Religious experience occupies a pivotal and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus. William James's foundational typology in the Varieties of Religious Experience establishes the irreducible phenomenological bedrock: the lived encounter with a reality beyond ordinary consciousness, whether manifested as conversion, mystical illumination, sanctification, or the annihilation of the ordinary self. James insists that such experiences must be judged by their fruits rather than their origins, a methodological wager that licenses psychological inquiry without reductive dismissal. Mircea Eliade extends this framework by arguing that the structural contrast between sacred and profane experience underlies all religious life, transcending historical and cultural variation. Stanisław Głaz's empirical program operationalizes the field's more phenomenological ambitions, constructing psychometric instruments—the IRES scale—capable of measuring the differential intensities of God's presence and God's absence as distinct experiential modes. Roland Griffiths and David Yaden bring the neuroscientific and psychopharmacological register to bear, demonstrating that psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences structurally comparable to those documented by James and Stace. James Hillman introduces a critical counterpoint, warning that psychotherapy risks sacralizing experience itself—producing a 'Dogma of Experience'—when it lacks the theological corrective of prayer and devotion. The field thus spans empirical measurement, phenomenological description, mystical theology, and critical psychology, making religious experience one of the most generative and contested concepts in the entire corpus.
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22 substantive passages
In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine quâ non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world.
James argues that psychopathic temperament, far from disqualifying religious phenomena, is precisely the disposition that grants access to regions of religious truth inaccessible to robust, self-satisfied constitutions.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' world... When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men.
James advances his central metaphysical claim that religious experience is not merely subjective but effects real transformation, providing philosophical grounds for treating the mystical region as a genuine reality.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
Our primary concern is to present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the differences between it and profane experience of the world... both live in a sacralized cosmos, both share in a cosmic sacrality manifested equally in the animal world and in the vegetable world.
Eliade argues that the defining feature of religious experience is participation in a sacralized cosmos, a structural condition that persists across radical differences in economy, culture, and historical period.
Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
The aim of this article is to present the issues of religious experience, and the associated experience of God's presence and God's absence, and then its operationalization, as well as to construct the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale, IRES.
Głaz announces a systematic psychometric project to operationalize religious experience—specifically the phenomenological poles of divine presence and absence—into a validated empirical instrument.
Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020thesis
All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud... I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.
This first-person account exemplifies for James the noetic quality of mystical experience—an immediate, non-inferential apprehension of cosmic aliveness and personal immortality that constitutes its distinctive epistemological character.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
During the experience of God's presence, man is aware of His presence in his life or His omnipresence in the world. This kind of experience is connected a feeling of joy, an elation, a feeling of surprise, and a feeling of inner calmness.
Głaz describes the phenomenological signature of the positive pole of Catholic religious experience—joy, elation, calm—distinguishing it structurally from the experience of divine absence, which is marked by emptiness, doubt, and loneliness.
Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020thesis
I felt him streaming in like light upon me.... I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the anæsthetics, the old sense of my relation to the world began to return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade.
James's anaesthetic revelation case illustrates the transient and ineffable character of the mystical encounter with God, while the distress at its fading underscores its perceived ontological reality.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis
One day in orison, on the steps of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world... it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery of the holy Trinity.
The mystical experiences of Saint Ignatius and Saint Teresa furnish James with canonical evidence for the noetic and visionary character of religious experience across the Western contemplative tradition.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, 'where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself.'
James marshals apophatic mystical utterances from Eckhart, Boehme, and Silesius to demonstrate that the deepest religious experience demands paradoxical negation as its only adequate linguistic form.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
The loss of self is commonly experienced as an absorption into something greater than the mere empirical ego... experiences occasioned by psilocybin are comparable with those that occur in other settings whether deliberately facilitated or occurring apparently spontaneously.
Yaden demonstrates the psychometric continuity between Hood's mysticism scale (grounded in James) and psilocybin-induced experiences, establishing that the self-transcendent structure of religious experience is reproducible across radically different induction contexts.
Yaden, David Bryce, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017supporting
Experience of oneness or unity with objects and/or persons perceived in your surroundings... Experience of unity with ultimate reality... Feeling that you experienced eternity or infinity.
