So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.”
To some the truth of God never comes closer than a logical conclusion. He is held to be as a living item in a creed. To the mystic he becomes real in the same sense that experienced beauty is real, or the feel of spring is real, or that summer sunlight is real—he has been found, he has been met, he is present.
Before discussing the crucial question whether these experiences are evidential and are worthy of consideration as an addition to the world’s stock of truth and knowledge I must say a few words about the normality or abnormality of them. Nothing of any value can be said on this point of mystical experience in the abstract. One must first catch his concrete case. Some instances are normal and some are undoubtedly abnormal. Trance, ecstasy and rapture are unusual experiences and in that sense not normal occurrences. They usually indicate, furthermore, a pathological condition of personality and are thus abnormal in the more technical sense. There is, however, something more to be said on this point. It seems pretty well established that some persons—and they have often been creative leaders and religious geniuses—have succeeded in organizing their lives, in finding their trail, in charging their whole personality with power, in attaining a moral dynamic and in tapping vast reservoirs of energy by means of states which, if occurring in other persons, would no doubt be called pathological. The real test here is a pragmatic one. It seems hardly sound to call a state abnormal if it has raised the experiencer, as a mystic experience often does, into a hundred horse-power man and through his influence has turned multitudes of other men and women into more joyous, hopeful and efficient persons. This question of abnormality and reality is thus not one to be settled off-hand by a superficial diagnosis.
An experience which brings spaciousness of mind, new interior dimensions, ability to stand the universe—and the people in it—and capacity to work at human tasks with patience, endurance and wisdom may quite intelligently be called normal, though to an external beholder it may look like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a state of dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-suggestion. It should be added, however, as I have already said, that mystical experience is not confined to these extremer types. They may or may not be pathological. The calmer and more restrained stages of mysticism are more important and significant and are no more marked with the stigma of hysteria than is love-making, enjoyment of music, devotion to altruistic causes, risking one’s life for country, or any lofty experience of value.
III
We come at length to the central question of our consideration: Do mystical experiences settle anything? Are they purely subjective and one-sided, or do they prove to have objective reference and so to be two-sided? Do they take the experiencer across the chasm that separates “self” from “Other”? Mystical experience undoubtedly feels as though it had objective reference. It comes to the individual with indubitable authority. He is certain that he has found some thing other than himself. He has an unescapable conviction that he is in contact and commerce with reality beyond the margins of his personal self. “A tremendous muchness is suddenly revealed,” as William James once put it.
We do not get very far when we undertake to reduce knowledge to an affair of sense-experience. “They reckon ill who leave me out,” can be said by the organized, personal, creative mind as truly as by Brahma. There are many forms of human experience in which the data of the senses are so vastly transcended that they fail to furnish any real explanation of what occurs in consciousness. This is true of all our experiences of value, which apparently spring out of synthetic or synoptic activities of the mind, i.e., activities in which the mind is unified and creative. The vibrations of ether which bombard the rods and cones of the retina may be the occasion for the appreciation of beauty in sky or sea or flower, but they are surely not the cause of it. The concrete event which confronts me is very likely the occasion for the august pronouncement of moral issues which my conscience makes, but it can not be said that the concrete event in any proper sense causes this consciousness of moral obligation. The famous answer of Leibnitz to the crude sense-philosophy of his time is still cogent. To the phrase: “There is nothing in the mind that has not come through the senses,” Leibnitz added, “except the mind itself.” That means that the creative activity of the mind is always an important factor in experience and one that can not be ignored in any of the processes of knowledge. Unfortunately we have done very little yet in the direction of comprehending the interior depth of the personal mind or of estimating adequately the part which mind itself in its creative capacity plays in all knowledge functions. It will only be when we have succeeded in getting beyond what Plato called the bird-cage theory of knowledge to a sound theory of knowledge and to a solid basis for spiritual values that we shall be able to discuss intelligently the “findings” of the mystic.
The world at the present moment is pitiably “short” in its stock of sound theories of knowledge. The prevailing psychologies do not explain knowledge at all. The behaviorists do not try to explain it any more than the astronomer or the physicist does. The psychologist who reduces mind to an aggregation of describable “mind-states” has started out on a course which makes an explanation forever impossible, since knowledge can be explained only through unity and integral wholeness, never through an aggregation of parts, as though it were a mental “shower of shot.” If we expect to talk about knowledge and seriously propose to use that great word truth, we must at least begin with the assumption of an intelligent, creative, organizing center of self-consciousness which can transcend itself and can know what is beyond and other than itself. In short, the talk about a “chasm” between subject and object—knower and thing known—is as absurd as it would be to talk of a chasm between the convex and the concave sides of a curve. Knowledge is always knowledge of an object and mystical experience has all the essential marks of objective reference, as certainly as other forms of experience have.
Professor J. M. Baldwin very well says that there is a form of contemplation in which, as in æsthetic experience, the strands of the mind’s diverging dualisms are “merged and fused.” He adds: “In this experience of a fusion which is not a mixture but which issues in a meaning of its own sort and kind, an experience whose essential character is just this unity of comprehension, consciousness attains its completest, its most direct, and its final apprehension of what Reality is and means.” It really comes round to the question whether the mind of a self-conscious person has any way of approach, except by way of the senses, to any kind of reality. There is no a priori answer to that question. It can only be settled by experience. It is, therefore, pure dogmatism to say, as Professor Dunlap in his recent attack on mysticism does, that all conscious processes are based on sense-stimulation and all thought as well as perception depends on reaction to sense-stimulus. It is no doubt true that behavior psychology must resort to some such formula, but that only means that such psychology is always dealing with greatly transformed and reduced beings, when it attempts to deal with persons like us who, in the richness of our concrete lives, are never reduced to “behavior-beings.” We have interior dimensions and that is the end on’t! Some persons—and they are by no means feeble-minded individuals—are as certain that they have commerce with a world within as they are that they have experiences of a world outside in space. Thomas Aquinas, who neither in method nor in doctrine leaned toward mysticism, though he was most certainly “a harmonized man,” and who in theory postponed the vision of God to a realm beyond death, nevertheless had an experience two years before he died which made him put his pen and inkhorn on the shelf and never write another word of his Summa Theologiae. When he was reminded of the incomplete state of his great work and was urged to go on with it, he only replied, “I have seen that which makes all that I have written look small to me.”