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In this moment from Malcolm’s life as a minister, we see decay (breaking down the legacy of colonialist and homophobic beliefs), distillation (the feeling that led the elderly man to break down in tears), and growth (that simplest expander of interconnectedness, the hug).

In high school and college, Malcolm carried William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience around with him, tucked under his arm, which (for good reason) provoked teasing from his friends. Malcolm Clemens Young was composting William James’s experiences of mystical awe from 120 years ago.

James was raised in a nineteenth-century New York family who had the means and free-spiritedness to wander and wonder. He went to experimental schools. He lived with his family in Europe when he was a child and then studied art when he was eighteen. Alongside these privileges, James suffered from anxiety of every kind. Panic. Self-doubt. Generalized anxiety. And a claustrophobia that led him to find window shutters unnerving unless they were opened to just the right degree. In his twenties, James was so beleaguered by severe depression that he contemplated suicide.

James would begin a lifelong search for what he would call the fundamental cosmical IT, or mystical awe:

But it feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem.

For James, there is an experience to be had, one of mystical awe, that is wild and beyond the ideas of the default self and society’s status quo.

Seeking such “wild in the universe,” James listened to talks by itinerant spiritualists. He attended seances. Inspired by amateur philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, James experimented with nitrous oxide. This drug activates the opioid system, which produces feelings of merging, and GABA, a neurotransmitter that energizes thought. In a rush of nitrous oxide, James called out: Oh my god, oh god, oh god! The anxieties of his default self were decaying. With the “tattered fragments” of words he described what was distilling as “thought deeper than speech.” He had discovered mystical awe through a drug we get at a visit to our dentist today.

These experiences are what led James to gather and curate stories of awe. He compiled personal accounts of encounters with the Divine, so often stories of inexplicable and at times extraordinary experiences, from ministers, writers such as Tolstoy and Whitman, acquaintances, and ordinary citizens. He would present his thinking in the Gifford Lectures in 1901 and 1902 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and from these talks publish The Varieties of Religious Experience, the most revolutionary book on religion from the twentieth century and a touchstone for those who study religion today.

In this book, James defines religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of men in their solitude. So far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.” Religion is about our experience of relating to the Divine, which James describes as vast, primal, and enveloping. We can find these feelings, of bliss, oceanic love, grace, terror, despair, doubt, confusion, and mystical awe—in almost any context. In all religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Jainism, the many forms of Christianity, Islam, Sufism. In nature. In music. In ideas. And even in chemicals that we put into our bodies. His thesis is one of radical pluralism; the pathways to mystical awe are nearly infinite. Everyday mystical awe.

Just over a hundred years later, a new science of religion has concerned itself with this most complex cultural form, focusing on things like beliefs about God, ceremonies and ritual, dogma and explanation, and the historical evolution of religions. And William James’s focus and ours, mystical awe.