Presence
The summit and the sea of cloud
Historical account — 1902
VBG Archives·Cambridge, US
presencemountainssolitudestillness
Modern language summary…
A twenty-seven-year-old described standing on a mountain summit -- once looking over a vast broken landscape running out to the ocean, once above an unbroken floor of white cloud with only a few peaks breaking through -- when the sense of being a separate self briefly switched off. In its place: illumination, and a significance to life he hadn't seen before. He didn't claim visions or voices. He simply said these unasked-for moments were what he meant by communion with God. (Location not recorded; account collected and published by William James, Harvard, 1902.)
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"I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected... Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without its presence."
Source: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture III. Public domain. View source