The plaque at 4th and Walnut – now known as Muhammad Ali Boulevard

Scholars who define religious experience have suggested that there is ‘introverted mysticism’ where the person seeks God by deliberately shutting off their senses to move into the depths of their mind and self. This can lead to feeling in the silence and darkness as One and outside time and space – deeply connected and present. This is inward-turning.

Outward-turning or ‘extrovertive mysticism’ uses the physical senses – so the person perceives the multiplicity of external material objects—the sea, the sky, the houses, the trees, other people—mystically transfigured so that the One, or the Unity, shines through them. Both culminate in the perception of an ultimate Unity.

Another way of describing this is to distinguish between what has been called ‘this-worldly mystical experience’ characterized as ‘mystical experience of the natural world or some region or content of it ‘; and ‘other-worldly mystical experience’, characterized as experiencing a world or things in the world as distinct from our familiar universe. There’s also ‘no-worldly mystical experience,’ characterized as religious experience of something beyond all worlds, this-worldly, and other-worldly, and all their contents. Presumably there is also the possibility of a mixture of all these. Using this distinction then Carl Jung’s near-death experience would fall into both ‘other-worldly’ and ‘no-worldly’.

Thomas Merton describes how in contemplative prayer there can be what he calls a tenuous awareness of God. This he sees as impossible to describe – let alone classify! There is, he thinks, no clarity and intellectual precision and it’s almost impossible to reduce to any logical formulation.

‘… it is essentially beyond concepts and beyond logic. The simple conversational way of conveying this paradox is to say that without having any way of knowing how you know, you just know.’

One description that Merton gives us happens early in his time as a monk when he is receiving the Eucharist.

‘And I stand at the altar—excuse the language, these words should not be extraordinary—but I stand at the altar with my eyes washed in the light that is eternity, as if I am one who is agelessly reborn. I am sorry for this language. There are no words I know of simple enough to describe such a thing, except that every day I am a day old, and at the altar I am the Child Who is God …

I swim in seas of joy that almost heave me off my moorings at the altar.’

This seems to be an inward turning of being one with Christ.

Merton’s famous Fourth and Walnut experience reads as an outward extrovert experience:

‘In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers…

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate … And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.’