triumphant reawakening, as if a new day were dawning after
a long and harrowing night.• • •
AT THE SAME TIME I was interviewing Richard Boothby and his fellow
volunteers, I was reading William James’s account of mystical
consciousness in The Varieties of Religious Experience in the hope of
orienting myself. And indeed much of what James had to say helped me
get my bearings amid the torrent of words and images I was collecting.
James prefaced his discussion of mystical states of consciousness by
admitting that “my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment
almost entirely.” Almost entirely: what James knows about mystical
states was gleaned not just from his reading but also from his own
experiments with drugs, including nitrous oxide.
Rather than attempt to define something as difficult to grab hold of as
a mystical experience, James offers four “marks” by which we may
recognize one. The first and, to his mind, “handiest” is ineffability: “The
subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate
report of its contents can be given in words.” With the possible exception
of Boothby, all the volunteers I spoke to at one point or another despaired
of conveying the full force of what they had experienced, gamely though
they tried. “You had to be there” was a regular refrain.
The noetic quality is James’s second mark: “Mystical states seem to
those who experience them to be also states of knowledge . . . They are
illuminations, revelations full of significance and importance . . . and as a
rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.”
For every volunteer I’ve interviewed, the experience yielded many
more answers than questions, and—curiously for what is after all a drug
experience—these answers had about them a remarkable sturdiness and
durability. John Hayes, a psychotherapist in his fifties who was one of the
first volunteers at Hopkins,
felt like mysteries were being unveiled and yet it all felt
familiar and more like I was being reminded of things I had