People can have unwilled ineffable insightful feelings {mystical state} {mystical experience}. People feel spiritual or divine presence, deep meaning, and/or unity with universe. People feel that everything is blissful, joyful, simple, and clear. People can feel nothingness, silence, self-expansion, transcendence, immanence, divine knowledge, enlightenment, cosmic consciousness, oneness, samadhi, or satori. Mystical experience can seem sacred or holy [James, 1902] [Kennett, 1972]. Mystical states are conscious but unaware with experienced sensations.
levels
Mystical experience can have different stages or levels. People can have insight into non-physical existence or divine and good power {awakening, mystical}. People can choose to become pure, live correctly, and discipline self to reach divine level {purgation}. People can receive enlightenment or feel divine presence or ultimate reality {illumination, mystical}. People can feel that self is preventing them from reaching ultimate level or that effort is never enough {dark night, mystical}. People can feel loss of self and unity with ultimate {union, mystical}. People can feel that they have no more self. People can feel surrounded by colored light. People can feel calm, bliss, and joy. People can experience all physical reality intensely. People can experience consciousness clearly and purely.
properties
During mystical experience, people are passive with no will or identity. People feel outside time and space or experience unlimited space and eternal time. People can sense a happy, ineffably good, complete, and dominant spirit, or an evil, horrible, and repulsive spirit.
People have mystical experience from half-hour to several hours.
causes
Depression and despair can trigger mystical state, as can meditation, prayer, nature, art, music, and worship.
LSD and psilocybin cause mystical experiences.
memory
People cannot describe or think about mystical feelings that they had before [Underhill, 1920].
People can feel immortal and/or infinite {cosmic consciousness}, at one with universe [Bucke, 1901] [Stace, 1960].
People cannot know God {docta ignorantia}, because he combines opposites. People can know the infinite only mystically [Nicholas of Cusa, 1440].
Unseen power or mysterious light {flash, mysticism} {illumination, mysticism}, felt in head, seems to possess tribal chieftains, priests, or medicine men.
In Hinduism, Kundalini yoga takes practitioner through stages {lotus ladder} from everyday dullness, to sex, to power and achievement, to compassion, to self and sex conquest, to god-like vision, and to pure ecstasy.
Religious and mystical selfless states end {Ozeanische Selbstentgrenzung} {oceanic boundary loss}.
People can feel that they receive insight {prophecy} {revelation, mysticism} from God or angel. Prophecy is knowledge about mystical experiences [Avicenna, 1020]. However, different revelations reflect personal lives and contradict each other.
Ecstasy can involve religion {religious ecstasy, mystical}. Mystical experience is often religious experience. People can feel that they experience something, beyond physical world or throughout physical world, that is divine, powerful, and good. People can feel God's presence [Hardy, 1979] [Persinger, 1999]. People can feel that they have no individual self but are part of something divine. People can feel possession by spirits. Religious ecstasy is conscious but unaware.
Buddhism
In Buddhism, ecstasy is one Eightfold-Path component. Buddha felt nirvana and nothingness, with no individualness and total mystical knowledge. In Shin Buddhism in China or Pure Land Buddhism in India, meditators can repeat mantras {nembutsu} {namu amida butsu} about the Cosmic Buddha (Amida) to try to reach nirvana, feel insight about themselves, and go beyond ordinary life and consciousness to the pure land. Emptiness {netti} with no thoughts or sensations is pure consciousness or being. The Cosmic Buddha combines the Buddha of Boundless Light (Amitabha) with the Buddha of Boundless Life (Amitayus). The actual embodied Buddha was Shakyamuni Buddha.
Christianity
Gianlorenzo Bernini depicted religious ecstasy in his Ecstasy of St. Theresa sculpture. In Christianity, people can feel God and have deep knowledge and understanding, as described by Ekhart.
Perceptions and facts mirror the finite, so people can know the finite world by perception. Finite world is contingent and temporal. Concepts mirror the infinite. Infinite world is absolute and without time. People cannot know the infinite, because finite and infinite have no relations. People cannot know God (docta ignorantia), because he combines opposites. People can know the infinite only mystically [Nicholas of Cusa, 1440].
Greek mythology
Asia-Minor and Greece cult {cult of Dionysius} was about nature, ecstasy, and passion [-600 to -450].
Hinduism
In Hinduism, people can feel bliss {tasting the sweetness} {savikalpa samadhi} in awareness of god. Devotional yoga {bhakti yoga} concentrates on god and its qualities. Atman joins with Brahman {becoming the sweetness} {nirvikalpa samadhi}. People can feel insight about themselves, going beyond ordinary life and consciousness, with no thoughts or sensations, only emptiness. In the Advaita School, this is the highest meditation state. Kundalini yoga takes practitioner through lotus-ladder stages from everyday dullness, to sex, to power and achievement, to compassion, to conquest of self and sex, to vision of God, and to pure ecstasy.
Judeo-Christian
Ecstasy allows miracles and prophecies. In this mystical state, people have feeling of knowing, not only desire to know. People can prepare for this state and be worthy, by love, truth, faith, prayer, and will and sense suppression. However, ecstasy is God's gift [Philo Judaeus, 40].
Sufism
Islam has a mystical philosophy that uses meditation for personal union with God. Sufism is about divine illumination, not behavior. Meditation is to attain higher-reality knowledge. Sufism has seven stages to salvation: repentance, abstinence or fear of God, piety and detachment, poverty, patience or ecstasy, trust in and surrender to God, and contentment.
Taoism
In Taoism, tao (way or path) is transcendent, as ultimate reality, and immanent, as universe itself. Tao is order, serenity, and grace in life. Tao emphasizes simple living, with no desires, much contemplation, and few activities. Taoism values spontaneity, naturalness, and openness. In Esoteric Taoism, tao is psychic power of societal links and so relates to mysticism. In popular Taoism, tao relates to magic.
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Date Modified: 2022.0225