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Hartshorne's answer seems to me to have much to recommend it. He holds that mysticism involves two claims: (1) that there is or can be immediate experience of God or of "the eminent, supreme, or unsurpassable Reality"; and (2) that this eminent Reality is ineffable or characterizable only in paradoxical or seemingly contradictory ways ("Mysticism and Rationalistic Metaphysics": 463). He then argues -- as it seems to me rightly -- that the first claim is not problematic, allowing, as he does, that the eminent Reality, being ubiquitous, cannot be absent from any even conceivable experience; and that we all in fact experience more than we may be consciously aware of, "conscious awareness" meaning "awareness with introspective judgments." As for the second claim, he also seems to me to be right both in (1) allowing that any concrete reality and, a fortiori, the eminent Reality is and must be "ineffable" in the sense that it cannot be exhaustively characterized; and
(2) insisting that there is no good reason why the abstract structure of that eminent Reality cannot be more or less adequately characterized.

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