The ordinary mystical experience cannot automatically sustain itself and cannot naturally continue itself. It evaporates, to the intense disappointment of the mystic, who imagines each time that he has undergone the supreme changeover of his whole life, but imagines in vain. He may catch a glimpse of the higher state of being but alas! he cannot keep it long. He may climb to the mountaintop but he cannot stay there. He may enjoy the rarefied atmosphere of its heights but he cannot live in it. He is forced by the ebb of inspiration to come down again to walk the common pedestrian roads. This is partly because his experience does not rise above the level of emotion and partly because it does not emerge from the self-centered attitude.
In the first case, a mysticism that is only emotional and nothing more, that lacks a reasoned metaphysical supporting structure, lacks also unity and continuity, inner principle and binding significance. In the second case, an aspirant who is seeking religious or mystical satisfactions is usually preoccupied with his own wants, his own emotions, his own reactions, and his own experiences. He is still egotistic, however higher his egoism may be than that of the common level. If he wishes to obtain a durable enlightenment, he will have to develop it out of something which, while necessarily including emotion, gathers in the whole of his being at the same time. That is, he will have to seek through the fourfold path for the philosophic experience. Even his first initiation into philosophy will teach him that reality and truth are not to be found here and will point to an order of being beyond it. From that moment he begins to look on life from the Overself's side, which although it does not exclude the personality's side, at the same time transcends it. He begins to shift the object of thought and feeling from his ego to his diviner self.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 2 : Phases of Mystical Development > # 57
