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The Psychology of Mysticism and the Divine Immanence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

H. C. Ackerman
Affiliation:
Nashotah House, Nashotah, Wis.

Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1919

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References

1 Cf. Mecklin, John M., The Revival of the Ontological Argument. JPPsSM, Vol. XIV, No. 5, pp. 124135.Google Scholar

2 Goldenweiser, A. A., Religion and Society: A Critique of Emile Durkheim's Theory of the Origin and Nature of Religion. JPPsSM, Vol. XIV, No. 5, p. 117.Google Scholar

3 Cf. Drake, Durant, Seekers after God, HTR, Vol. XII, No. 1, pp. 6783.Google Scholar

4 As a matter of fact final causation is anomalous in scientific investigation.

5 See my article, The Nature of Spirit, BW. Vol. LIII, No. 2, pp. 145–148.

6 Now moral life is self-controlled. But morality and spirituality are distinguishable. Aristotle puts the whole matter in a nut-shell thus: life is determined to be indeterminate; which means, in this connection, that spiritual propulsion is deterministic and moral compulsion is indeterministic, or free. That is to say, religion constrains us to make moral decisions.

7 Hocking (The Meaning of God in Human Experience) notwithstanding.