The Varieties of Religious Experience-Mysticism

I live, yet not I, but God liveth in me. Only when I become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between God and me remains.

“This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and God is the great mystic achievement.” In mystic states the person becomes one with God.

This is the “everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition,” unaltered by race or creed. “In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God their speech antedates languages, and they do not grow old.” William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)(Mysticism).

An example of a mystical experience is cited by James:

In my consciousness of God which comes to me sometimes a presence not a personality but something in myself makes me feel a part of something bigger. In these times I feel myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exalt “in the mere fact of existence, of being part of it all-the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree trunks, and so on.”  As the years go by such moments continue to come, but I want them continually. This is because I know “so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love,” that I want this perception to be constant. (James citing Starbuck’s Collection).

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