our being plunge, it seems to me, into an
altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely
"understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the
supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal
impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it,
for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot
articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than
that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most
intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in
question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world.
When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite
personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the
way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative
change.[360] But that which produces effects within another reality
must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic
excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal.

[360] That the transaction of opening ourselves, otherwise called
prayer, is a perfectly definite one for certain persons, appears
abundantly in the preceding lectures. I append another concrete
example to rein force the impression on the reader's mind:--

"Man can learn to transcend these limitations [of finite thought] and
draw power and wisdom at will.... The divine presence is known through
experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of
consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious
experience. It is not an ecstasy, it is not a trance. It is not
super-consciousness in the Vedantic sense. It is not due to
self-hypnotization. It is a perfectly calm, sane, sound, rational,
common-sense shifting of consciousness from the phenomena of
sense-perception to the phenomena of seership, from the thought of self
to a distinctively higher realm.... For example, if the lower self be
nervous, anxious, tense, one can in a few moments compel it to be calm.
This is not done by a word simply. Again I say, it is not hypnotism.
It is by the exercise of power. One feels the spirit of peace as
definitely as heat is perceived on a hot summer day. The power can be
as surely used as the sun s rays can be focused and made to do work, to
set fire to wood." The Higher Law, vol. iv. pp. 4, 6, Boston, August,
1901.

God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for