Mystical Experience

I

WHILE I am writing this, the world seems to be collapsing into a primitive chaos of revolution and destruction. It appears to be reverting to a barbarism of hate and blind self-destructive conflict. The discourse on every hand is about bombing planes, resources of gasoline, the explosive power of chemicals, the control of naval and air bases, the conscription of men, and the banning of the sale of scrap iron. What a time this is to talk of the soul’s discovery of God! In the midst of the destruction of the capitals of the world, the cry of mangled children and the waste of the supreme creations of genius, who has an ear for the dream of the soul’s communion with Eternal Love and Beauty?

Yet it has been, strangely enough, in such epochs of desolation and confusion that the mystics of history have borne their testimony to the Reality of God and to the resources by which men live. We cannot prepare ourselves for the tasks of rebuilding the shattered world by merely knowing facts, the facts of history and the facts of our laboratories: we must get back to the springs and sources of life, to an experience that fortifies and undergirds us for life, for living. It is now if ever that we need the voice of those who, ‘listening to the inner flow of things, speak to the age out of Eternity.’

A great many persons in the history of our race have found themselves in direct communion with an Over-World of Spirit. They have felt resources of life flood into themselves. They have been invaded with life from beyond the margins of themselves. They have in many instances been persons of balance and sanity and possessed of minds of first rank. One of the most extraordinary features of this experience is the fact that those who have it feel as though their specific gravity were suddenly lightened and, in George Fox’s phrase, as though they were ‘atop of the world.’

If we are to give credence to experiences of that sort, we must stake out large claims for the domain of the soul of man. There would be no use talking of such an experience if it were taken as settled that the only avenue of approach to the mind of man is through the highway of the senses. If it were true, as John Locke supposed, that there can be nothing in the mind that has not been in the senses, then the testimony of mystics, however sane they might otherwise appear, is the testimony of a wishful thinker. But that philosophy, that view of life, is bankrupt and has long been in the hands of a receiver. Leibnitz very wisely made a notable addition to the current phrase, ‘There is nothing in the mind [Intellect] that has not been in the senses,’ by supplying the transforming words: ‘except the mind itself.’ This addition of the mind itself in all the processes of knowledge is of the utmost significance.

When we pass from the superficial theory of the mind as a receptacle, as a kind of bird cage, to the true conception of mind as self-conscious spirit with capacity for free creative scope, the change is a momentous one. Mind as we actually know it is self-transcendent. It sees and goes beyond what is before its footlights, what is ‘given’ to it. It is not only receptive of sense data, but it has its own range of self-activity and organizing power. It produces from within ‘free ideas’ and the non-sensuous universal through which it organizes and expands its experience and makes it ‘knowledge’ of the order of truth. There is no knowledge until the mind has done its creative organizing work and rises to the insight, I know this. The mind cannot and does not stop satisfied with anything merely ‘given.’ It has a thrust, an urge for more, for a beyond. If we expect to arrive at any significant goal of life, we must first of all pass over from the lower-case conceptions of mind, as a causal product of the material order and a mere enlargement of the animal type, to a higher-case interpretation of mind of unique spirit scope. This change of outlook is not got by a leap in the dark, but by a more careful diagnosis of what is involved in mind itself in its profoundest operations.

This insistence upon the unique operation of the mind itself does not imply any tendency to belittle the sphere of the senses. The loss of a sense is a real limitation of the range and scope of experience. There was apparently a primitive type of perception before specific senses had emerged and developed. The primitive creature who had only this undifferentiated form of perception ‘ saw’ and ‘ felt ‘ All-over, as Xenophanes would say. It would be a dim, vague awareness, a sense of ‘acquaintance,’ without specific knowledge in particular about the object. There might be life reactions, under such conditions, but no possibility of the accumulation and transmission of knowledge about the world in which the primitive creature was living and moving and having its being. It would seem perhaps, to one committed to the theory that senses are the only organs of experience, that the person pretending to communion and correspondence with an Over-World of higher reality, with no specific organ for it, would be as unfitted for such correspondence as the primitive creature was who reacted to his world ‘all over.’

II

But the parallel is by no means complete. The external world, as we know it, is a world characterized by quantities and qualities which could, as far as one can see, be apprehended only through specific senses. Not to possess senses would mean, to be sure, not to know the external world. If we lost our power to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, to feel resistance, we should lose our well-known world — we should indeed be ‘moving about in worlds not realized.’

