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.
Consciousness>Consciousness>States>Mystical Experience
1-Consciousness-States-Mystical Experience
Outline of Knowledge Database Home Page
Description of Outline of Knowledge Database
Date Modified: 2022.0224