The more normal, expansive mystical experiences come apparently when the personal self is at its best. Its powers and capacities are raised to an unusual unity and fused together. The whole being, with its accumulated submerged life, _finds itself_. The process of preparing for any high achievement is a severe and laborious one, but nothing seems easier in the moment of success than is the accomplishment for which the life has been prepared. There comes to be formed within the person what Aristotle called “a dexterity of soul,” so that the person does with ease what he has become skilled to do. Clement of Alexandria called a fully organized and spiritualized person “a harmonized man,” that is, adjusted, organized and ready to be a transmissive organ for the revelation of God. Brother Lawrence, who was thus “harmonized,” finely says, “The most excellent method which I found of going to God was that of _doing my common business_, purely for the love of God.” An earlier mystic of the fourteenth century stated the same principle in these words: “It is my aim to be to the Eternal God what a man’s hand is to a man.”
There are many human experiences which carry a man up to levels where he has not usually been before and where he finds himself possessed of insight and energies he had hardly suspected were his until that moment. One leaps to his full height when the right inner spring is reached. We are quite familiar with the way in which instinctive tendencies in us and emotions both egoistic and social, become organized under a group of ideas and ideals into a single system which we call a sentiment, such as love, or patriotism, or devotion to truth. It forms slowly and one hardly realizes that it has formed until some occasion unexpectedly brings it into full operation, and we find ourselves able with perfect ease to overcome the most powerful inhibitory and opposing instincts and habits, which, until then, had usually controlled us. We are familiar, too, with the way in which a well-trained and disciplined mind, confronted by a concrete situation, will sometimes—alas not always—in a sudden flash of imaginative insight, discover a universal law revealed there and then in the single phenomenon, as Sir Isaac Newton did and as, in a no less striking way, Sir William Rowan Hamilton did in his discovery of Quaternions. Literary and artistic geniuses supply us with many instances in which, in a sudden flash, the crude material at hand is shot through with vision, and the complicated plot of a drama, the full significance of a character, or the complete glory of a statue stands revealed, as though, to use R. L. Stevenson’s illustration, a genie had brought it on a golden tray as a gift from another world. Abraham Lincoln, striking off in a few intense minutes his Gettysburg address, as beautiful in style and perfect in form as anything in human literature, is as good an illustration as we need of the way in which a highly organized person, by a kindling flash, has at his hand all the moral and spiritual gains of a life time.