It is probably true, too, that we should not find ourselves either, should not know ourselves as spirit, if we did not develop our personality in and through relations of give-and-take to a world of nature. It is there that we get our discipline. It is there that we get our intellectual nurture. That is the locus in which we find our values of life. It is there we get our stock of working knowledge. But in so far as we find ourselves and know ourselves as spirit it is not through the approach of the senses. We have no senses for the apprehension of self. It is through a direct awareness, ‘knowledge of acquaintance,’ that we know ourselves. I do not arrive at the knowledge that I am I by looking in a mirror, or by grasping my foot by my hands, but by an incontrovertible and irreducible inner experience, which is utterly unique. Mind as spirit in its essential nature is self-conscious as well as merely conscious. It knows itself in its own sphere and in ways quite unlike the way of sense knowledge. When the level of self-consciousness is reached there is a unique transition from all lower types of consciousness. Something utterly new comes into operation. Here on this new level is a type of mind that knows itself.

There does not seem to be any insuperable reason why spirit of our type may not meet and directly commune with Spirit of the eternal type. It becomes merely a question of evidence of fact. If telepathy between human minds were a common and well-attested mode of communication, direct correspondence between minds would be taken for granted without further argument. But telepathy at best is a rare occurrence, still questioned by strict scientists, and at the present stage of verification a dubious ground of support. It is a fact, however, that we recognize other minds. We are in rapport with other minds, by methods which transcend sense and lie beyond mere inference. The consciousness of ‘self’ and the consciousness of ‘other’ are born together, and we cannot use one of them as the searchlight to find the other. There comes a leap of ‘ acknowledgment’ of other persons which is of a very different order from our attainment of the sense of the reality of external objects. Deep calls unto deep within us and like knows like. If it is granted that we know ourselves by an irreducible and incontrovertible experience, and if we know other minds by an equally irreducible and incontrovertible operation, there would seem to be ground for the expectation that spirit would have mutual and reciprocal correspondence with an Over-World of Spirit.

From time immemorial persons have been aware of correspondence with a Beyond, with a More than themselves. Sometimes it has seemed like an invasion, an incursion into the individual mind from beyond its margins, bringing a sense of exaltation or rapture; and sometimes it has seemed as though it were a thrust of the individual mind through a gate, or drawbridge, into the central Keep of the universe, with a corresponding sense of exaltation.

Saint Teresa in her Autobiography has given many accounts of this first type of invasion, ‘A rapture,’ she writes, ‘is absolutely irresistible. It comes, in general, as a shock [that is, as something unexpected], quick and sharp, before you can collect your thoughts, or help yourself in any way, and you see and feel it as a strong eagle, rising upward and carrying you away on its wings.’

Richard of St. Victor in the twelfth century speaks of his experience of having his mind ‘rapt into the secret closet of the divine privacy, while it is on all sides encircled by the conflagration of divine love, and it is intimately penetrated and set on fire through and through. It [the mind] strips off self and puts on a certain divine condition, and being configured (or transfigured) to the beauty it is gazing upon, it passes into a new kind of glory.’

The experience of the celebrated mystic of the Eastern Church, Saint Simon the New Theologian, is an excellent typical illustration of invasion. ‘Suddenly,’ he says, ‘God came and united Himself to me in a manner quite ineffable; He entered into every part of my being, as fire penetrates iron, or as light streams through glass. . . . I am filled with light and glory; my face shines like that of my Beloved and all my members glow with heavenly light.’

There is a remarkable passage of this first type in the Diary of Josiah Royce’s mother, amid the perils of her pioneer journey across the continent. Face to face with an appalling danger, she suddenly found herself environed by invisible forces. She says: ‘Whence this calm strength which girded me round so surely? . . . I had known what it was to believe in God and to pray that He would never leave us. Now He came so near that I no longer simply believed in Him, but knew His presence there, giving strength for whatever might come. . . . That calm strength, that certainty of One near and all sufficient hushed and cheered me.’

