The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 421are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed Kttle more than musical compositions. " He who would hear the voice of Nada, ' the Soundless Sound,' and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana. . . . When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams ; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE — the inner sound which kills the outer. . . .

For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. . . . And now thy Self is lost in self, thyself unto thyself, merged in that self from which thou first didst radiate. . . . Behold ! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God.

Thou art thyself the object of thy search : the voice unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat." ^ These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common.

Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt ; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores. " Here begins the sea that ends not till the world's end.

Where we stand, Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves that gleam, We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man hath scanned. . . • Ah, but here man's heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom with venturous glee. From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the sea." * 1 H. P. Blavatsky : The Voice of the Silence. ^ Swinburne : On the Verge, in ' A Midsummer Vacation.'

p. 422That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our ' immortality,' if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already now and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in certain philosophic circles, finds its support in a ' hear, hear !

' or an ^ amen,' which floats up from that mysteriously deeper level.^ We recognize the passwords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use them ourselves ; it alone has the keeping of ^ the password primeval.' ^ 1 have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range of consciousness.

It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, atid harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called otherworldly states of mind. My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does it furnish fiiaj warrant for the truth of the twice-bornness and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors ? I must give my answer to this question as concisely as I can.

In brief my answer is this, — and I will divide it into three parts : — (1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to~1be, ab'soTutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come. (2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically. ^ Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399.

2 As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical region and the discursive life is contained in an article on Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, by F. C. S. Schiller, in Mind, vol. ix., 1900,

p. 423(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith. I will take up these points one by one. 1.

As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them.^ They have been ■• there,' and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate .(^ have we of the majority to order him to live in another "^^.^'"C^ijlli way?

We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind — we commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs.^ It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own more ^ rational ' beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs.

Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact ; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions 1 I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject) remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from the demon.

2 Example : Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching Methodism : " My soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing praises to God all day long ; for he turned my captivity into joy, and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed of down.

Now could I say, 'God's service is perfect freedom,' and I was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me. Journal, London, no date, p. 172.