The something seemed close
to me, and intensely more real than any ordinary perception.
Although I felt it to be like unto myself so to speak, or finite,
small, and distressful, as it were, I didn't recognize it as any
individual being or person."
Of course such an experience as this does not connect itself with
the religious sphere. Yet it may upon occasion do so; and the
same correspondent informs me that at more than one other
conjuncture he had the sense of presence developed with equal
intensity and abruptness, only then it was filled with a quality
of joy.
"There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused
in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some
ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect
of some poem, or scene, or blossom, of music, but the sure
knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and
after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of
reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that."
My friend, as it oddly happens, does not interpret these latter
experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God.
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