10 Facts About Mystical experience

Mystical experience describes extrovertive mysticism as an experience of unity within the world, whereas introvertive mysticism is "an experience of unity devoid of perceptual objects; it is literally an experience of 'no-thing-ness'".

The notion of "religious Mystical experience" was used by Schleiermacher to defend religion against the growing scientific and secular critique.

Mystical experience considered the "personal religion" to be "more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism", and defines religion as.

Mystical experience ignores ritual, the historicity of religious traditions, and theology, instead emphasizing "feeling" as central to religion.

Robert Sharf points out that "Mystical experience" is a typical Western term, which has found its way into Asian religiosity via western influences.

Essentialist model argues that mystical experience is independent of the sociocultural, historical and religious context in which it occurs, and regards all mystical experience in its essence to be the same.

Yet, according to Laibelman, Katz did not say that the Mystical experience can't be unmediated; he said that the conceptual understanding of the Mystical experience can't be unmediated, and is based on culturally mediated preconceptions.

Theoretical study of mystical experience has shifted from an experiential, privatised and perennialist approach to a contextual and empirical approach.

Mystical experience questioned the earlier accounts of religious figures with temporal lobe epilepsy, noticing that "very few true examples of the ecstatic aura and the temporal lobe seizure had been reported in the world scientific literature prior to 1980".

Matthew Day notes that the discovery of a neurological substrate of a "religious Mystical experience" is an isolated finding which "doesn't even come close to a robust theory of religion".