If the mystics' world is a world of imagination therefore, from a practical standpoint, some imagination is worth having for we have to live personally as well as enquire analytically. Art and its creations are not rejected even if imaginary but on the contrary they are most valuable in everyday life. Similarly the peace and absorption of the mystical experience may even be imaginary but they provide a useful if temporary refuge from the pressure of troubles and burdens. Even the illusiveness of his fantasy experience is not entirely worthless when it reveals little-known powers of the mind in giving back to man what he has once thought, thus proving their subconscious existence. And like dreams, his mysterious visions and occult experiences illustrate the wonderfully creative powers of the same mind. If the forms taken by these phenomena are the working of imagination, the activating power behind them is not necessarily so. We must never forget that the initial movement of these experiences (in those cases where they are authentic and inspired) starts in the Overself and is a manifestation of its Grace. If, therefore, we want to understand the mystic's highest experience aright we have got to get away from its concrete details and the intellectual paralysis that often accompanies them and pay attention primarily to the state of being in which it arises. He often tells us that its atmosphere is so sublime, so peace-fraught, as to be beyond all human verbal description. It is indeed a temporary expansion of consciousness because through it he has been led into the presence of the Overself.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 1 : Mystical Life in The Modern World > # 44
