The materialistic opponents and critics of meditation fasten triumphantly on its unhealthy phenomena as constituting sufficient grounds for condemning the practice outright. Nevertheless we reply that those so-called scientific psychologists who analyse and expose only the fantastic aberrations of mysticism, in the belief that they are analysing and exposing mysticism itself, are themselves self-deluded. For unless they can approach mysticism from the inside, from their own personal experience, as well as from the outside, from what the observing world sees, they will blunder badly into undue scepticism, unnecessarily materialistic explanations, and even wholly false interpretations. But because few scientists possess such equipment, few can offer an accurate, fair, sympathetic yet critical estimate of mystical claims, or comprehend that all mystical experiences are not on the same level, or that even those which are differ in kind and degree.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 1 : Mystical Life in The Modern World > # 71
