Every religion in this course rests part of its authority on experience, so a student needs a working sense of what turns an experience into a religious one. The question is harder than it looks, because nothing in the event itself arrives labelled.
Scholars usually work from the interpretation the person gives rather than from the event. An experience counts as religious when the one who has it understands it as contact with, or a message from, a reality beyond ordinary life.
That reality is not described the same way everywhere. Christians, Muslims, Jews and Sikhs speak of a personal God, Theravada Buddhists speak of insight into how things actually are, and Taoists speak of accord with the Tao.
William James collected the features that recur across such reports: the experience resists words, it feels like knowledge rather than mood, it does not last long, and the person feels acted upon rather than acting.
Context supplies the vocabulary. A vision reported in a Catholic village is described in Catholic terms, and a Sufi experience is described in the terms Islam has already given the person having it.
Traditions apply their own tests. Reports are checked against scripture, against the community's teaching and against the moral change they produce in the person who made them.
Definition
A religious experience is an event the person interprets as encounter with a reality beyond the ordinary.
Traditions name that reality as God, as ultimate truth, or as the way things are.
The interpretation rather than the outward form is what makes it religious.
Communities normally test such reports before accepting them.
Numinous and mystical experience
Scholars often sort reports into two broad kinds. Rudolf Otto named the first the numinous, an encounter with something wholly other that leaves a person awed and very small.
Otto described its double effect as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a presence that terrifies and attracts at once. Reports of this kind keep God and the worshipper firmly distinct.
The Tanakh supplies the pattern he worked from. Moses at the burning bush and Isaiah in the Temple both react with fear and a sense of unworthiness before anything is said to them.
The second kind is mystical, where the distance closes instead of opening. Sufi poets, Christian mystics such as Julian of Norwich, and Advaita Vedanta teachers all describe union or the dissolving of separateness.
Traditions disagree about how far that goes. Advaita Vedanta Hindus hold that atman is finally identical with Brahman, while most Muslim and Christian theologians keep creator and creature distinct however close the union is described.
Neither kind has to be dramatic. Many adherents report a quiet, steady sense of presence during prayer, kirtan, puja or a funeral, and their traditions count these as religious experience in the same sense.
Definition
The numinous is an experience of an overwhelming other that awes the person having it.
Rudolf Otto called it mysterium tremendum et fascinans, terrifying and attractive together.
The worshipper remains clearly distinct from what is encountered.
Fear, smallness and wonder are the usual reported ingredients.
Common Mistake
Religious experience is often pictured as visions and voices.
Most adherents report nothing spectacular at all.
A steady sense of presence in ordinary prayer already counts.
Traditions rarely treat the dramatic cases as the most reliable ones.
Conversion and reaffirmation
Some experiences change a person's religious position rather than deepen it. Conversion is the move into a tradition, or a decisive turn within one, and it may arrive suddenly or build over years.
Islam frames the same event differently. Muslims often speak of reversion, on the teaching that everyone is born in a natural state of submission to Allah and is returning to it rather than arriving.
Traditions differ over whether entry is available at all. Hindus have generally held that a person is born into a jati rather than converted, though movements such as ISKCON and the Arya Samaj accept incomers.
Reaffirmation is the commoner event, an experience that renews a commitment already held. Retreats, pilgrimage, festivals and the Sikh Amritsanskar ceremony all work this way.
Scholars judge these changes by their effects rather than by their feelings. A conversion is usually assessed through changed practice, changed company and changed priorities over a long period.
Communities mark the change publicly. Christian baptism, the shahadah spoken before Muslim witnesses and Jewish conversion before a beit din all give the private experience a public form.
Definition
Conversion means entering a religion, or turning decisively within the one already held.
Muslims usually call it reversion, a return to a person's original state.
It may be sudden or may develop slowly over years.
Communities normally recognise it with a public rite.
Group and individual experience
Religious experience happens in crowds as well as in solitude, and the two feed each other. The Hajj, the kumbha-mela, the Easter vigil and Wesak processions are things people undergo together.
Music and movement carry much of the work. Sikh kirtan, gospel choirs, Sufidhikr and Hindu bhajans are all used to bring a gathering into a shared state of attention.
Solitary practice runs the other way. Vipassana meditation, Jewish morning prayer, Christian contemplation and Taoist stillness in nature are pursued alone or in silence.
The conditions are arranged deliberately. Sacred space, fasting, incense, darkness, repetition and rhythm are all used, which shows that traditions expect experience to be cultivated rather than simply awaited.
Access is not evenly shared. Gender, age and status shape who may lead prayer, enter a shrine or speak publicly about what they experienced, and traditions differ sharply on all three.
Communities also police the boundary. A report that contradicts the tradition's teaching is usually reinterpreted or set aside, so experience answers to doctrine as well as supporting it.
Example
Millions of Hindus bathe together at a kumbha-mela.
Pilgrims often describe the crowd itself as part of what they came for.
The same gathering contains long stretches of private prayer at the water.
Group and solitary experience are being had in one place at once.
Interpretation and its limits
Reports are all a student ever has. The experience itself is private, so the evidence is always a description made afterwards, in words the person already possessed.
Ineffability complicates that description. Many adherents insist that language fails them, and then reach for metaphor, poetry, music or silence in order to say so.
Explanations from outside the tradition exist and are studied. Psychological, neurological and social accounts propose mechanisms for such experiences, and adherents commonly answer that describing a mechanism does not settle whether anything was met.
The academic task is description rather than verdict. A student reports what adherents say happened and what it meant to them, without ruling on whether their interpretation is correct.
Comparison needs care. Calling a Buddhist insight and a Christian vision both mystical can bury the fact that one tradition reports no God present and the other reports a personal one.
Experience also carries different weight in different traditions. Some communities treat a founder's experience as the source of everything that follows, while others subject every later report to scripture and law.
Active recall
What makes an experience religious, given that the event itself carries no label?
Contrast a numinous experience with a mystical one and name a scholar linked to each.
Why do Muslims often prefer the word reversion to conversion?
Give two ways traditions deliberately cultivate religious experience.
Why does an academic study describe religious experience without judging it true or false?