Religious Experience versus Mystical Experience

[Sunstone]

I think there is a distinction to be made, but not really as you presented it. Mystical experience does very much include a particular religion's symbols. There are basically different types of mysticism beginning with psychic-level mysticism, to subtle-level mysticism, to causal-level mysticism, to nondual mysticism. The subtle level is very much where encounters with various deity forms arises, visions of Krishna, Jesus, Mary, Kali, Tara, Sophia, etc, etc.

To give you a reference please see the descriptions of these in this explanation of these stages of meditation here paying particular attention to the subtle level: Stages of Meditation | Integral Life

Now as far as distinguishing religious experience from mystical experience, I would say that the experience of religion is most recognizable as a relationship with the external forms; the rituals, the rites, the community, the shared experience, etc. One's identity becomes bound with these forms, and being true to these practices and ways is part of the practice of being faithful and true to one's lineage. Many people never have an internal, mystical experience being part of a religion, but they do benefit from what the externalized forms offer in way of community and belonging, a sense of identity and grounding with culture, etc.

Does this help clarify? BTW, I very much have mystical experiences all the time in meditation that involves deity forms. That is very much a mystical experience, beyond just the religion's teachings. It's direct, immediate, and non-scripted to put a word to it.

So would you insist there is only one legitimate way to categorize mystical and religious experiences?

 

[Sees]

Yet, it would lead to a person believing they can do whatever they like and still have a mystical experience. I don't know why, but this just doesn't seem right to me.

If Hitler claimed to have a mystical experience that told him to do all that bad stuff, was it a mystical experience?

If I could attain moksha by eating beef, having sex, taking drugs, watching TV, telling god to go to hell...I mean, that would be so easy, wouldn't it?

You can't really know or understand exactly what kind of state of mind somebody is in when they tell you they had a mystical/spiritual/ghostly/heavenly experience. Just see their actions and compare to what you know about truths life, who/what we are, etc. It doesn't matter what inspired dumb, cruel, ignorant crap. Maybe some deluded spirit whispered in his ear or his brain isn't properly processing what deity of choice commanded.

I don't see why somebody couldn't wake up to reality/life/truth/blah while having sex or biting into a steak. Divine/Ultimate/Truth isn't just around when you are being a certain flavor of angel. If people make the choice to actually stop sleep-walking through life and truly live, not just study people of the past who lived and dared to seek, they will bump into deeper truth one way or the other.

 

[nazz]

I don't see why somebody couldn't wake up to reality/life/truth/blah while having sex or biting into a steak.

Cypher did...

[youtube]Z7BuQFUhsRM[/youtube]
Agent Smith and Cypher - YouTube

 

[NobodyYouKnow]

Reconciled:
http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/hinduism-dir/158285-experiencing-shiva.html

 

[Sees]

Cypher did...

Have to watch the movie again soon...been a while.

Neo definitely has a few mystical experiences.

 

[Vouthon]

Yeah. I'm serious. Refer me one translation of the Bible (pre-20th century) that explains union with God. Can't find one? Run for your life then

Even though this whole discussion is ludicrous with you (and for some reason my post was ignored by you entirely), and you have derailed Sunstone's excellent thread with your overt desire to de-spiritualize Christianity, sure thing. The Douay-Rheims is a Catholic translation into English from 1582 of the Latin Vulgate translated by St. Jerome in the 4th century AD. I present to you Chancellor's revision of this from 1750: The New Testament (Douay-Rheims, Challoner revision, ca. 1750) -- Browse

Here is its translation of 1 Corinthians 6:17 in which St. Paul states:

1 Corinthians [6][17] But he who is joined to the Lord, is one spirit [with Him]

The New Testament (Douay-Rheims Bible, Challoner revision, ca. 1750)

In whatever translation you so choose to read this verse it is a crisp and simple description of spiritual union with God. If you join yourself to Him, you and He become one spirit, rather than two separate ones.

And just FYI: "Union with God" is not the sine qua non of mystical experience. By holding it up as the be all and end all you exclude Buddhism, Jainism and other non-theistic religions entirely. Mysticism need have no reference to a deity.

Now goodbye! I am not replying back to you again

 

[cafecorridor]

The Douay-Rheims is a Catholic translation into English from 1582 of the Latin Vulgate translated by St. Jerome in the 4th century AD. I present to you Chancellor's revision of this from 1750: The New Testament (Douay-Rheims, Challoner revision, ca. 1750) -- Browse

Commentary? (Pre-20th century) Back in a while

Now goodbye! I am not replying back to you again

Oh Jesus

 

[Windwalker]

The experience of Brahman is the only 'mystical experience' in my mind (or not), so, despite what I thought yesterday (I was trying to keep an open mind about it), there is only one ultimate mystical experience - the realization of the absolute and everything else is just bulldust.

