The developed mystic needs but neglects the undeveloped thinker within himself, just as the thinker needs but neglects the mystic. It is not enough to arrive at truth through mystical feelings; we must also arrive at it through metaphysical thinking. The liability to strive for unrealizable ends, as well as the tendency to mistake in his hurry mere reflection of reality for the Real itself, will then be eliminated. Truth can never suffer from the proper activity of human reason and experiment, but only from their improper or unbalanced activity. The moment the mystic seeks to convey his experience to others, when his trance, ecstasy, or inspiration is over, that moment he has to begin to analyse it. If he lacks the proper intellectual equipment to do this with scientific objectivity and precision, he will convey it faultily, insufficiently, and to some extent ineffectively. This is most often the case, unfortunately, because the distaste for intellectual activity is one of the customary reasons why a number of men have taken to mysticism. Without such equipment, the aspirant will be unable to extract the precise significance of his own mystical experiences, as he will be unable to check the correctness of his opinions upon them; whereas with it in his possession, he will be able to examine any such experience and any such opinion by the light of a systematic, thoroughly tested world view. The vagueness of his concepts, the looseness of his thinking, the confusion of his facts, and the partisan character of his conception of life all combine to render the average mystic's understanding of the truth about his own inner experience often unsatisfactory and his evaluation of other men's vaunted occult claims often untenable. We must distinguish between ebullient emotion and deep love. Those whose aspirations are still in the region of the first may sneer at any other spiritual path than the devotional one, yet if an aspirant is really devoted to the Divine, as he says, he ought not to object to learning all he can about his beloved, which is to say that he ought not to be averse to study of the metaphysics of truth, however difficult and strange it is likely to be.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 2 : Phases of Mystical Development > # 142
