Mystical experience Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Mystical experience - Assignment Example Such experiences are always spiritual, though they may not be; they are not limited to priests or monks. However, all individual religious experiences are entrenched in mystical states of consciousness, yet all mystical experiences are partially religious. Although mystical experiences occur commonly, they happen unbidden to someone perhaps once or severally in a lifetime. Mystical experiences are for example, those of oneness with nature and the deeper self, the mystic is always a tragic form, torn by the tensions between the soul and the body, between the spiritual and physical. He is beleaguered by his bodily chains that limit him to this meager realism; he is drawn to the elusive, he longs for the inspiring, for the best. He desires to free himself, to rise further. The world surrounding him is a dark, awful place, his spirit sores and soars, attempting to flee its worldly prison. William James identified four Mystical characteristics; Ineffability, where mystical states are more similar to states of feeling than intelligence, slightly shaded with fine nuances that are hard to express in their import and splendor to another. As a result, much mystical writing is filled with symbolism and paradoxes1. Noetic quality experiences are conditions of insight, knowledge, revelation, awareness, and illumination beyond the grab of the intelligence. There is knowledge of unity with the totality, of immorality of the soul, of immense truths. Space and time are exceeded. Transiency, mystical experiences fleet in linear time, even though they tend to be eternal. It is rare to maintain a mystical state for long hours. For instance, Eastern adepts are capable of sustaining prolonged stages of Samadhi, a mystical condition of one-pointed meditation; and some allegedly are able to maintain the highest states of nirvana. Passivity, the personal feels held by a greater power and swept up. This can be accompanied by a feeling of division from bodily consciousness, trance, or ph enomena like automatists, healing powers, voices, and visions. Such examples are viewed in Eastern thought as conditions of pseudo-enlightenment. Religious mysticism makes schools and accumulates traditions, much less common than people think. For example, in Christianity, mysticism is usually self-indulgent and ascetic in nature; in the Vedanta institution it is monistic, in the Sankhya institution it is dualistic. Since mystical experiences vary to a large degree, the mystical feeling of union, emancipation, and enlargement has no specific rational content on its own. Therefore, the non-mystic is ever gratified to confer a greater authority to the experience or to the mystic. Mystical consciousness simplifies the way in which truth is procured more significantly. The truth or validity-revealing character of a mystical experience as with other knowledge does not depend on the validity of the integrated theories such as those determined by the culture within which the experience is felt. The validity of the integrated speculation is relative to the know-how led to them earlier and the experiences which are made possible by themselves. It must be likely for the experience smash through the theories inclusive of the incorporated theories and make people to remake them. More positively, mysticism might help to liberate traditions from most of its deforming influences. Part II. Question 6 The life and works of St. Theresa of Avila In mid-life, St. Teresa underwent a deep conversion experience,