Religious Experience

intensity of religious experience scale

Religious experience occupies a generative fault line within the depth-psychology corpus, where phenomenological description, psychometric operationalization, mystical philosophy, and clinical psychology converge without resolution. William James remains the canonical anchor: his pragmatic bracketing of pathological origins in favor of fruits-based evaluation, his meticulous case documentation of conversion, illumination, and mystical union, and his insistence on an ‘unseen region’ that ‘produces effects in this world’ together constitute the founding grammar for the field. Against this phenomenological inheritance, Glaz’s psychometric project introduces rigorous operationalization, distinguishing the experience of God’s presence from the experience of God’s absence as empirically separable but correlated dimensions, each measurable and predictive of religious faith, meaning in life, and self-forgiveness. Eliade situates religious experience within a structural contrast between the sacred and the profane, arguing that differences across cultures are secondary to the shared fact of inhabiting a sacralized cosmos. Griffiths and Yaden bring the axis of pharmacological induction into alignment with classical mystical typology, demonstrating that psilocybin-occasioned states satisfy the same phenomenological criteria James and Stace articulated. Hillman sounds a dissenting note, warning that psychotherapy risks conferring religious aura on ordinary confession while omitting the devotional movement that alone completes the religious act. The corpus thus holds in productive tension the empirical, the phenomenological, the psychometric, and the critical.

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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 argues that religious experience is not merely subjective but produces real effects on personality and conduct, warranting philosophical recognition of the unseen region as genuinely real.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis

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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.

Glaz introduces the IRES as a psychometric instrument designed to operationalize Catholic religious experience along the dual dimensions of divine presence and divine absence.

Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020thesis

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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 contends that despite historical and cultural variation, the structural distinction between sacred and profane experience constitutes a universal feature of religious life.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis

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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 rehabilitates the psychopathic temperament as a privileged portal to religious truth, insisting that pathological origin does not invalidate the value of religious experience.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis

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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.

James presents a paradigmatic first-person account of sudden mystical illumination in which the boundary between self and cosmos dissolves into an experience of living presence and eternal consciousness.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902thesis

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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.

Glaz specifies the phenomenological signatures of divine-presence experience — joy, elation, calmness — while distinguishing it from divine-absence experience, which evokes emptiness, doubt, and loneliness.

Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting

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One day, being in orison, it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God… The view was so subtile and delicate that the understanding can scarcely seize it.

James documents Saint Teresa’s mystical vision as an exemplary instance of non-discursive religious experience in which totality is apprehended instantaneously and resists verbal formulation.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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Experiences occasioned by psilocybin are comparable with those that occur in other settings whether deliberately facilitated or occurring apparently spontaneously.

Yaden establishes psychometric continuity between pharmacologically induced mystical states and spontaneously occurring ones, grounding the comparison in Hood’s and MacLean’s scales derived from James and Stace.

Yaden, David Bryce, The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience, 2017supporting

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Experience of pure Being and pure awareness (beyond the world of sense impressions)… Experience of unity with ultimate reality… Loss of your usual sense of time… Feeling that you experienced eternity or infinity.

Griffiths enumerates the constituent phenomenological features of mystical-type experience — unity, transcendence of time and space, pure awareness — as operationalized in the Mystical Experience Questionnaire.

Griffiths, Roland, Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance, 2006supporting

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My soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon me…. I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt.

James records an anaesthetic-induced religious experience of divine encounter, using it to illuminate the relationship between altered physiology and genuine mystical apprehension.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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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 draws on Eckhart, Boehme, and Silesius to illustrate how mystical religious experience drives language toward paradox and negation as the only adequate epistemic posture before the divine.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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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).

Glaz demonstrates that intensity of divine-presence experience is strongly and positively correlated with multiple dimensions of religiosity, including faith, morality, and practice.

Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting

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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.

James defends the comparative pathological method as epistemically productive for understanding religious experience, not as a means of wholesale condemnation but of precise discrimination of genuine merit.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God’s taking care of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh.

James presents multiple first-person testimonies of sudden conversion experiences characterized by intense affective transformation, sensory luminosity, and overwhelming joy.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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Analysis itself is regarded religiously; ‘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 warns that psychotherapy unconsciously sacralizes ‘experience’ itself, generating a pseudo-religious aura that substitutes for genuine religious movement while blocking critical examination.

Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting

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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.

James documents a sanctification experience in which somatic influx, interior vision, and certainty of moral purification combine into a paradigmatic religious event.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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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 presents a trance-based mystical account in which the encounter with formless, denuded selfhood destabilizes the ordinary ontological hierarchy between inner experience and outer reality.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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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 records a conversion account marked by immediacy and certainty of divine address, illustrating the felt quality of personal relationship central to one form of religious experience.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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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.

Glaz clarifies that the IRES specifically measures the perceived life-influence of divine presence or absence, distinguishing it conceptually and empirically from other multidimensional religiosity scales.

Glaz, Stanislaw, Psychological Analysis of Religious Experience: The Construction of the Intensity of Religious Experience Scale (IRES), 2020supporting

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How personally meaningful was the experience? 3.42 (0.35) [placebo] 6.54 (0.22) [psilocybin] <0.001. How spiritually significant was the experience? 2.63 (0.22) [placebo] 4.79 (0.26) [psilocybin] <0.001.

Griffiths provides quantitative evidence that psilocybin-occasioned experiences are rated significantly higher in personal meaning and spiritual significance than placebo conditions, with sustained behavioral effects.

Griffiths, Roland, Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance, 2006supporting

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A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway… I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain.

James presents a visionary near-death religious experience in which divine agency is apprehended as both cosmically vast and intimately painful, exemplifying the paradoxical character of extreme religious states.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902aside

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The idea of this war between science and religion was bolstered by the generation of a powerful nineteenth-century mythology of science’s own fabrication.

McGilchrist contextualizes the science-religion conflict as a historically constructed mythology rather than an inevitable epistemic opposition, relevant to framing the scientific study of religious experience.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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