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 bringing success to his momentous quest. No great mystic since St. Augustine has made more of the will in spiritual matters than he does. We have seen how the doors to both world-kingdoms stand before the soul, and how "free-will," "earnest purpose," "decisive endeavour" settle for each soul which door shall open and which shall shut, and so determine its eternal destiny. "Election" is, for Boehme, a fiction of the false imagination, a "Babel-opinion," a perverse invention of "the Church of Cain." Christ never says "thou couldst not," but rather "thou wouldst not."[62]