The Psychology of Mysticism and the Divine Immanence

Abstract

Recent studies in religious mysticism from the standpoint of psychology have netted, inter alia, the following contributions: (1) The conceptualization of divine reality, apprehended through the peculiar spiritual experience of the mystic, is based, not upon some aboriginal idea of deity, but upon the humanization of some sacred aspect of nature. (2) Mystical intuition is not a unique form of experience, but simply a way of experiencing which involves more of consciousness than is ordinarily exercised in plain matter of fact attention to the familiar object of the world. (3) The objectivity of God aroused as a postulate in the mind under the pressure of an intensified interest in, or concentration upon, the causal meaning of holy aspirations, is but the projection of the idealized self before the retina of the actual self as though it were a disparate entity independent of any necessary connection with consciousness. (4) The ideational aspects of the mystical superself, to which is attributed extraneous being, are such as denote social rather than individual qualities of life. And further (5), this subjective creation appears more intensely real (vital) or dynamic in its manifestations than the normal self, owing of course to the heightened form of the feelings and emotions out of which it is generated. In fine, the nature of the “unchartered reality,” which makes itself felt in the excess of spiritual ecstasy, appears to overlap or transcend the natural bounds which limit human nature and to elicit potentialities of perfection.