Griffiths's MEQ subscale items operationalize the classical mystical experience dimensions—unity, transcendence of time and space, noetic quality—confirming the structural overlap between James's phenomenology and chemically induced religious-type states.
Griffiths, Roland, Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance, 2006supporting
'experience' is endowed with religious values, becoming sacred, unavailable to examination: the Dogma of Experience. The emotions of the heart are taken for religious revelations.
Hillman critically diagnoses a secular appropriation of religious experience within psychotherapy, arguing that the sacralization of subjective experience without devotional corrective produces an idolatrous and addictive confessionalism.
Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992thesis
Suddenly there seemed to be a something sweeping into me and inflating my entire being—such a sensation as I had never experienced before... for the first time in all my life, did I know that I was cleansed from all sin, and filled with the fullness of God.
This conversion testimony exemplifies James's category of sanctification experience, characterized by sudden passivity, bodily sensation, and a transformative sense of divine infilling that restructures the subject's moral and spiritual identity.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
My whole frame was in a tremor from head to foot, and my soul enjoyed sweet peace. The pleasure I then felt was indescribable. The happiness lasted about three days.
James presents this testimony as evidence of the somatic dimension of religious experience—bodily tremor accompanying spiritual relief—illustrating the inseparability of physical and noetic registers in conversion states.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
Often have I asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality?—the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner Self.
James documents the epistemological vertigo induced by trance states, in which the distinction between ordinary and mystical consciousness becomes genuinely destabilized, suggesting the depths of ontological challenge religious experience can pose.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
A statistically significant relationship and positive is observed between the experience of God's presence (PG) and religious faith (WR) (r=.73, p<.001), morality (MR) (r=.72, p<.001), religious practices (PR) (r=.74, p<.001).
Głaz's empirical findings establish strong positive correlations between the experience of divine presence and multiple dimensions of religiosity, lending psychometric validation to the integrative function attributed to religious experience in Catholic spirituality.
Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting
It always leads to a better understanding of a thing's significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere... that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits consist.
James articulates his methodological rationale for pathological analysis of religious experience: studying extremes and distortions illuminates the essential character of genuine religious phenomena by sharpening contrast.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky... I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel.
This visionary account exemplifies James's category of theistic absorption, in which the self experiences itself as instrumentalized by a divine power, raising fundamental questions about agency, identity, and the boundaries of personal consciousness in religious states.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
The IRES measures a sense of influence of God's presence or absence on one's life... The smallest correlation coefficients are observed between the IRES and the SPRdB.
Głaz identifies discriminant validity issues between the IRES and certain religiosity subscales, arguing that content differences—rather than measurement error—explain the weaker correlations, thus clarifying the construct boundaries of religious experience as distinct from religious commitment or worship.
Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting
The very instant I heard my Father's cry calling unto me, my heart bounded in recognition. I ran, I stretched forth my arms, I cried aloud, 'Here, here I am, my Father.'
James deploys this conversion narrative to illustrate the pre-reflective, immediate quality of religious recognition—an encounter in which doubt and deliberation are overtaken by an overwhelming sense of divine address.
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
The three major scales on the APZ are the OSE (oceanic boundlessness, a state common to classic mystical experiences including feelings of unity and transcendence of time and space), the AIA (dread of ego dissolution, dysphoric feelings similar to those of some 'bad trips').
Griffiths describes the APZ instrument's capacity to differentiate the positive oceanic dimension of mystical experience from its dysphoric counterpart, operationalizing the ambivalence that James had already noted in his phenomenological accounts.
Griffiths, Roland, Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance, 2006supporting
The Scale of Religious Experience (SRE)... is related to the Catholic religious experience. In its construction, these items whose loadings were higher than .400 were considered. The grouped homogeneous items... allowed for the constitution of three factors: Religious experience, Experiencing God's presence, and Experiencing God's absence.
Głaz describes the psychometric lineage and factor structure underlying the IRES, establishing the three-factor model—general religious experience, divine presence, divine absence—as the empirical architecture for measuring Catholic religious experience.
Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting