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" "Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?
William James (11 January 1842 – 26 August 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. He developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism, and wrote influential books on the science of psychology, the psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are all there in all their completeness . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
Even now I fear that some one of my… hearers may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of [their] life. It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at once find that you are doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.