Cliff Notes: Mysticism

One might well remember this lecture as the one wherein we learn that William James snuffed chloroform. And possibly ether. For scientific purposes, but still.

At any rate, James devotes this lecture to the key of religious knowledge and individual religious experience: mystic encounters and the knowledge they impart through alternative states of consciousness. James notes, not surprisingly, four characteristics of mystic consciousness.
They are:

1. Ineffability. No adequate report of it can be given in words.
2. Noetic quality. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance.
3. Transiency. Mystical states cannot be sustained for long.
4. Passivity. The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance.

These four characteristic set mystic consciousness and set it apart from ordinary awareness. This is not to say that the resulting lines are sharp, or that there are not gradations within these qualities. One ordinary sort of mystic experience is that of being struck by the truth of a statement or proverb: the mysticism of poetics. A more powerful but only somewhat less common mystic experience would be the sensation of deja vu: it only has a minor noetic quality, a sense of importance without real content.

Next in experiential power would be a the type of experience depending on intoxicants. And James spends some time on detailing his experiences and that of others. And it is his own experience that leads him to privilege mystic consciousness:

"our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one especial type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different...Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance."

Further up the mystic ladder James finds those experiences more commonly religious: encounters with a cosmic consciousness, or, as one wrote of it, "I was aware that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God." An overriding commonality of these is the sense of the lively order of the universe, the harmonious eternity of infinite vitality.

This is the encounter with the Absolute, remarkable in that it reaffirms both. By this time, of course, we are quite beyond the power of language to describe what happens. Of course this has not stopped the many mystic traditions of religion trying to do so, and James chronicles some of their various attempts.

James concludes by considering the value of mystic experience as knowledge, and of it he says this:

(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.

(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.

(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness.

Indeed, James notes, mystic experience, while usually devoid of both doctrinal and theoretic content, may actually be the truest form of experience.