Socrates’ statement in the Apology that the unexamined life is not worth living has been one of the major touchstones of my career as a teacher of philosophy, along with his persistent inquiries into the real meanings of those values which he and others held dear. As a colleague of mine recently noted, “Woolman says that philosophy is vain without experience; Socrates says that experience is vain without philosophy.”
Trying to be faithful to both mentors, I shall report three of my own encounters with transcendence, experiences of a kind familiar to a great many Friends and others. Then, reflecting on those experiences, I want to see what I can learn from them about myself, about reality, about God, about transcendence. But experience is first and last. It gives rise to the reflections, and the reflections in turn are tested by those experiences and others. The whole point of reflection is to make experience intelligible.
