[399] mystical, but then you must have a lecture of two semesters only in order to remove all the nonsense from the connotation of the word "mystical." But what I mean here is just this, nothing else but this, nothing irrational, nothing AGAINST reason, but simply the experience of the holy^a which grasps you, and elevates you, and makes you transcend the subject-object situation.

QN: What would be the difference between what you say--"encounter with the holy"--and what Buber^b says: "encounter with the eternal Thou"? What you say is the subject-object world and what he calls the world of "it" PT: What he calls "it," I call the realm of objects. Now his ego-Thou is different from my own interpretation of the encounter with the holy insofar as I believe the more adequate this ego-Thou encounter with God^c is, the more the separation of ego and Thou is overcome by God acting

IN us, in His [his?] encounter with himself [Himself?], so that, so to speak, there are not two individuals separated by different bodies^d, or by space^e or anything like that, but there is a power grasping us which has both personal and supra-personal character. And if for "supra- personal" you say "mystical," then this is another way of speaking about the mystic, but it is by no means the anti-rational. QN: Do you think that ours is the first period of history^f in which such great objectivation has taken place? PT: This is a very justified question, whether our period is the first in which such objectivation^g has taken place. I have learned about the whole thing only by studying the history of Greek