It may be just possible that there is a universe of spiritual reality upon which our finite spirits open inward as inlets open into the sea.
“Like the tides on the crescent sea-beach When the moon is new and thin Into our hearts high yearnings Come welling and surging in; Come from that mystic ocean Whose rim no foot has trod. Some call it longing But others call it God.”
Such a view is perfectly sane and tenable; it conflicts with no proved and demonstrated facts either in the nature of the universe or of mind. It seems anyway to the mystic that there is such a world, that he has found it as surely as Columbus found San Salvador, and that his experience is a truth-telling experience.
But granting that it is truth-telling and has objective reference, is the mystic justified in claiming that he has found and knows God? One does not need to be a very wide and extensive student of mystical experience to discover what a meager stock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports. William James’ remarkable experience in the Adirondack woods very well illustrates the type. It had, he says, “an intense significance of some sort, if one could only _tell_ the significance.... In point of fact, I can’t find a single word for all that significance and don’t know what it was significant of, so that it remains a mere boulder of impression.”[7] At a later date James refers to that “extraordinary vivacity of man’s psychological commerce with something Ideal that _feels as if_ it were also actual.”[8] The greatest of all the fourteenth century mystics, Meister Eckhart, could not put his _impression_ into words or ideas. What he found was a “wilderness of the Godhead where no one is at home,” i.e., an Object with no particular differentiated, concrete characteristics. It was not an accident that so many of the mystics hit upon the _via negativa_, the way of negation, or that they called their discovery “the divine Dark.”
“Whatever your mind comes at I tell you flat God is not that.”
Mystical experience does not supply concrete information. It does not bring new finite facts, new items that can be used in a description of “the scenery and circumstance” of the realm beyond our sense horizons. It is the awareness of a Presence, the consciousness of a Beyond, the discovery, as James puts it, that “we are continuous with a More of the same quality, which is operative in us and in touch with us.”