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].
Consciousness>Consciousness>States>Mystical Experience
1-Consciousness-States-Mystical Experience
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Date Modified: 2022.0224