passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness. Then came flashes of intense light alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon me. I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the anesthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to return. The new sense of my relation to God began to fade. I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting and shrieked out. It is too horrible! It is too horrible! It is too horrible! Meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the ground and, last awoke, covered with blood, calling to the two surgeons who were frightened. Why did you not kill me? Why would you not let me die? Why? Only think of it. To have felt for that long, dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. Yet, this question remains. Is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded when my flesh was dead to impressions from without to the ordinary sense of physical relations was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God? Footnote. I subjoin, also bridging it, other interesting anesthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking ether for a surgical operation. I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered having heard it said that people learn through suffering, and in view of what I was seeing the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said aloud, to suffer is to learn. With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately preceded my real coming to. It only lasted a few seconds, and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words. A great being, or power, was traveling through the sky. His foot was on a kind of lightning, as a wheel is on a rail. It was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied in direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest points of this, as he passed, I saw. I understood for a moment things that I have not forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking, as I woke, that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and seen still more, and should probably have died. He went on, and I came too. In that moment, the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I understood them. This was what it had all meant. This was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I did not see God's purpose. I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, dominy known some digna. For I had been lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized that in that half hour under ether, I served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or than I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing something. I know not what or to whom, and that to that exact extent of my capacity for suffering. While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the love of God. Nothing but his relentlessness. And I heard an answer, which I could only catch saying, knowledge and love are one, and the measure is suffering. I give the words as they come to me. With that, I came finally to into what seemed a dream world compared with the reality of what I was leaving. And I saw that what would be called the cause of my experience was a slight operation under insufficient ether in a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in a common city street. If I had to formulate a few of the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as follows. The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness, the veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings, the passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does, the impossibility of discovery without its price. Finally, the excess of what the suffering seer or genius pays over what his generation gains. He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied, bringing a lack of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the lack away, dropping one rupee and says, that you may give them, that you have earned for them, the rest is for me. I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate. And so on. These things may seem to you delusions or truisms, but for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even such words as these has been given me by an aether dream. Close quote, end footnote. With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple. Simon's question takes us back to those examples which you will remember my quoting in the lecture on the reality of the unseen, of sudden realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape or another is not uncommon. writes Mr. Trine, quote, I know an officer on our police force who has told me that many times when off duty and on his way home in the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with his infinite power, and this spirit of infinite peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide. Close quote. Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such mystical moods. Footnote. I never lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood at the foot of the horseshoe falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the immensity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an atom too small for the notice of Almighty God. I subjoin another similar case from Starbucks manuscript collection. Quote. In that time, the consciousness of God's nearness came to me sometimes. I say God to describe what is indescribable. A presence, you might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of something bigger than I that was controlling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in nature. I exalted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all, the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree trunks, and so on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love that I was unhappy because that perception was not constant. Close quote. The cases quoted in my third lecture are still better ones of this type. In her essay, The Loss of Personality in the Atlantic Monthly, Ms. Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of the sense of self and the feeling of immediate unity with the object is due to the disappearance in these rapturous experiences of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the constant background of consciousness, which is the self, and the object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the reader to the highly instructive article which seems to me to throw light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to account for the rapture or the revelation value of the experience in the subject's eyes. End footnote. Most of the striking cases which I have collected have occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this fact in many passages of great beauty, this extract, for example, from Amiel's Journal in Time. Quote. Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which sometimes came to me in former days? One day in youth at sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Fusine, and again in the mountains under the noonday sun above Lavet, lying at the foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies, once more at night upon the shingly shore of the northern ocean, my back upon the sand, and my vision ranging through the milky way, such grand and spacious, immortal cosmogenic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns the infinite. Moments divine, ecstatic hours in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the blue firmament, instance of irresistible intuition in which one feels one's great self as the universe and calm as a god. What hours, what memories, the vestiges they leave behind are enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm as if they were visits of the Holy Ghost. Close quote. Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist, Malvita von Maisen. Quote. I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling, and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dufina, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is, to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the greats who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting. Thou, too, belongest to the company of those who overcome. Close quote. The well-known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical experience. Quote. I believe in you, my soul, loaf with me on the grass. Loose the stop from your throat. Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning, swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth. And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, and I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, and that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, and that a kelson of the creation is love. Close quote. Footnote. Whitman, in another place, expresses in a quieter way what was probably with him a chronic mystical perception. He writes, quote. There is, apart from mere intellect, in the makeup of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education, though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name. An intuition of the absolute balance in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world. A soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of a hunter. Of such soul-sight and root center for the mind, mere optimism explains only the surface. Close quote. Whitman charges it against Carlisle that he lacked this perception. End footnote. I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from the autobiography of J. Trevor. Quote. One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to accompany them, as though to leave the sunshine on the hills and go down there to the chapel would be, for the time, an act of spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the morning and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon lost my sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the road to the cat and the fiddle, and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in heaven, an inward state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light, as though the external condition had brought about the internal effect. A feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the scene around me stood out more clearly as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though with decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time after, only gradually passing away." The writer adds that having had further experiences of a similar sort, he now knows them well. He writes, quote, The spiritual life justifies itself to those who live it, but what can we say to those who do not understand? This, at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test. The highest experiences that I have had of God's presence have been rare and brief. Flashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim with surprise, God is here. Or conditions of exaltation and insight, less intense, and only gradually passing away. I have severely questioned the worth of these moments. To no soul have I named them, lest I should be building my life and work on mere fantasies of the brain. But I find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out today as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far-reaching significance are ever becoming more clear and evident. When they come, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I was not seeking them. What I was seeking with resolute determination was to live more intensely my own life as against what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in the most real seasons that the real presence came, and I was aware that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God. Even the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the existence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely specific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those who have them. A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Buck, gives to the more distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic consciousness. Says Dr. Buck, quote, cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances is not simply an expansion or extension of the self-conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the super addition of a function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as self-consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the higher animals. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos, there occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence, would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking and more important then is the enhanced intellectual power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already. Close quote. It was Dr. Buck's own experience of a typical onset of cosmic consciousness in his own person, which led him to investigate it in others. He has printed his conclusions in a highly interesting volume from which I take the following account of what occurred to him. Quote, I had spent the evening in a great city with two friends reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a handsome to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city. The next I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exaltation, of immense joyousness, accompanied, or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe was not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living presence. I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then. I saw that all men are immortal, that the cosmic order is such that without any per-adventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone, but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say, that consciousness has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost. We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness as it comes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as an element of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Muhammadans, and Christians all have cultivated it methodically. In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of Yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based on preserving exercise, and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline vary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The yogi, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed Samadhi, and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know. He learns, quote, that the mind itself has a higher state of existence beyond reason, a superconscious state, and that when the mind gets to that higher state, then his knowledge beyond reasoning comes. All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state, or Samadhi, just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which also is not accompanied with the feeling of egoism. There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves, for Samadhi lies potential in us all, for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and identical with the atman or universal soul. Close, quote. The Vedantists say that one may stumble into superconsciousness sporadically without the previous discipline, but it is then impure. Their test of its purity, like our test of religion's value, is empirical. Its fruits must be good for life. When a man comes out of Samadhi, they assure us that he remains enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint. His whole character changed, his life changed, illumined. Footnote. A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of yoga with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible by us, says, quote. It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy men. Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his thoughts and his body, he grows into a character. By the subjection of his impulses and propensities to his will, in the fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a personality hard to influence by others, and thus almost the opposite of what we usually imagine a medium, so-called, or psychic subject, to be. Close, quote. And footnote. The Buddhists use the word Samadhi as well as the Hindus, but tyana is their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be four stages recognized in tyana. The first stage comes through concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire, but not discernment or judgment. It is still intellectual. In the second stage, the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity remains. In the third stage, the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins, along with memory and self-consciousness. In the fourth stage, the indifference, memory, and self-consciousness are perfected. Just what memory and self-consciousness mean in this connection is doubtful. They cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life. Higher stages still of contemplation are mentioned, a region where there exists nothing, and where the mediator says, there exists absolutely nothing, and stops. Then he reaches another region where he says, there are neither ideas nor absence of ideas, and stops again. Then another region where, having reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops finally. This would seem to be not yet nirvana, but as close an approach to it as this life affords. In the Mohammedan world, the Sufi sect and various Dervish bodies are the possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to those initiated. To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds, I will quote a Muslim document and pass away from the subject. Al Ghassali, a Persian philosopher and theologian who flourished in the 11th century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Muslim church, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside of Christian literature. Strange that a species of book so abundant among ourselves should be so little represented elsewhere, the absence of strictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely literary student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness of religions other than the Christian. M. Schmulders has translated a part of Al Ghassali's autobiography into French. Says the Muslim author, quote, The science of the Sufis aims at detaching the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of the divine being. Theory, being more easy for me than practice, I read certain books until I understand all that can be learned by study and hearsay. Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is just what no study can grasp but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the soul. How great, for example, is the difference between knowing the definitions of health, of satiety, with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy or filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists, as being a state occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach, and being drunk effectively. Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor what makes it interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing, whilst the physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness consists, and what are its predisposing conditions. Similarly, there is a difference between knowing the nature of abstinence and being abstinent, or having one soul detached from the world. Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but what was left could be learned neither by study nor through the ears, but solely by giving oneself up to ecstasy and leading a pious life. Reflecting on my situation, I found myself tied down by a multitude of bonds, temptations on every side. Considering my teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself struggling with all my might to achieve glory and to spread my name. Here follows an account of his six months' hesitation to break away from the condition of his life at Baghdad, at the end of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue. Then feeling my own weakness and having entirely given up my own will, I repaired to God like a man in distress who has no more resources. He answered as he answers the wretch who invokes him. My heart no longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory, wealth, and my children. So I quitted Baghdad, and reserving from my fortune only what was indispensable for my subsistence. I distributed the rest. I went to Syria where I remained about two years with no other occupation than living in retreat and solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training myself to purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare my heart for meditating on God, all according to the methods of the Sufis as I had read of them. This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude and to complete the purification of my heart and fit it for meditation. But the vicissitudes of the times, the affairs of the family, the need of subsistence, changed in some respects my primitive resolve and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life. I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few single hours. Nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this state. Every time that the accidents led me astray, I sought to return, and in this situation I spent ten years. During this solitary state, things were revealed to me which it is impossible either to describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path of God. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whether internal or external, they are illumined by the light which proceeds from the prophetic source. The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality, this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The intuitions and all that precede are, so to speak, only the threshold for those who enter. From the beginning, revelations take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis see before them, wilts wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets. They hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport rises from the perception of forms and figures to a degree which escapes all expression, and which no man may seek to give an account of without his words involving sin. Whosoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be sure of its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the Sufi say. As there are men endowed with the sensitive faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects of the pure understanding, so there are intellectual men who reject and avoid the things perceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by narration and hearsay. Yet God has brought prophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a man who was himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are people who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men and who in dreams yet perceive things that are hidden he would deny it and give his reasons. Nevertheless his arguments would be refuted by actual experience. Wherefore just as the understanding is the stage of human life in which an eye opens to discern various intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true nature since one knows only what one can comprehend. But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception of which one touched the objects with one's hand. This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport but for no one else. In this as I have said it resembles the knowledge given to us in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. Thought with its remoteness and abstractness has often enough in the history of philosophy been contrasted unfavorably with sensation. It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God's knowledge cannot be discursive but must be intuitive that is must be constructed more after the pattern of what in ourselves is called immediate feeling than after that of proposition and judgment. But our immediate feelings have no content but what the five senses supply and we have seen and shall see again that mystics may emphatically deny that the senses play any part in the very highest type of knowledge which their transports yield. End of lecture 16