Chapter XIV: Part 14

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.

1. _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 one’s self 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.

2. _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 inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after‐time.

These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found. These are:—

3. _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.

4. _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.

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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 over‐ripe 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’ve heard that said all my life,” we exclaim, “but I never realized its full meaning until now.” “When a fellow‐monk,” said Luther, “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.”(224) This sense of deeper significance is not confined to rational propositions. Single words,(225) and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. 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:

“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.”(226)

Sir James Crichton‐Browne has given the technical name of “dreamy states” to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent consciousness.(227) 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‐Browne’s opinion they connect themselves with the perplexed and scared 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:—

“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?”(228)

A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J. A. Symonds; and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to it from their own experience.

“Suddenly,” writes Symonds, “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
anæsthetic 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 phantasmal 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 these 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 dream‐like unsubstantiality
of which they comprehend at such eventful moments? What would
happen if the final stage of the trance were reached?”(229)

In a recital like this there is certainly something suggestive of pathology.(230) 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 anæsthetics, 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 veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is 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, whilst 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 contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but _one of the species_, the nobler and better one, _is 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 wholly 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.(231)

I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anæsthetic revelation. For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the _other_ in its various forms appears absorbed into the One.

“Into this pervading genius,” writes one of them, “we pass,
forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God.
There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the 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.”(232)

This has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A. Symonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as follows:—

“After the choking and stifling had 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
anæsthetics, 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 at 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?’ 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?”(233)

With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple. Symonds’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.

“I know,” writes Mr. Trine, “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 this 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.”(234)

Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such mystical moods.(235) 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 Intime:—

“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 Faucigny; and again
in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, 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, cosmogonic 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; ... instants of irresistible intuition in which
one feels one’s self great 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.”(236)

Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:—

“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 Dauphiné, 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 great
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.’ ”(237)

The well‐known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical experience.

“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.”(238)

I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from the Autobiography of J. Trevor.(239)

“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 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 and 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.

“The spiritual life,” he writes, “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. These 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 phantasies of the brain. But I
find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out to‐day
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
came, 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.”(240)

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. Bucke, gives to the more distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic consciousness. “Cosmic consciousness in its more striking instances is not,” Dr. Bucke says, “simply an expansion or extension of the self‐ conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition 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 than 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.”(241)

It was Dr. Bucke’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:—

“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 hansom 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 exultation, 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 is 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
peradventure 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.”(242)

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, Mohammedans, 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 persevering 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 _samâdhi_, “and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know.” He learns—

“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 this knowledge beyond reasoning comes....
All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us
scientifically to the superconscious state or samâdhi.... 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 Samâdhi 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.”(243)

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 Samâdhi, they assure us that he remains “enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character changed, his life changed, illumined.”(244)

The Buddhists use the word “samâdhi” as well as the Hindus; but “dhyâna” is their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be four stages recognized in dhyâna. 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 meditator 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 Nirvâna, but as close an approach to it as this life affords.(245)

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 Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.

Al‐Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished in the eleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem 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. Schmölders has translated a part of Al‐Ghazzali’s autobiography into French:(246)—

“The Science of the Sufis,” says the Moslem author, “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 understood 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’s 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 one’s self 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 conditions of his life at Bagdad, 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 Bagdad, 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,
whilst 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.

“Whoever 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
Sufis say. As there are men endowed only 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 a 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, as if one touched the
objects with one’s hand.”(247)

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.

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In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although many of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes of the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based upon them, in which everything legitimate finds its place.(248) The basis of the system is “orison” or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul towards God. Through the practice of orison the higher levels of mystical experience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind‐curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life.

The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind’s detachment from outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises recommend the disciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to imagine holy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semi‐ hallucinatory mono‐ideism—an imaginary figure of Christ, for example, coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism.(249) But in certain cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of them, thus describes the condition called the “union of love,” which, he says, is reached by “dark contemplation.” In this the Deity compenetrates the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul—

“finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the
sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling
with which she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of
God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the
sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other
circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and
the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor
impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness,
although the mysterious and sweet‐tasting wisdom comes home so
clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a
certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can
understand it, use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it,
nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a
mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness
when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the
divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and
supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both
inner and outer, and impose silence upon them.... The soul then
feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no
created thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert,
desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this
abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the
well‐springs of the comprehension of love, ... and recognizes,
however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how
utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek
to discourse of divine things by their means.”(250)

I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian mystical life.(251) Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and moreover, I confess that the subdivisions and names which we find in the Catholic books seem to me to represent nothing objectively distinct. So many men, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.

