The Unity of Mystical Experience
Blackfriars May 1, 1950 Conrad Pepler
The author examines whether mystical experiences across different religious and cultural traditions share a common core, arguing against a simple pendulum-swing model of alternating extremes (moralism vs. quietism) and instead proposing a synthetic unity at a central point of reality. The paper considers non-Christian and non-European mystics alongside Christian ones, noting that writers like Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Ananda Coomaraswamy have demonstrated close resemblances between these experiences over the past twenty years.