Absolutist thinking does not reflect the Absolute.

 

[Windwalker]

So would you insist there is only one legitimate way to categorize mystical and religious experiences?

No. Why?

Let me offer something that may help. I believe entering into altered states of consciousness provide a perceptual shift that opens one to insights that are otherwise obscured by the "normal" way of seeing the world. The sense of "higher" mind, at any level, is a mystical experience. It's really a matter of how deep that well goes, which is infinite. I see there being types of mystical experiences, types of various states of consciousness. These are state experiences. Anyone can have these. What they do with them, whether they write them off as a spot of bad cheese that was "trippy", or whether they allow it to open them to new understanding, is really the key difference.

Does that help clarify?

 

[NobodyYouKnow]

Absolutist thinking does not reflect the Absolute.

I do understand the whole concept of Fideism and the rationality of Meillassoux.

I am totally at peace using differential fault analysis in the field of hierarchical complexities right now.

You all can have your 'mystical experiences' and I shall have mine.

 

[Sunstone]

Even though this whole discussion is ludicrous with you (and for some reason my post was ignored by you entirely), and you have derailed Sunstone's excellent thread with your overt desire to de-spiritualize Christianity, sure thing. The Douay-Rheims is a Catholic translation into English from 1582 of the Latin Vulgate translated by St. Jerome in the 4th century AD. I present to you Chancellor's revision of this from 1750: The New Testament (Douay-Rheims, Challoner revision, ca. 1750) -- Browse

Here is its translation of 1 Corinthians 6:17 in which St. Paul states:



The New Testament (Douay-Rheims Bible, Challoner revision, ca. 1750)

In whatever translation you so choose to read this verse it is a crisp and simple description of spiritual union with God. If you join yourself to Him, you and He become one spirit, rather than two separate ones.

And just FYI: "Union with God" is not the sine qua non of mystical experience. By holding it up as the be all and end all you exclude Buddhism, Jainism and other non-theistic religions entirely. Mysticism need have no reference to a deity.

Now goodbye! I am not replying back to you again

This was quite helpful, Vouthon! Sorry I'm out of frubals at the moment.

 

[Vouthon]

Commentary? (Pre-20th century) Back in a while

I did promise not to reply to you again and I like to think of myself as a man of my word, nevertheless if you insist, here ya go. Read it and weep!

Here is a commentary on that verse 1 Corinthians 6:17 by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a Doctor of the Catholic Church, from the twelfth century:

On Loving God

by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153)​

Chapter X.

Of the fourth degree of love: wherein man does not even love self save for
God's sake

How blessed is he who reaches the fourth degree of love, wherein one
loves himself only in God! Thy righteousness standeth like the strong
mountains, O God. Such love as this is God's hill, in the which it
pleaseth Him to dwell. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?' O
that I had wings like a dove; for then would I flee away and be at
rest.' At Salem is His tabernacle; and His dwelling in Sion.' Woe is
me, that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech! ' (Ps. 24.3; 55.6;
76.2; 120.5). When shall this flesh and blood, this earthen vessel
which is my soul's tabernacle, attain thereto? When shall my soul, rapt
with divine love and altogether self-forgetting, yea, become like a
broken vessel, yearn wholly for God, and, joined unto the Lord, be one
spirit with Him? (I Cor. 6.17) When shall she exclaim, My flesh and my heart faileth;
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever' (Ps.
73.26). I would count him blessed and holy to whom such rapture has
been vouchsafed in this mortal life, for even an instant to lose
thyself, as if thou no longer existed, to cease completely to experience thyself,
as if thou wert emptied and lost and swallowed up in God, is
no human love; it is celestial. But if sometimes a poor mortal feels
that heavenly joy for a rapturous moment, then this wretched life
envies his happiness, the malice of daily trifles disturbs him, this
body of death weighs him down, the needs of the flesh are imperative,
the weakness of corruption fails him, and above all brotherly love
calls him back to duty. Alas! that voice summons him to re-enter his
own round of existence; and he must ever cry out lamentably, O Lord, I
am oppressed: undertake for me' (Isa. 38.14); and again, O wretched man
that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' (Rom.
7.24).

