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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: lectures. In this way we shall save verbal disputation, and the
recriminations that generally go therewith.
1. 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. In this peculiarity mystical
states are more like states of feeling than like states of
intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a
certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists.
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