Religious experience as a category was invented to shield faith from rationalism
Talk of a distinct religious experience only took shape in the 19th century, when Friedrich Schleiermacher grounded religion in a feeling of the infinite to fend off scientific critics. William James then made the idea famous, and scholars have been arguing about what such experiences are ever since.
Strictly, a mystical experience means a sense of unity in which the boundary between self and everything else dissolves; more loosely, any non-ordinary awareness that a person reads in religious terms. Visions, near-death episodes and paranormal events usually fall outside the narrow definition but can still count as religious experiences. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was not alone in rooting belief in experience: Kant rested religion on moral experience, and John Wesley treated the conversions of early Methodists as the foundation of a committed life.
James gave the field its first checklist. Mystical states, he said, are ineffable, carry a sense of knowledge, pass quickly, and happen to a person rather than being produced at will. Rudolf Otto described the wider category of the numinous as simultaneously terrifying and fascinating. James and Aldous Huxley held the perennialist view that all such experiences point to one shared transcendent reality. R. C. Zaehner disagreed and sorted mysticism into theistic, monistic and nature types, while Walter Stace countered with an outward-looking unity in diversity and an inward pure consciousness.
From the 1970s a constructionist school took over, arguing that no experience arrives raw: people meet the sacred through frameworks they already hold. A related attribution approach studies how people assign religious meaning to particular events. Perennialism is now largely dismissed by academics, though it keeps its popular appeal. Others push back on James's idea of transience; the philosopher Gellman suggests some people live with an abiding mystical consciousness through their day.
Brain research has found correlates too. The temporal lobe is the main region implicated, Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquili highlighted the parietal lobe, and newer work points to the default mode network and to the anterior insula, which may underlie the feeling of certainty that such episodes bring. Dan Merkur separates trance, where ordinary judgement switches off and visions feel simply true, from reverie, where insights still seem to need interpreting.
Source: Mystical or religious experience
