Religious Experience: Key Words Flashcards
Clairvoyance
The claimed ability to gain information about objects/persons by means beyond the normal methods of perception.
Corporeal Vision
Relating to a person’s body. A corporeal vision is one that comes through physical sense of sight.
Empirical
Empirical religious experiences are those which are experienced by the sense of touch, taste, hearing, smell and sight.
Entheogen
‘Generating the Divine from within.’
Extrovertive
In Walter Stace’s definition, a kind of ‘half-way house’ to introvertive religious experience. Unlike the introvertive religious experience, in the Extrovertive type, sense experience is still active although objects are transformed by unity that shines through.’
Hallucinogenic
Causing hallucinations e.g. hallucinogenic drugs.
Illumination
Cast light. In religious terms, the doctrine of illumination holds that when the biblical writers wrote their books, the Holy Spirit illuminated their minds with the truth. In intellectual visions, the vision illuminates the soul without any kind of visual image.
Imaginative vision
A vision seen in the mind, usually through a dream experience
Ineffable
For William James - an aspect of mystical religious experiences not describable in words, so cannot be imparted to others.
Intellectual Vision
A vision ‘Without any visual image, where the experience is an ‘illumination’ of the soul.
Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans
‘A tremendous and fascinating mystery’ - part of Otto’s description of numinous religious experience.
Neuroscience
The scientific study of the structure and function of the nervous system.
Neurotheology
The attempt to explain religious experience and behaviour in neuroscientific terms.
Noetic
For William James - an aspect of mystical religious experience - that such experiences are states of knowledge as well as feelings, but the knowledge is spiritual and non-transferable as well as authoritative.
Non-intellectual
The ‘I’ of the rational intellect is replaced by ‘pure consciousness.’
