A series of essays offering a clear-eyed analysis of mystical experience, distinguishing its permanent core from traditional, psychological, and symbolic accretions. The author identifies an overpowering awareness of the divine alongside a receptive self as the central fact, while arguing that doctrinal images are provisional. Other pieces address practice and psychology, exploring prayer, the roles of will, intellect, and feeling, spiritual education, communal responsibility, and the mystic's creative impulse. The book closes with critical studies of historic figures from Plotinus through medieval and modern Christian mystics, using those lives to illuminate how theory and practice interact across diverse spiritual expressions.