Hi Jason, glad to be here.
First terminology: general umbrella of “spiritual” or “religious experience.” That includes mystical but much more. Mystical experience proper is beyond word, thought, or image. It’s about undifferentiated unity of all things. It’s the sense that it’s all one and it fits together in a great whole and everything is good and meaningful. Even that is putting it into words, it’s beyond words. It’s what Abraham Maslow called “peak experience.”
People who think God is telling them to put their baby in the oven or something, or exercise demons from their dog, that is not mystical experience. It’s in words. Mystical experience is not in words. There’s a secondary kind of mystical experience called “sense of the numinous” or “sense of the Holy” (Rudolph Otto). That is a sense of the special nature, a quality of cleanness or sublimity that evokes a sense of awe and reverence. It’s often accompanied by an all pervasive sense of presence and love. People who have that often think of it as God’s love.
This that I’m about to say is not in my book. There are personal experiences in my book not of my own. I do hint at having had them but I don’t discuss it at all. The book does not have much in the way describing experiences. It’s really an intellectual discussion.
I did not have the undifferentiated unity in moving from atheism to Christianity. I had spiritual experiences and miraculous ones that amazed me. Experiences that I didn’t think were possible. After I got saved, (what I call “born again experience” which was not mystical) I had the experience charismatics call “baptism of the Holy Spirit” with speaking in tongues. That was similar to the sense of the numinous. I think that was part of it. But it wasn’t really what I would call the full on mystical experience. That came about a year or two after I first had the “born again” experience. That was with the undifferentiated sense of unity and sense of the numinous.
That latter experience started me seeking to study mystical experience. I had no systematic way to study it. My reading was all framed by Evelyn Underhill and writers of the mystical movement of the early 20th century, Dean Inge. Baron von Hügel. That stuff was so framed by its own tradition I still didn’t have a good understanding of what mystical experience was. I got saved in 1979. Little by little throughout the 80s I studied it in spurts. I discovered W.T. Stace and read some of his stuff and read about his theories. That gave me my first systematic understanding of it. Meanwhile I was proceeding with my Christian life, and praying and trying to cultivate prayer. I had a friend who led me to the Lord, she was really a mystic. She didn’t say “I am really a mystic.” I didn’t think of her that way. I read the stuff she suggested but she didn’t put it into a framework that defined the experience. I related everything to the charismatic world. I was actually getting grounded in a mature mystical understanding but did not know it. That’s why Stace seemed to right to me. In 90’s I got away from it. I was in graduate school I had a Masters degree in theology from a major seminary (Perkins at SMU). It’s not that they said “stop being a mystic” and I said “Ok sure.” It just sort got replaced by an intellectual outlook, an arrogant outlook, a self aggrandized outlook.
By 2007 when I started writing the book, mystical experience was something I felt like was part of my past. I still liked it, I still thought it was worthwhile and I wanted to write about it. I also felt like it’s something I used to do. I went through a crisis where my whole life fell apart, and I started praying again. I had some more amazing experiences. I was getting back into the spiritual life. I had been arguing with atheists on the net since 1998. During the course of that time I had seen lots of arguments they make about “religion is mental illness,” “religious experience is emotional instability.” So I had looked up some studies that contradicted those ideas. I also had studied Abraham Maslow. He was a figure I discovered way back in my atheist days as an undergraduate. I was a sociology major, so he was important to me. I found his book on peak experience and he said things that refuted the kinds of things atheists were saying about religious experience and religion in general. He himself was an atheist. I thought it would be important to read his book.
In the interest of sharpening my message board apologetic, I read Maslow and researched enough to discover Hood and the M scale. Then about 2008 It hit me “hey why don’t I write a book about this huge volume of studies I’m finding that say religion is good for you. NO one out there seems to know about it outside of psychology of religion.” I would find atheists saying things about how science proves religion is primitive and silly and blah blah and then I would see psychologists of religion were saying “that’s all nineteenth century stuff, now we know religious experience is a healthy thing and religion is not primitive or the result a pathological state.” They specifically said Freud is out of date. It was in actively researching that book that I constructed the frame work of understanding mystical experience that the book assumes. It’s very much influenced by William James, and Ralph Hood who is the biggest William James fan ever. Maslow still figures prominently and so does W.T. Stace.