The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William James“The Anaesthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the ImmemorialMystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the InevitableVortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive is inherent—itis what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy norsorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of.“It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of thingsbut it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secularand intimately personal illumination of the nature and motive ofexistence, which then seems reminiscent—as if it should have appeared,or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.“Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directlysuch a matter of course—so old-fashioned, and so akin toproverbs that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense ofsafety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But nowords may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he isrealizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.“Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if itcould not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normalconsciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence,and to try to formulate its baffling import—with only this consolatoryafterthought: that he has known the oldest truth, and that hehas done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destinyof the race. He is beyond instruction in ‘spiritual things.’“The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is within. Alldays are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose ofeternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges therow of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement:so may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unityfor which each of us stands.“This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In myfirst printed mention of it I declared: ‘The world is no more the alienterror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultrybattlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gulllifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearlesseye.’ And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing isgrayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasizethat declaration. I know—as having known—the meaning of Existence:347