This kind of spiritual joy often involves mystical attunement. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was a young boy, and before the funeral he found himself in a room alone with her open casket. He climbed up on a chair to look down on her and experienced a strange peacefulness. “Somehow as I gazed, an irrepressible, incomprehensible power seemed to compel me,” he later wrote. “For a time I lost all sense of existence and experienced a kind of vague blissfulness which though grand and sweet, was also sad.”
