Mysticism

The direct-experience end of religion: visions, silences and unknowing, from medieval monks to jazz ashrams, told with the sources showing.

• Jung, Bill W. and the Origins of Alcoholics Anonymous A Swiss psychiatrist's verdict on one hopeless drinker started the chain that became AA. The outline is true. The dates Bill Wilson gave are not.
• Teresa of Ávila and the Interior Castle A Spanish nun who outlived her own dug grave mapped the soul as a castle of seven rooms. Then her body was scattered across Europe.
• Hildegard of Bingen: The Abbess Who Saw the Living Light She said heaven dictated her books. A pope agreed, a neurologist diagnosed migraine, and neither account quite covers what she left behind.
• Alice Coltrane's Turn Toward God After John Coltrane died in 1967, his widow went through an ordeal, found a guru, made two astonishing records and left the music business for an ashram.
• William James and the Four Marks of a Mystical Experience In 1902 a Harvard psychologist who never had a mystical experience defined one so well that researchers still use his terms.
• The Cloud of Unknowing: A Medieval Guide to Knowing Nothing An anonymous fourteenth-century English monk argued that God is reached by love and never by thought. Modern centering prayer took him at his word.