Here is the testimony of a young man who was sentenced to an English prison because he refused to take military service;—

A CELL, POLICE STATION, IN ENGLAND
September 3, 1941
I have just had a wonderful experience. I cannot adequately describe it. I have gradually been becoming aware of a Presence in the cell, and suddenly the whole room was charged with infinite Power. I was as if in the midst of a vast congregation, yet utterly intimate. The place was illuminated and yet not physically so. The emotion of my happiness was so powerful that it struck me through and through, and I had a very storm of weeping in my weakness. Yet through it I have gained a profound strength. How shall I describe what is beyond words? This cell is now a holy place to me, and I am overcome with an impulse to glorify and worship. I have had no difficulties yet, but I know now how the saints were upheld whatever their condition. In the words of George Fox ‘I had great openings.’ Only those will understand who have been through it themselves.

Saint Augustine in his famous biographical account of what happened at Ostia just before the death of his mother, Saint Monica, is a good illustration of the second type, which I have called the ‘thrust’ from within. ‘We passed,’ he says, ‘from stage to stage through all material things, through heaven itself, whence sun and moon and stars shed their radiance upon earth. And now we began a more inward ascent, by thinking and speaking and marvelling at Thy works. And so we came to our own minds and we passed beyond them. . . . And as we talked and yearned after the Life itself we touched it and hardly touched it — with the utmost leap (toto ictu) of our heart.’ In an earlier passage of the Confessions, Saint Augustine describes how step by step he passed from external things and bodily sense, from the changeable to the unchangeable and ‘thus with the flash of one trembling glance the soul’s inward faculty arrived at That which is.’

Nobody has given a better account of this second type than that of Jacob Boehme the Silesian shoemaker — the most remarkable of all Protestant mystics. He says in the Aurora: ‘While I was in affliction and trouble, I elevated my spirit, and earnestly raised it up unto God, as with a great stress and onset, lifting up my whole heart and mind and will and resolution to wrestle with the love and mercy of God, and not give over unless He blessed me — then the Spirit did break through. When in my resolved zeal I made such an assault, storm and onset upon God, as if I had more reserves of virtue and power ready, with a resolution to hazard my life upon it, suddenly my spirit did break through the Gate not without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and I reached to the innermost Birth of the Deity and there I was embraced with love as a bridegroom embraces his bride.’

Boehme’s account implies throughout a mutual and reciprocal correspondence between the human spirit and the divine Spirit, and that would be true of almost all accounts of both these types of experience. They differ only in the degree of the objective or subjective emphasis.

William Pepperell Montague’s experience does not bring the assurance of contact with ultimate Reality to the same extent as these other testimonies do. It has the restraint of the philosopher. For that very reason it is impressive. ‘I was walking home to lunch in fine spirits,’ he says after a lively discussion on Kant. ‘Suddenly I got the strangest experience. ... It has meant more to me than anything else that has happened in my life. The feeling came as I was crossing a brook, and it was as if I could look down through each point of space and perceive a kind of well of indefinite depth. The new realm was like a fourth dimension of space, and yet as contained within each point it seemed to be a lesser thing than a spatial dimension.’ It was a point, but not a zero or an empty point of space. It was an interior domain of intensity. It seemed to him to be the realm of the psychical, or of the spiritual, with interior depth, and the philosopher ‘went home in a daze of ecstasy.’

Most persons who live deeply and effectively have mystical moments, when they feel like saying, as Hugh Walpole said in Rome: ‘This is the best moment of my life. I shall never be so happy again.’ Walpole does not claim to be a mystic, nor to be ‘a very spiritual man,’ and yet he closes The Roman Fountain with the impressive words: ‘This book is an honest record of the moments when the writer . . . perceived the strong, unchecked, rich, glorious undercurrent of the inner, outer, wider, fuller life of the Spirit.’ He continues: ‘That life immediate current history cannot terminate or destroy. . . . I do not know how it may be with the world six months or a year from now, . . . but I do know that the inner life of man will be continuing richly, rewardingly, often joyfully, as it has always continued, even though London is in ruins and we are living, most of us, on acorns in stout underground cages.’

III

These two divergent aspects of mystical experience are very well brought to light by the two rival words for love which have run through the whole history of Christian life and thought. Saint Paul took an ancient Greek word for love (Agapē), often used in former times with a lower significance, and raised it to a unique height of meaning. It became, especially in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, a new word and a new wonder, the full glory of which Christians themselves are only beginning to grasp. Agapē lies at the heart of Christ’s life and in His parables. It is ‘the thing itself’ which we call Christianity. It expresses the movement of love downward, from the Heart of God. It is the new splendor in God, the immense outreach of grace, which Christ has revealed. It is the perpendicular confrontation of man by the unfathomable love of God. It is spontaneous, uncalculating, adventuring, sacrificial love, giving itself for others, not in return for merit, or desert, but just for love’s sake. We love, if in the true sense we do love, because the birth of God has taken place in us, ‘for God is Agapē.’

