The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencein yet other dreamy states. Such feelings as these which CharlesKingsley describes are surely far from being uncommon, especiallyin youth:—“When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with aninnate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could butunderstand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths whichI cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes… . Haveyou not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mentalvision, except in a few hallowed moments?”228A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is describedby J. A. Symonds; and probably more persons than we suspect couldgive parallels to it from their own experience.“Suddenly,” writes Symonds, “at church, or in company, or whenI was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, Ifelt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of mymind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in aseries of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from anaestheticinfluence. One reason why I disliked this kind of trancewas that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even now findwords to render it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftlyprogressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinousfactors of experience which seem to qualify what we arepleased to call our Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinaryconsciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying oressential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remainedbut a pure, absolute, abstract Self. The universe became withoutform and void of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its vividkeenness, feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as itseemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about it.And what then? The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grimconviction that this state was the last state of the conscious Self, thesense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of theabyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion,stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return to ordinary condi-228 Charles Kingsley’s Life, i. 55, quoted by Inge: Christian Mysticism,London, 1899, p. 341.342