The Inner Life

by Rufus M. Jones

As mystical experience supplies us with moments of the highest integral unity, the richest wholes of consciousness, I shall deal mainly with that type, and I shall endeavor to see whether it gives any proof of a trans-subjective reality. There can be no doubt that this type of experience brings the recipient spiritual holidays from strain and stress, that it gives life an optimistic tone, and leaves behind a fresh supply of energy to live by, but can it carry us any farther? Does it supply us with a ladder or a bridge by which we can get “yonder”?

Josiah Royce in The World and the Individual says that the mystic “gets his reality not by thinking, but by consulting the data of experience. He is trying very skillfully to be a pure empiricist.” “Indeed,” he adds, “I should maintain that the mystics are the only thoroughgoing empiricists in the history of philosophy.”[18] “Finite as we are,” Royce says elsewhere in the same book, “lost though we may seem to be in the woods or in the wide air’s wilderness, in the world of time and chance, we have still, like the strayed animals or like the migrating birds, our homing instinct.”[19]

Now the mystics in all ages have insisted that, whether the process be named “instinct,” or “intuition,” or “inner sense,” or “uprushes,” the spirit of man is capable of immediate experience of God. There is something in man, “a soul-center” or “an apex of soul,” which directly apprehends God. It is an immense claim, but those who have the experience are as sure that they have found a wider world of life as is the person who thrills with the appreciation of beauty.

Cases of the experience are so well known to us all to-day that I shall quote only a very few accounts. It looks to me as though some of this direct and immediate experience underlay the entire fabric of St. Paul’s transforming and dynamic religious life. “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me.” “It is no longer I that live but Christ liveth in me.” “God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying Abba, Father.” “God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts.” The entire autobiographical story, wherever it comes into light, lets us see a man who is able to face immense tasks and to die daily because he feels in some real way that his life has become “a habitation of God through the Spirit” and that he is being “filled to all fullness with God.” St. Augustine in the same way makes the reader of the Confessions feel that the most wonderful thing about this strange African who was for a thousand years to be the Atlas, on whose shoulders the Church rested, was his experience of God. He is speaking out of experience when he says, “My God is the Life of my life.” “Thou, O God, hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” “I tremble and I burn; I tremble feeling that I am unlike Him; I burn feeling that I am like Him.” “I heard God as the heart heareth.” “We climbed in inner thought and speech, and in wonder of Thy works, until we reached our own minds and passed beyond them and touched That which is not made but is now as it ever shall be, or rather in It is neither ‘hath been’ nor ‘shall be’ but only ‘is’—just for an instant touched It and in one trembling glance arrived at That which is.”

Jacob Boehme’s testimony is very familiar, but it is such a good interior account that I must repeat it.

“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 to 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. My triumphing can be compared to nothing but the experience in which life is generated in the midst of death or like the resurrection from the dead. In this Light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in all created things, even in herbs and grass, I knew God—who He is, how He is, and what His will is.”[20]

Very impressive are the less well-known words of Isaac Penington: “This is He, this is He: There is no other. This is He whom I have waited for and sought after from my childhood. I have met with my God; I have met with my Savior. I have felt the healings drop into my soul from under His wings.”[21]

Edward Carpenter has given many accounts of the transforming experience when he felt himself united in a living junction with the infinite “including Self.” “The prince of love,” he says, “touched the walls of my hut with his finger from within, and passing through like a great fire delivered me with unspeakable deliverance.”[22] It brought him, as he himself says, “an absolute freedom from mortality accompanied by an indescribable calm and joy.”[23] A nameless writer in the “Atlantic Monthly” for May, 1916, has given a remarkable description of an experience which is called “Twenty Minutes of Reality.” “I only remember,” the writer says, “finding myself in the very midst of those wonderful moments, beholding life for the first time in all its young intoxication of loveliness in its unspeakable joy, beauty, and importance. I cannot say what the mysterious change was—I saw no new thing, but I saw all the usual things in a miraculous new light—in what I believe is their true light.... Once out of all the gray days of my life I have looked into the heart of reality; I have witnessed the truth; I have seen life as it really is—ravishingly, ecstatically, madly beautiful, and filled to overflowing with a wild joy and a value unspeakable.”

Finally, I shall give a modern Russian writer’s appreciative report of a typical mystical experience:

“There are seconds when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained. It’s something not earthly—I don’t mean in the sense that it’s heavenly—but in that sense that man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. He must be physically changed or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable; it’s as though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ God, when He created the world, said at the end of each day of creation, ‘Yes, it’s right, it’s good.’ It ... it’s not being deeply moved, but simply joy. You don’t forgive anything because there is no more need of forgiveness. It’s not that you love—oh, there’s something in it higher than love—what’s most awful is that it’s terribly clear and such joy. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I’d give my whole life for them, because they are worth it.”[24]