s and treats them as
the substance and occupation of the highest life. We are disposed to
describe these experiences as trances or visions, names which generally
mean something morbid or hypnotic. But in India their validity is
unquestioned and they are not considered morbid. The sensual scheming
life of the world is sick and ailing; the rapture of contemplation is
the true and healthy life of the soul. More than that it is the type and
foretaste of a higher existence compared with which this world is
worthless or rather nothing at all. This view has been held in India for
nearly three thousand years: it has been confirmed by the experience of
men whose writings testify to their intellectual power and has commanded
the respect of the masses. It must command our respect too, even if it
is contrary to our temperament, for it is the persistent ideal of a
great nation and cannot be explained away as hallucination or
charlatanism. It is allied to the experiences of European mystics of
whom St Teresa is a striking example, though less saintly persons, such
as Walt Whitman and J.A. Symonds, might also be cited. Of such mysticism
William James said "the existence of mystical states absolutely
overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and
ultimate dictators of what we may believe[48]."

These mystical states are commonly described as meditation but they
include not merely peaceful contemplation but ecstatic rapture. They are
sometimes explained as union with Brahman[49], the absorption of the
soul in God, or its feeling that it is one with him. But this is
certainly not the only explanation of ecstasy given in India, for it is
recognized as real and beneficent by Buddhists and Jains. The same
rapture, the same sense of omniscience and of ability to comprehend the
scheme of things, the same peace and freedom are experienced by both
theistic and non-theistic sects, just as they have also been experienced
by Christian mystics. The experiences are real but they do not depend on
the presence of any special deity, though they may be coloured by the
theological views of individual thinkers[50]. The earliest Buddhist
texts make right rapture (samma samadhi) the end and crown of the
eight-fold path but offer no explanation of it. They suggest that it is
something wrought by the mind for itself and without the co-operation or
infusion of any external influence.

13.

Indian ideas about the destiny of the soul ar