Chapter XXII (part 6)

It is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They all agree that the "more" really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal God or gods while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency. . . . It is when they treat of the experience of "union" with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and Karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on inveterate disputes. At the end of my lecture on Philosophy I held out the notion that an p. 277 impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate on terms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general belief. Let me then propose as an hypothesis that whatever it may be on its farther side, the "more" with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. The conscious person is continuous with a wider self. . . . The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the super-natural region. . . . We be, long to it, in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to thy, visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. . . . The communion with this invisible world is a real process with real results. . . . . . . Personal religious experience has its roots and centre in mystical states of consciousness. ______ But what, after all, is mysticism? Returning to the terminology established in the foregoing chapters, we may say that "mystical states of consciousness" are closely bound up with knowledge received under conditions of expanded receptivity. Until quite recently psychology did not recognize the reality of the mystical experience and regarded all mystical states as pathological ones —unhealthy conditions of the normal consciousness. Even now, many positivist-psychologists hold to this opinion, embracing in one common classification real mystical states, pseudo-mystical perversions of the usual state, purely psychopathic states and more or less conscious deceit. This of course can be of no assistance to a correct understanding of the question. Before going further let us therefore establish certain criteria for the identification of real mystical states: Prof. James enumerates the following: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity. But some of these characteristics belong also to simple emotional states , and he fails to define exactly how mystical states can be distinguished from emotional ones of analogous character. p. 278 Considering mystical states as "knowledge by expanded conscious. ness," it is possible to give quite definite criteria for their discernment and their differentiation from the generality of psychic experiences. 1. Mystical states give knowledge WHICH NOTHING ELSE CAN GIVE. 2. Mystical states give knowledge of the real world with all its signs and characteristics. 3. The mystical states of men of different ages and different peoples exhibit an astonishing similarity, sometimes amounting to complete identity. 4. The results of the mystical experience are entirely illogical from our ordinary point of view. They are super-logical , i.e., Tertium Organum , WHICH IS THE KEY TO MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE, is applicable to them in all its entirety. ______ The last-named criterion is especially important—the illogicality of the data of mystical experience forced science to repudiate them.