Mystical Experiences – criteria for identification
Source: May R M (1991) Cosmic Consciousness Revisited; Element
* Ineffability – the handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.
* Noetic quality – Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into the depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance … and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.
* Transiency – Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seem to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day.
* Passivity – Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes grasped by a superior power.
The above list is that of William James who himself had no mystical experiences. [Comment: "One of the experiences described by James in The Varieties of Religious Experience and attributed there to an anonymous source was later admitted by James to be his own mystical experience". - Thanks to Ian Robinson, President, Rationalist Society of Australia for the clarification (more)]
Those who have had a mystical experience would add a fifth:
* Oneness – a sense of the Oneness of all Creation, of the One behind the many.
