Religious Experience Research Paper

a) Examine the distinctive features of religious experience
I will examine the distinctive features of a religious experience and how they differ from everyday experiences from the world religions of Christianity and Buddhism. I intend to use the religious experiences of mysticism, near death experiences and revelations to highlight the distinctive features. These distinctive features are what separate religious experiences from ordinary experiences, such as us not having suitable words in our vocabulary to describe religious experiences and the experience not being universal to human beings.
Firstly, I will start by providing a definition of what a “religious experience” actually is. Religious experiences can be characterized generally as
T. Stace suggests that there are 2 types of mystical experiences-"One may be called extrovertive mystical experience, the other introvertive mystical experience. Both are apprehensions of the One, but they reach it in different ways.” • Extrovertive experience = the mystic looks outward and through the physical senses into the eternal world. • Introvertive experience =the mystic turns inward, introspectively, and finds the One at the bottom of the self, at the bottom of human personality. • Introvertive is purest form of a mystical experience, according to Stace, as it is non-sensual and non-intellectual, where the empirical consciousness is suppressed. It is cross-cultural and that the essence of this experience is unity, though Stace sees this interpreted differently in varying cultures and religions.
In the wide sense, mystical experiences occur within the religious traditions of at least Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Indian religions, Buddhism, and primal religions. Many Buddhist traditions, however, make no claim for an experience of a supersensory reality. Some cultivate instead an experience of “unconstructed awareness,” involving an awareness of the world on an absolutely or relatively non-conceptual