Sterba feels every mystic experience of lasting effect is 'a tour-de-force conflict solution'. The basic element of the mystic experience is the loss of the constrictive frame of the self and fusion with objects of the outside world—human,

parts of the Cosmos, or the universe as a whole. Aesthetic feelings are mild forms of mystic experience; they involve transcendence of the self into the outside objects through extension of ego boundaries. An important motivation leading to the mystic state is the denial of mortality through fusion with divinities or the universe and participation in their external existence.