"the soul's eternal native country and abiding Home."
Descriptions here all fail and are only "stammering words of a child,"
as Boehme himself says. But, as a matter of fact, descriptions fail
and fall short in the case of all genuine life-experiences, {203} even
those that are most universal and common to the race. How one feels
when after nights of agony from watching over a child that is hovering
between life and death, and seemingly certain to slip away from human
reach, the doctor says, "He has passed the crisis and the danger is
over!" one cannot describe. Whenever it is a matter that concerns the
inner _quick_ of the soul, all words are the stammerings of a child.

The true mystical experience is not primarily a knowledge-experience,
it is not the apprehension of one more describable fact to be added to
our total stock of information--what Boehme so often calls "opinions"
and "history,"--it is a sudden plunge or immersion into the stream of
Life itself, it is an interior appreciation of the higher meaning of
life by the discovery of a way of entering the Life-process, or,
better, of letting the Life-process enter you, on a higher level than
is usual. Life always advances by a kind of leap, an _elan_, which
would not have been predicted or anticipated, but which, now it is here
revealed in a being with a novel function and a higher capacity of
survival, will lift the whole scale of life henceforth to a new level.
So, in some way which must for the present at least remain mysterious,
the eternal Source of Life, when it finds a human door ready for its
entrance, breaks in--or shall we say that the _earnest will_ climbs up
and pushes open the door into new regions in this eternal Life
Source?--and it seems then, as Boehme says, as though "the true nature
of God and man and the true relation between God and man" had been
found. The mystical experience is, thus, one way, perhaps the highest
we have yet discovered, of entering the Life-process itself and of
gaining an interior appreciation of Reality by living in the central
stream and flow of it, so that the Spirit can "break through" and can
"see into the Depth of Deity."

Boehme appears to hold two inconsistent and seemingly contradictory
views about the human attitude which is the psychological pre-condition
for this epoch-making experience. In his own autobiographical {204}
accounts, he always refers to the part that _earnest resolution_ has
played in bringi