American psychologist William James not only studied mystical experiences and their role in religious experience, but also dabbled in induced visions himself. Here he writes of the change in consciousness brought on by breathing nitrious oxide. The emergence into and out of this monistic wholeness James equates to the thinking of German philosopher Hegel. I strongly urge others to repeat the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough. With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exiting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination.
Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence.
The centre and periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its objects, the meum and tuum, are one. It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quality and quantity, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way.