Plato wrought a similar transformation in the other Greek word for love, Eros. This word usually meant desire for the opposite sex — ‘the maiden passion for a maid’; it was essentially desire for something for the sake of the self. It was egocentric love. Eros, unlike Agapē, moves from below up. Plato, in a passage in the Symposium (192-212), which in its glory of style and beauty is one of the noblest pieces of prose in all literature, raised this Eros type of love to its loftiest meaning. Here Eros is the passion in us for eternal beauty, for eternal reality. We are here in this lower world of sense, — far from the true, the beautiful, and the good, — but we have in our inmost soul [Nous] something divine which makes us long for our true home, our dear Fatherland. This is the noblest message of Greek thought. It was caught in its fullest sense by Saint Augustine and expressed in imperishable fashion in the opening words of his Confessions: ‘Thou, O God, hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.’ That is the very heart of the urge of upward-striving mysticism.

There are, then, the two ways: the way down (Agapē) and the way up (Eros), the double search. Both ways are essential to vital Christianity, but the most amazing thing is this Agapē passion in the heart of God which the greatest mystics have discovered and experienced.

The major difficulty these types of ‘direct experience’ have to face in the rough-and-tumble world, and even more in the world of exact science and in the laboratory of the psychologist, is the difficulty of transmission, of establishing validity, of making an inner, private experience overt and explicit and universally convincing. A drama which is enacted in the soul of man, from the very nature of the case, cannot be made public for spectators in a stadium or be put on exhibition for a general audience. The experience I am talking about is not a conceptual type of knowledge, which can be brought under universal categories and transmitted to everybody. It is rather a penetration of spirit through intimate fusion with the Object, by which the mind enters the stream of Life itself and shares in its flow. It is knowledge of acquaintance which comes ‘lifewise,’ and it is tested by the superabundance of life which attends it, the increased vitality, the extraordinary dynamic quality of it, the flare of radiant energy that comes with it, rather than by the new stock of ideas which can be communicated to others.

This must not be taken to mean that the experience in question is reduced to a ‘feeling’ or an emotion, or the active push of the will. The innermost nature of the whole undifferentiated self is in operation. It is the emergence of a new and deeper level of consciousness rather than the functioning of one aspect of mind. There is a matrix of the life of the mind [Nous] in us which underlies ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ and ‘willing,’ out of which these processes emerge. Knowdedge and action always involve a wider context of experience. There is a foundational mental structure in us, deeper than reasoning or arguing or proving, which is the mother ground of our forms and categories. In this matrix consciousness we transcend, or fuse together, subject and object, and live and move and possess ourselves in these moments of identity, which all great poets and creators as well as mystics experience.

My late friend, Professor Charles A. Bennett of Yale University, called this type of experience the ‘total-working’ of the mind, as contrasted with the ‘partworking’ which characterizes most of our mental operations. Bennett gives the following account of the ‘ total-working experience’: (1) In it] the mind apprehends as a whole. It is synoptic. It is intuitive, not analytic; noetic, not discursive. (2) The knowledge it confers is inarticulate and cannot readily be translated into conceptual terms. (3) Yet this knowledge is destined to become articulate, for the two types of knowledge are not incompatible, though they are distinguishable. (4) Even when inarticulate it is positive, though it is the fruitful source of negations and exclusions. We know what we do not mean or do not want.

The greatest of the mystics of history have assumed quite naturally a matrix Life, something like this, in God Himself. For Plotinus it was the undifferentiated One, from which Nous, or Spirit, emerges. The ultimate Real is thus for him beyond thought. For Eckhart, the master mystic of the Middle Ages, the Godhead (Gottheit) is the Eternal Ground out of which the personal God (Gott) has come forth into being. And the original doctrine of the Trinity, of course, as the Fathers conceived it, presupposes a similar spiritual movement, or ‘procession,’ in God. Jacob Boehme, the master mystic of Protestantism, affirms an ineffable principle as the foundational basis of the divine genesis, which he calls the Ungrund, the unoriginated origin, in the unfathomable Depths. And Spinoza, both philosopher and mystic, contrasts the Natura Naturans, the eternally creating Nature, with the Natura Naturata, the created or produced Nature. This, of course, is speculation and not experience, but I am convinced that life itself reveals in us, as finite spirits, what I have called ‘matrix consciousness.’ Wordsworth has referred to it in a famous passage: —

