discriminate _mystical experience_ from the elaborate body of doctrines
and theories, historically known as "mysticism," which is as much an
_ism_ as are the other typical, partial, and more or less abstract
formulations of religion.

Mysticism for the mystic himself is characterized by a personal
experience through which the ordinary limitations of life and the
passionate pursuits of the soul are transcended, and a self-evident
conviction is attained that he is in communion, or even in union, with
some self-transcending Reality that absolutely satisfies and is what he
has always sought. "This is He, this is He," the mystic exclaims:
"There is no other: This is He whom I have waited for and sought after
from my childhood!"[7]

The experience is further characterized by the inrush {xx} of new
energies as though a mysterious door had been pushed open--either out
or in--admitting the human spirit to wider sources of life. "Fresh
bubblings from the eternal streams of Life flowing into the soul" is
the way the recipient often describes it. All the deep-lying powers of
the inward self, usually so divergent and conflicting--the foreground
purposes defeated by background inhibitions, and by doubts on the
border,--become liberated and unified into one conscious life which is
not merely intellectual, nor merely volitional, nor solely emotional,
but an undivided whole of experience, intensely joyous, enriched with
insight and pregnant with deeds of action. As in lofty experiences of
appreciation of beauty, or of music, or when the chords of life are
swept by a great love, or by a momentous moral issue, the spirit rises
in mystical experience to a form of consciousness which no longer marks
clock-time and succession of events, whether outward or inward. It may
afterwards take hours or days or weeks or even years to spread out and
review and apprehend and adjust to the experience--"the opening," to
use George Fox's impressive word--but while it is _there_ it is held in
one unbroken synthetic time-span. It is, to revive a scholastic
phrase, a _totum simul_, an all-at-once experience, in which parts,
however many, make one integral whole, as in a melody or in a work of
art; so that the mystic has a real experience of what we try to express
by the word Eternity. It feels as though the usual insulations of our
own narrow personal life were suddenly broken through and we were in
actual contact with an enfolding presence, life-giv