At the same time I was interviewing Richard Boothby and his fellow volunteers, I was reading William James’s account of mystical consciousness in The Varieties of Religious Experience in the hope of orienting myself. And indeed much of what James had to say helped me get my bearings amid the torrent of words and images I was collecting. James prefaced his discussion of mystical states of consciousness by admitting that “my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely.” Almost entirely: what James knows about mystical states was gleaned not just from his reading but also
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