11.1 Spiritual experience  (Page 3/3)

Although these experiences are more common in Eastern religious traditions where the Divine is seen to permeate this reality, there are also many cases where the insights of Christian mystics have appeared to have at least elements of the immanent as well. The mystic Meister Eckhardt, for example, said that "God is nearer to me than I am to myself".

These experiences are often called "monistic mysticism" because they are experiences that come forth from the inner person which is said to be identical with the Divine. Monistic refers to systems of thought that hold that the Divine is present within everything – even the human being.

Mystic unity

The term mysticism is often used quite loosely to refer to things that are not understood, to things that are strange and sometimes to things that are vaguely of a religious nature. It should, however, be reserved for those experiences where people feel that they have had a direct, immediate, and intimate contact with the Ultimate. These experiences are of the kind where the person feels that the separateness between God and herself is an illusion and that they are One.

This category of experiences is found in all the religious traditions of the world, those that are usually transcendent and those which are usually immanent. While these are more acceptable in the religious systems of the East, many mystics in the Semitic religions have also had these experiences – although some of them have had to pay with their lives for speaking about these, such as the Muslim mystic al–Hallaj (d 922 CE).

In Hinduism the great sage Sankara taught that Brahman (the Ultimate primal force of the universe) and Atman (the soul of the person) are identical.

These experiences of union can also be non–religious, as when a person has an experience of oneness with nature without interpreting it as oneness with God or a Divine force. This type of experience is described well in the poetry of William Wordsworth and Robert Browning.

Did you know?

There is an ongoing debate on whether it is possible to have an experience that is not influenced by one's own beliefs and understanding off the world. Theorists who consider this question differ on the answer. Some say that a direct experience of pure consciousness is possible and that great religious people have had such experiences and it is only when they try to explain the experiences that they fall back on their own beliefs and explain it by referring to religious symbols within their own tradition.

Others say that all experiences are influenced by our world views and our language and that one cannot have an experience of pure consciousness. That is why we won't find a Buddhist having a vision of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus or a Christian having an experience of opening the third eye. In other words, religious experiences are of the kind one would expect in one's own tradition and culture because they are already influenced by beliefs and customs.

This debate is ongoing and scholars don't agree and perhaps the answer lies somewhere between these two positions. Religions have developed their own ways of dealing with the problem: in Zen Buddhism, for example, if one goes to a religious teacher and tells him that while in meditation you have experienced a vision of the Buddha, he is likely to say, "That's very nice. But don't worry, if you keep concentrating on your breath it will go away”!