Mysiticism and Theology

Decades after the death of James, Bergson asserts that mystical experience has a different "source" than traditional religion, thereby implicitly criticizing his friend's concept of them as varieties of one and the same process.  However, he, too, fails to decisively distinguish the posited sources.  For, his interpretation of 'mystical experience' as a recovery of Spirit from a fall into Matter, is only a special case of the perdition-salvation theme of orthodox theology.  In contrast, one approach to sharpening the dichotomy has been previously proposed here--the characterization of 'mystical experience' as a surplus process, i. e. as 'ecstatic', establishes it as independent of any presuppositions about its antecedent conditions, including the still prevalent theological interpretation of humans as ontologically deficient in some respect.