What is a Mystical Experience According to William James?

I’m about to record a podcast episode about this question — I’ll post the results in a few hours — because I’ve been reading William James again. Basically, James tries to categorize and formalize the mystical experiences — and he takes examples from all religious traditions. In those examples, he finds enough similarities that he can propose four essential traits, or “marks,” of the authentic mystical experience:

1. Ineffability
2. Noetic Quality
3. Transiency
4. Passivity

These are worth looking up, and I’ll make sure to define them carefully on the podcast. But the most important question is always, “do mystical experiences prove the existence of God?” And the answer seems to be, “Yes–for the mystic. But not for anyone else.” Can anyone think of a way to get past that problem? Can we “unlock” the mystical experience so that even those who do not have it for themselves can believe in its reality, and take it as authoritative? Or would that be bad and dangerous?

Thanksgiving and the Challenge of Nonconformism

The only thing I forgot in this episode was to point out that it’s sort of ironic that these Puritans — the ultimate nonconformists, themselves “separatists” from the Church of England — really had a hard time figuring out what to do half a generation later when nonconformists from within their own community like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson challenged the hierarchy and even the “orthodoxy” of New England Puritanism. Check out the episode, complete with video!