O chaste and holy love! O sweet and gracious
affection! O pure and cleansed purpose, thoroughly washed and purged
from any admixture of selfishness, and sweetened by contact with the
divine will! To reach this state is to become deified. As a drop of
water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the color and savor of
wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself,
forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sun-beams, seems
not so much to be illuminated as to be light itself; so in the saints
all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into
the will of God. For how could God be all in all, if anything merely
human remained in man?

Chapter XV.

Of the four degrees of love, and of the blessed state of the heavenly
fatherland

For then in wondrous wise he will forget himself and
as if delivered from self, he will grow wholly God's. Joined unto the
Lord, he will then be one spirit with Him (I Cor. 6.17). This was what
the prophet meant, I think, when he said: ' I will go forth in the
strength of the Lord God: and will make mention of Thy righteousness
only' (Ps. 71.16). Surely he knew that when he should go forth in the
spiritual strength of the Lord, he would have been freed from the
infirmities of the flesh, and would have nothing carnal to think of,
but would be wholly filled in his spirit with the righteousness of the
Lord...

What of the souls already released from their bodies? We believe that
they are overwhelmed in that vast sea of eternal light and of luminous
eternity.​

Happy? This is nearly from a thousand years before the 20th century and is a witness to how the Church interpreted this verse.

 

[Windwalker]

I am totally at peace

Then you have no need to be right anymore.

 

[Vouthon]

Earlier I noted:

religious people will often relate their mystical experiences to their religion and use terminology applicable to it in their descriptions thereof.

__________________

If I may elaborate a little further with reference to the famous Hindu mystic Ramakrishna. In 1929 Romain Rolland, a friend of Sigmund Freud, wrote a book about the mysticism of this Indian holy man, in which he differentiated between the mystical experiences of Ramakrishna, proper, and his personal interpretation and application of them as relating to the goddess Kali, with whom he had a strong Bhakti devotion.

Let me illustrate his psychological assessment by quoting Ramakrishna directly:

"...I looked at her [statue] and my brain was struck by lightening...An ocean of ineffable joy rolled within me. And to the depths of my Being I was conscious of the presence of the Divine Mother..."

Consider this. The mystic is in devotion before a statue of Kali when he has a mystical experience of unspeakable joy. The experience itself is quite "impersonal". What is specifically theistic about "joy" or "ineffability"? Then he interprets it as being the "presence of the Divine Mother".

So in Rolland's view the "mystical" experience is quite "content free" as much as specific religious personages or concepts are considered but the individual mystic, when discursive thought returns, associates it with Christ, Buddha etc.

An interesting parallel to this is near-death experiences. Universally, the NDE-experiencer beholds a "being of light" from whom they feel and derive an unimaginable sense of love, benevolence, compassion, joy and sense of meaning.

I've seen Buddhist NDE'ers say, "It was His Holiness the Buddha!", Christians, "It was the Lord Jesus!", Baha'is, "It was the Blessed Beauty Baha'u'llah" and atheists or agnostics "a warm light".

The experience would appear to be in itself "content free" but a "content" specific to the person's pre-determined belief system is applied in the immediate aftermath.

 

[Leftimies]

I'm not sure how that would actually work in practice. For instance, some people say it's a religious experience for them to have the feelings of warmth and acceptance they experience while praying with their church congregation on Sundays. But they do not claim their experience involves anything more unusual than heightened emotions. That is, they don't describe it as, say, a radical change in their awareness. Can you explain how that religious experience is "just a mystical experience interpreted from the viewpoint and context of one's cultural background"?

To me, it sounds like these people are talking about social experiences and identity-related experiences occurring within the framework of organised religion, rather than religious experience itself. It all comes down to how you define religious experience of course - personally, I always saw religious experience as experience related to one's faith, not as an experience of acceptance or warmth in relation to other people. Naturally, the faith in question that the religious experience relates to, is one defined by religious tradition - and it is this that sets religious apart from mystical experience: mystical experience lacks any predefined context, but religious experience is supernatural experience understood within the boundaries of one's faith. In my opinion at least.

But when the experience is not one of faith, but rather one of social nature, then that has more to do with self-identification within societal unit. As student of social sciences and theory, I'd keep the two apart...but thats just my two cents. And my two cents aren't the hottest currency around XD

 

[lamarkia]

William James, in his famous "Varieties of Religious Experience," saw one great partition in defining religion or religious experience. On the one side lies institutional, on the other personal religion. Institutional religions are organized by men into entities resembling corporations. They usually have set and rigid belief structures, heirarchies, creeds, and other ceremonies. Personal religion, on the other hand are: "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."

"Mystical experience lies in the realm of personal religion and is more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the Founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine."