Typologies of religious experiences keyed to Gary Kessler, Studying Religion Through Cases

1. Ritual Symbol Myth
Understanding Religious Experience

2. Defining “Experience”
• There is a difference between the reality of the object of an experience (gods,
spirits, ghosts,God) and the person’s perception of an experience.
• We cannot investigate the object that a religious person believes lies behind the
experience, but we can study the phenomenon , or experience, as the person
having it perceives it, describes it, and explains what it means to him/her.
• We take the person’s description and explanation at face value without judging its
historicity or truth value.This is called the phenomenological approach to
religious studies. Each experience is a phenomenon. By collecting evidence of
experiences and comparing them to one another we can create useful categories
of comparison to learn something about what people mean when they say they
have a religious experience.

3. Religious Experience
For our purposes in this class, any experience that a person explains or understands
within a religious frame of reference is a religious experience. Religious experience
can be categorized in many different ways.There is no single, absolute set of
categories that account for all religious experiences.You choose your categories
based on what will be most useful in making sense of your stories or data. For
example, you can ask where the person’s experience primarily takes place. Does the
experience happen as a normal part of a social gathering; does it take place in a
person’s body via the physical senses, or is it mostly experienced in the mind:
• Social experiences
• Sensory experiences
• Interior experiences

4. Social Experiences
People may describe their social interactions
with others in a religious environment as
“religious experiences”. For example:
• “I went to church camp.”
• “I sang in the choir.”
• “Our home fellowship group ministered
to the homeless.”
These are ‘religious’ experiences insomuch
as they take place in a social environment for
religious purposes. Not all camps, choirs and
home groups are religious social
experiences.There is nothing essentially
religious about this kind of experience.This
doesn’t mean you might not have a sensory
or interior religious experience singing in the
choir, of course.

5. Sensory Experience
Religious experiences are sometimes described in
terms of how they make a person feel, physically and
emotionally. Rudolph Otto argued that there is a
uniquely religious experience that he called
“numinous.” It is an eerie mixture of fear and
fascination that makes your heart pound and your
knees weak.. You “shouldn’t go there” but you are
drawn to the encounter nevertheless. You “know”
that you are in the presence of something uncanny or
otherworldly, dangerous even, and yet you cannot
resist.
Other kinds of sensory religious experiences include
visual and auditory hallucinations.
Again, what makes this kind of experience religious is
the frame of reference used to describe it and the
meaning derived from it. For some, a numinous
encounter may be religious, for others, it may just be
fantasy, while for scientists, it may only be evidence
of a primitive biological response, fight or flight, to
perceived danger. Those who claim to have visions
and hear voices can be saints in a religious context but
mentally ill or frauds when judged by non-believers.

6. Interior Experience
Mystical or ecstatic experiences are primarily
perceived inwardly, in the mind and the
emotions rather than externally in the senses.
Often, though, the senses must be subdued
through various physical techniques so that the
mind, freed from the constant influx of external
signals, can reach alternate states of
consciousness where these interior experiences
can occur.
Music, dance, chanting, yoga … these are all
physical modalities that can be used to
overwhelm the senses and precipitate an interior
experience. When an experience like this takes
place in a religious framework, then the
experience can be classified as “religious” and
can be compared to other religious experiences
in different contexts. Is there a single, core
experience we can label as mystical Is there a
common cause (external or biological) behind
the experience? ? Or, do these experiences vary
in different contexts and religious frameworks?

7. Organizing by point of origin
• You could also organize experiences by where they originate—does the person initiate the
experience, or does it seem to begin outside the human realm and “intrude” into this world?
• Revelatory – God, gods or other supernatural power/s ‘reveal’ truth or give important direction to
the prophet, visionary, or penitent believer. Communication originates from the divine realm and
reaches out or down to the human realm.This is common in monotheistic religions but largely
absent from non-theistic religions like Buddhism for obvious reasons.
• Ecstatic – the religious practitioner finds a way to connect directly with the divine or the world of
supernatural beings.The experience begins with the human being and reaches out to or for the
divine or non-material realm. Non-theistic as well as theistic religious systems can accommodate
ecstatic experiences, but monotheistic religions are often wary of mystics because they seem to
share more similarities with other mystics in different religious traditions than with non-mystics in
their own religion.

8. Revelatory Experiences
Revelations. Religious stories, or myths often contain stories
of special individuals who experience a direct, unmediated
communication from the divine realm of
gods, ghosts, spirits, or other supra-worldly entities.This can
be portrayed as
• hearing an “invisible” or “inaudible” voice, and/or
• having a vision of the divine realm, or even
• intuitive ‘knowing’ that bypasses the rational, logical
thought process.

9. Personal, Communal Revelations
• The Bible claims that Moses received theTorah fromYHVH on Mt. Sinai and
Muslims claim that Mohammad received the Qur’an from the angel Gabriel.These
are examples of communal revelations.
• Born-again Christians often say they receive personal direction in the form of
intuitive knowledge: “The LORD told me ...” or “The Holy Spirit revealed to me
…” These examples could be classified as personal revelations.
• The ongoing visions and communal revelations of theVirgin Mary reported by six
visionaries for the past 30+ years in Medjugorje are a rare example of mutually
confirming personal experiences with communal significance.

10. MarianApparitions of Medjugorje
Mirjana Dragicevic-Soldowas born on March 18th, 1965, in Sarajevo. She claims to have had daily apparitions of the Virgin
Mary beginning in 1981 until December 25th, 1982. Since August 2nd, 1987, on each second day of the month since the, she
reports that she hears interiorly the Virgin’s voice and prays with her for unbelievers. Sometimes she also sees her. [Read
more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2252122/Virgin-Mary-sightings-Are-Bosnians-hoaxers-living-saints.html]

11. Ways to Organize by Function
• Ecstasy comes from the Greek Ek-Stasis, meaning to stand outside of oneself
• Shamanic ecstasy – a shaman enters the ecstatic state in order to mediate
between the divine and human realms.Tribal shamans work as healers, psychics,
and seers; in modern America, “channels” like the famous J. Z. Knight say they
allow themselves to be possessed by wise, old spirit beings wishing to bring
messages to a modern, seeking audience.
• Mystical ecstasy – a mystic enters the ecstatic state for personal communion or
union with the divine. Feelings of intense emotional pain or pleasure may occur.
Mystics may intuitively ‘know’ the true nature of Ultimate Reality or even merge
with it in what is described as a loss of self awareness.

12. Ramtha and J Z Knight
Anthropologists take shamanistic
performances in tribal or “primitive” cultures
seriously as religious phenomena; but what
about modern experiences? Consider the
case of New Age channelers and
spiritualists, whose popularity waxes and
wanes in American society.
J. Z. Knight has been channeling “Ramtha,” a
35,000 year old warrior, for more than 30
years.On what basis do we include or
exclude her experiences from our collection
of data? Is channeling Ramtha a case of
opportunistic fraud?A religious experience
(sacred or demonic)? Self-delusion? Mental
illness? Spiritual but not religious? In an
attempt to mainstream her
experiences, Knight opened the Ramtha
School of Enlightenment in 1988.
http://www.jzknight.com/about/

13. Other Ecstatic Experiences
• Out of body experiences
• Near death experiences
• Holy Spirit Pentecostal experiences
• Spirit possession experiences
When are these religious experiences, and if not
religious, then how would they be classified and by
whom?

14. MysticalTechniques
• Yoga
• Meditation
• Drugs and other mind-altering substances
• Monotonous, rhythmic sound and bodily
movements
• Hypnosis; self-hypnosis

15. 19TH C RELIGION AND
20TH C PSYCHOLOGICALTHEORY
Explaining religious experience

16. Frederich Schleiermacher
• The core of all religious experience is
a feeling (cognitive intuition) of
complete and utter dependence on
something higher, i.e., God.
• German Christian theologian (1768-
1834) and philosopher.
• Writing to defend Christianity
against skeptics who were
disillusioned with institutional
religion and who disparaged the idea
that miracles or other supernatural
events were possible.

17. Rudolph Otto
• German scholar of comparative religion and
Lutheran theologian (1869-1937)
• The core of religion is the “numinous” experience.
Numen is Otto’s term for referring to God.
• A human being who experiences God, experiences
the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a fearful
and fascinating mystery), a force completely
outside the human realm; the wholly Other, the
Holy (Das Heilige).
• In this encounter, the human soul is awed,
humbled, speechless, and made aware of its own
unworthiness. In the presence of the Holy the
human being senses his Profane state of being.
• True religion is revelation; and the highest
revelation is the Son, or Christ of Christian religion.

18. Sigmund Freud
• Austrian physician and the forefather of modern
psychotherapy.
• Religion, that is, monotheistic belief in a God, is an
illusion.
• “God” is a projection of the human mind (following
Feuerbach).
• Ecstatic experiences are not the result of
encountering an external object (God, spirits), but
are self-produced effects, whose true causes lie in
the repressed needs and unfulfilled sexual desires
that reside in the unconscious mind.
• Compulsive religious ritual behavior resembles
neurotic obsession, and is likely a means of purging
unconscious feelings of guilt.

19. Carl Jung
• Swiss psychotherapist, the father of
analytical psychology (1875-1961).
• The human psyche is naturally “religious”.
• At the core of all mystical experience is the
human need for individuation or psychic
integration.
• Extrovertive and introvertive mystical
experiences are evidence of the self
achieving wholeness; encountering itself
within, and finding the Divine.
• The gods, spirits, and other divine beings are
healthy projections of the human mind that
can assist the integrative process.