Experiencing the sacred: spirituality and meaning in human experience

Experiencing the Sacred

Compare St. Teresa's experience of the spiritual marriage with both Muhammad's Night Journey and the Buddha's Enlightenment. The focus should clearly identify similarities and differences.

Teresa of Avila, Muhammad, and the Shakyamuni Buddha all had intense spiritual experiences. Their experience can all be classified as numinous and ecstatic, because they each surrendered their physical selves to experience union with a spiritual dimension. They were each subsumed by their spiritual experiences, imparting either fear or joy. Moreover, each of these individuals made a great impact on religious, philosophical, and spiritual teachings.

There are some distinct differences between these three figures, though. The obvious differences are cultural, geographic, and temporal. St. Teresa of Avila is the most modern of the three figures. She lived during the 16th century in Spain, and her upbringing was steeped in Catholicism. Muhammad lived during the 7th century CE, nearly a thousand years prior to St. Teresa. Rather than being steeped in the traditions of Catholicism, though, Muhammad was raised in Arabia: where he would have had contact with tribal polytheistic customs, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity too. Finally, Siddhartha Gautama grew up an upper caste, Brahmin Hindu. A prince, Gautama had privileged insight into the upper echelons of Hinduism but rejected those in favor of the pursuit of personal enlightenment. Siddhartha Gautama lived another millennium before Muhammad, making these three individuals world apart in terms of time, culture, and geography.

Although all three of them experienced a contact with a divine dimension, only St. Teresa and Muhammad classified their numinous encounters as being with a God or deity. For the Buddha, enlightenment comes from disciplined focus and meditation. Although all three of these individuals were understood to be fully human, there are some Buddhist sects that have deified Shakyamuni. However, most Buddhist traditions see the Buddha as an enlightened being rather than as a god. Their numinous experienced causes a deep personal transformation within the individual, which then carries over into subsequent writings and teachings that influence generations upon generation of aspirants.

Part 2: Does religious experience provide evidence of the sacred? Discuss one argument that is supportive of religious experience as providing evidence for the sacred, and discuss two arguments against religious experience providing evidence for the sacred.

Religious experience cannot be quantified, but it can be analyzed and considered from a number of different epistemological perspectives. Religious experiences may or may not provide evidence of the sacred. On the one hand, a religious experience is as valid as any other psychological experience. Like love or fear, the numinous is an experience that cannot be quantified or explained logically. Yet it still does exist, and is a part of the human consciousness, psyche, and experience. On the other hand, there is still no proof that religious experience actually points to the reality of any sacred or divine dimension. Just because people experience the divine, or a god, does not mean that those experiences are anything more than psychological. Religious experience is private, even when it is shared in a communal worship or ceremony.

To debate this issue, it is first important to define what a religious experience is. There are generally two types of religious experience: the mystical type and the religious type. The mystical type of religious experience is one that is characterized by a sense of oneness or unity. There is no separation between the self and the divine. In this sense, the mystical experience shares much in common with the philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism.

The other type, a religious experience, is one that is characterized by an encounter with a God. This is the type most commonly reported among followers of monotheistic faiths such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Indeed, the prophets of these three religions all have religious, rather than mystical, experience.