The cognitive aspects of them, their value in the way of revelation, is what we are directly concerned with, and it is easy to show by citation how strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depths of truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts in describing such conditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of one of the highest of them, the “orison of union.”

“In the orison of union,” says Saint Teresa, “the soul is fully
awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this
world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union
lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if
she would, she could not think of any single thing. Thus she needs
to employ no artifice in order to arrest the use of her
understanding: it remains so stricken with inactivity that she
neither knows what she loves, nor in what manner she loves, nor
what she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the
world and lives solely in God.... I do not even know whether in
this state she has enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she
has not; or at least that if she does breathe, she is unaware of
it. Her intellect would fain understand something of what is going
on within her, but it has so little force now that it can act in
no way whatsoever. So a person who falls into a deep faint appears
as if dead....

“Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself,
suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees,
hears, nor understands, so long as she is united with God. But
this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is.
God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a
way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for
her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth
remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years
should pass without the condition returning, she can neither
forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you,
nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and
understand that she has been in God, since during the union she
has neither sight nor understanding, I reply that she does not see
it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has
returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which
abides with her and which God alone can give her. I knew a person
who was ignorant of the truth that God’s mode of being in
everything must be either by presence, by power, or by essence,
but who, after having received the grace of which I am speaking,
believed this truth in the most unshakable manner. So much so
that, having consulted a half‐learned man who was as ignorant on
this point as she had been before she was enlightened, when he
replied that God is in us only by ‘grace,’ she disbelieved his
reply, so sure she was of the true answer; and when she came to
ask wiser doctors, they confirmed her in her belief, which much
consoled her....

“But how, you will repeat, _can_ one have such certainty in
respect to what one does not see? This question, I am powerless to
answer. These are secrets of God’s omnipotence which it does not
appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the
truth; and I shall never believe that any soul who does not
possess this certainty has ever been really united to God.”(252)

The kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways, whether these be sensible or supersensible, are various. Some of them relate to this world,—visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events, for example; but the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical.

“Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single
hour of meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about
heavenly things than all the teachings of all the doctors put
together could have taught him.... One day in orison, on the steps
of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner
the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another
occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and
it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to
the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery
of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such
sweetness, that the mere memory of it in after times made him shed
abundant tears.”(253)

Similarly with Saint Teresa. “One day, being in orison,” she
writes, “it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all
things are seen and contained in God. I did not perceive them in
their proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of
a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed upon my
soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the
Lord has granted me.... The view was so subtile and delicate that
the understanding cannot grasp it.”(254)

She goes on to tell how it was as if the Deity were an enormous and sovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions were contained in such a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before. On another day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian Creed,—

“Our Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be
in three Persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as
extremely surprised as I was comforted, ... and now, when I think
of the holy Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I understand how the
three adorable Persons form only one God and I experience an
unspeakable happiness.”

On still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresa to see and understand in what wise the Mother of God had been assumed into her place in Heaven.(255)

The deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything known in ordinary consciousness. It evidently involves organic sensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too extreme to be borne, and as verging on bodily pain.(256) But it is too subtle and piercing a delight for ordinary words to denote. God’s touches, the wounds of his spear, references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in the phraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon away in these highest states of ecstasy. “If our understanding comprehends,” says Saint Teresa, “it is in a mode which remains unknown to it, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends. For my own part, I do not believe that it does comprehend, because, as I said, it does not understand itself to do so. I confess that it is all a mystery in which I am lost.”(257) In the condition called _raptus_ or ravishment by theologians, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a question among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily dissevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa’s descriptions and the very exact distinctions which she makes, to persuade one’s self that one is dealing, not with imaginary experiences, but with phenomena which, however rare, follow perfectly definite psychological types.

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To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life.

Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing, seems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember the helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary Alacoque. Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken of them by admiring followers. The “other‐worldliness” encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this over‐abstraction from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and the intellect feeble; but in natively strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results. The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far as it has often been carried, appear for the most part to have shown indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the trances in which they indulged.