I am standing forth as a champion of the mystic’s experience, not because we need such fortification in this crisis and not because of the comfort and serenity which that experience brings. I am profoundly interested in it because I am convinced that at its highest and best it is a pathway to the truth of life and the reality of God. I believe and am persuaded that mind as self-conscious spirit has, as it emerges into being, brought with it something whose essential aspects are akin to eternal reality, that like knows like, and that, however far inland we may be from the shores of the Fatherland, ever the twain — spirit with Spirit — may meet.

We have accumulated a vast amount of theoretical knowledge about color, and blind Helen Keller knows as much of this theoretical knowledge of retinal rods and cones, of vibrations, of molecular processes, and of specific brain centres, as most of us do, but what she lacks forever is the experience of color, and she is bound to miss the knowledge of what it is in its ‘first intention.’ All our genuine knowledge carries implications and intimations of an ultimate Reality as the source and ground of what appears. Our philosophies and our theologies and our ethics never terminate at the frontier of what is seen and known and described. They are concerned with What Essentially Is. And every sound conclusion which they bring us from their profound researches is a welcome addition to our growing knowledge. But we should be much poorer than we are if we lacked the testimony of the mystics, who tell what they have seen and heard and handled of the Word of Life.

As we have seen, the truth which the mystic sees cannot be objectified and expressed in concepts and so passed on, as the discovery of a lode of iron ore or of gold deposit could be communicated. What happens rather is that the direct contact with the Fountain-Source of life heightens the whole significance of life, reorganizes the content of the mind, melts and fuses the materials of thought into new form and brings fresh creative power. This is seen especially in the lives of the greatest prophets of the race. They did not receive magically communicated messages or forecasts of the future. There was rather a creative fire kindled in their souls. They became the spiritual statesmen of their critical epoch. They saw God and then saw what the nation ought to be and do. Their contact with eternal Reality made them see the futility of petrified religion and dead forms and gave them power to order and marshal their ideas of life in fresh and creative ways very much as a genius like Shakespeare takes the material of an old play and remolds it into immortal form. How it happens nobody explains to us further. We stop with the word ‘genius.’ The way of mysticism is essentially the way of entrance into life. Religion on this level takes on new and final meaning because one has now entered the gate of life. All questions find their answer not in intellectual theories, but through the direct operation of life itself.

What I am concerned to maintain in this essay is the thesis that mystical experience may quite naturally be expected to occur from the fundamental nature of mind as self-conscious spirit in relation with its ground and origin in the Over-World of Spirit. It is not, or at least need not be, some rare occurrence due to a pathological condition in the recipient. It is not confined in its milder forms to an unusual genius type. It is not an affair of a few rare souls, who possess a miraculous gift or endowment. It is the way rather of health and normality. The range and quality of the experience vary from low to high, from slight to momentous, as is true also in the sphere of æsthetics or mathematics, but some sort of commerce, of mutual and reciprocal correspondence, with the Beyond attaches to our essential nature as persons. Josiah Royce’s mother did not think of herself as a ‘mystic.’ Hugh Walpole did not claim to belong in the class of the spiritually gifted. William Pepperell Montague made no pretensions to unusual religious qualifications. But they all three had moments that meant more to them than all the rest of their lives. I find such persons everywhere I go. They are in every church and in no church at all. They are in towns and cities, on country farms, in CCC camps and in the Army. They are laboratory professors and they are college students. They are rich and they are poor. They are good-livers and they are hardy ascetics. But they have, one and all, learned that they do not live by bread alone, but have resources from the World beyond the world of space and time, and their ‘ best moments of life’ are times of spiritual fecundity, infused by contact with a Beyond.

Aldous Huxley in that remarkable book, Grey Eminence, raises the question, ‘Why shouldn’t Mysticism die out?’ as he thinks (I believe wrongly) that it seemed likely to do at the end of the seventeenth century. ‘What use is it,’ he asks, ‘when it is alive?’

‘The answer to these questions,’ he proceeds to say, ‘is that where there is no vision, the people perish; and that, if those who are the salt of the earth lose their savour, there is nothing to keep that earth disinfected, nothing to prevent it from falling into complete decay. The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion. A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.’