Mystics are appreciated today as people who take God seriously. They do not merely believe in the existence of God or the divine, they claim to have experienced the presence of God in their lives and in the world. The aim and purpose of mysticism is union with God, a oneness with the divine that is complete and total. For mystics, everything else follows from this. When the mysterious presence of God fills their consciousness in ways that are impossible to describe, their lives are transformed. They become happy, joyful, confident, humble, loving, free, and secure. The hunger for spirituality is a hunger for precisely that.
One of the features of the mystical experience of union with God is that it always includes an experience of oneness with all human beings and with the whole universe.
— Albert Nolan, Jesus Today