All religious thought and speech are through and through symbolic. And this fundamental insight is perhaps as old as religion itself. - Walter Terence Stace

It is a commonplace that eternity is not an endless prolongation of time, has nothing to do with time. Eternity is a characteristic of the mystical experience. The word eternity doubtless meant originally endlessness of time, which must count, therefore, as its literal meaning. But in its religious and metaphysical use it is a metaphor for the characteristic of the experience. For in that experience time drops away and is no more seen.

The incommensurability of the mystical with the sensory-intellectual consciousness is also the ultimate reason why we have to exclude visions and voices, telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance from the category of the mystical.

And we think that this ultimate blessedness differs only in degree from the happy and joyful experiences of our lives. Whereas the truth is that it differs in kind. The joys, not only of the earth, but of any conceivable heaven - which we can conceive only as some happy and fortunate prolongation of our lives in time - are not of the same order as that ultimate blessedness.