The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 391" After the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness ; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch.

I thought that I was near death ; when, suddenly, ray souT became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon me. ... I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the anaesthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade.

I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and shrieked out, ' It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible,' meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the ground, and at last awoke covered with blood, calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened), ' Why did you not kill me ? Why would you not let me die ? ' Only think of it.

To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in ' spiritual things.

" The lesson is one of central safety : the Kingdom is within. All days are judgment days : Init there can be no climacteric purpose of eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the row of t)ewildering \ figures by increasing his unit of measurement : so may we reduce the * distracting multiplicity of things to the unity for which each of us stands. " This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it.

In my first printed mention of it I declared : ' The world is no more the alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.

And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know — as having known — the meaning of Existence : the sane centre of the universe — at once the wonder and the assurance of the soul — for which the speech of reason has as yet no name but the Anaesthetic Revelation." — I have considerably abridged the quotation.

p. 392" Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience ? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God ?

" ^ 1 Op. cit., pp. 78-80, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it, another interesting anaesthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript by a • friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking ether for a surgical operation.

" I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered having heard it said that people ' learn through suffering,' and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, * to suffer is to learn. " With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately preceded my real coming to.

It only lasted a few seconds, and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words. " A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them.

He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go.

I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saio. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity.

The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and ' seen ' still more, and should probably have died. " He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and \ I understood them. This was what it had all meant, this was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do.

I did not see God's purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is ripening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on wak- /ing, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, ' Domine non sum digna,' for I had been lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized

p. 393With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and simple. Symonds's question takes us back to those examples which you will remember my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape or another is not uncommon.

" I know," writes Mr. Trine, " an officer on our pohce force who has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or than I am capable of desiring to do.

I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, "\^ I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent of my capacity ^ for suffering. " While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the love of God, nothing but his relentlessness.

And then I heard an answer, which I could only just catch, saying, * Knowledge and Love are One, and the measure is §^uffering ' — I give the words as they came to me.

With that I came finally ' to (into what seemed a dream world compared with the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be called the ' cause ' of my experience was a slight operation under insufficient ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in a common city street.

If I had to formulate a few of the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as follows : — " The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness.

The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings ; — the passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, not moving, it must do what it does ; — the impossibility of discovery without its price ; — finally, the excess of what the suffering ' seer ' or genius pays over what his generation gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the lac away, dropping one rupee, and says, ' That you may give them.

That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.') I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate. " And so on ! — these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms ; but for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even such words as these has been given me by an ether dream."