III - MAN AND THE DIVINE WORLD

Summary

I have run round the world of variety, and am now centered in eternity; that is the womb out of which I was taken, and to which my desires are now reduced.

JACOB BAUTHUMLEY

The experiences I discussed in chapter II were border-line experiences: their religious status is ambiguous–that is why I called them ‘daemonic’. In our culture visions and voices are commonly treated as symptoms of illness; and dreams are regarded as a channel of communication not between God and man but between the unconscious and the conscious parts of the human psyche. Phenomena of this sort still play an important rôle in the religious life of certain individuals and certain sects, but most of us are inclined to dismiss them as belonging at best to the pathology of religion. I now propose to exemplify and discuss a class of experiences whose nature is indeed obscure and illdefined but whose religious character and religious importance is generally admitted.

All the beliefs and experiences to be examined here are of the kind loosely described as ‘mystical’. But ‘mysticism’ is a dangerously vague term. For the purpose of this chapter I shall adopt the strict definition which Lalande gives in his Vocabulaire de la Philosophie: mysticism is ‘belief in the possibility of an intimate and direct union of the human spirit with the fundamental principle of being, a union which constitutes at once a mode of existence and a mode of knowledge different from and superior to normal existence and knowledge’.