A summary of my personal history with mystical experience:
- As a child and an adolescent in the charismatic movement, I was impressed by the sincerity of the adults enthusiastic for mystic experiences, but baffled by the obvious falseness they were willing to tolerate in my own experience in order to bring me into the fold.
- In my teens through early twenties, I owned my faith on conservative, fundamentalist terms. I wrote in my journal, "At some point I became a Christian, not because of any single experience of revelation but because I came to accept the events of the Bible to be true."
- In my mid-twenties, I had my own “mystical experience” when I was confronted suddenly with my inability to objectively know myself, and with the implications of what Bunyan had written (above) and passages of the Bible such as Matthew 7:22 which indicate our unlimited capacity to deceive ourselves.