spiritual experience - exam 1

dr noll

cognitive

thinking

affective

the observable expression of emotion, verbal reports

behavioral

what bodies do, how people act

experiential dimension

private or subjected experiences that are deemed as spiritual

objective

can be verified by others

subjective

cannot be verified by others

Phenomenology

a new field of study that studies spiritual experience and conscious thought

Psychophysics

experiemtnal psychology that studies sensory experiences

Psychology of Religion

starbuck and james studied subjective accounts of different types of religious conversion experiences

human experience

limited by the 5 sensory organs and the structure of the brain. we can use our understanding of biological, cultural, and cognitive filters on human experiences to help unpack claims of mystical experiences.

spontaneous experiences

not planned and happens by chance

deliberatly induced expeiences

induced with purpose with meditation, psychedelics, or prayer

ann Hutchinson

a puritain spiritual advisor. she was able to discern between her voice and the voice of god/jesus/her beloved. she lived in the Massachusetts bay colony. she was given revelations from the voice she heard, and what it said to her was different from what others were teaching, and that caused her to be cast out from her village/town.

edwin starbuck

created the questionnaire to help learn about different types of religious conversion, which would be sudden or gradual conversion

william james

believed that psychology cannot claim to be comprehensive if it fails to account for the varieties of different experiences distinct from those people consider “normal”

to understand normal we must study the abnormal

studied first person accounts of intense experiences that clients deemed mystical

emphasized phenomenology

judge by the fruits, not by the roots

experiences should not be judged based off of the experience alone, but the outcome of it

ineffability

beyond understanding and incapable of being put into words

noetic quality

insight gained from these mystical experiences

transiency

the short duration of these experiences

passivity

hearing voices or seeing visions, people report these expeirences as if they are happening to them

Perennialism

mystical experiences are unique and cannot be reduced to psychological, physiological, or sociological interpretation.

all humans can directly interact with this unseen knowledge and reality

all religious traditions begin with special people who have these experiences and are all assessing the same truth

rudolf otto and huston smith

medical materialism

all “experiences” can be broken down via a physiological cause

william james coined the term yet he did not agree with it

postmodernism

a movement based on the skepticism on any universal claims

language is used by the elites to control society

based on the fact that we only have verbal reports of these private experiences, there is no way to really verify them

steven katz and wayne proudfoot

negative theology

humans cannot possibly being saying any truth from these experiences of god or the divine based off our human limitations

cognitive science of religion

study of religious thought and behavior from the perspective of cognitive science, and often goes hand in hand with evolutionary science