Course Code: GEE 101

Course Title: Religions, Religious Experiences and Spirituality

Number of Teaching Hours: 54 Hours
NAME:
Credit Units: 3 Units
COURSE and SECTION:

1. This school of thought, explain a way religion as a

delusion and are convinced that in our experience
of life ‘what you see is what you get’, that there is
no more to life than meets the eye, or direct sense
experience.

2. This experience may be thought of as an

experience which points beyond normal, everyday
life, and which has spiritual or religious
significance for the person to whom it happens.

3. He defined spiritual experience as a deep

awareness of a benevolent non-physical power
which appears to be partly or wholly beyond, and
far greater than, the individual self.

4. This is a particularly appropriate term for

experiences which either confirm or conform to the
tenets of a religious tradition or which take place
during religious observance or practice or are the
result of lengthy preparation or devotion, of
mental training, prayer or fasting. Such
experiences may be communal, taking place
within a setting of worship or ritual or may be
solitary.

5. He used religious experience as a term in his

Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion of 1901 and
1902, subsequently published as The Varieties of
Religious Experience.

6. He proposes that we have to reconsider the

meaning of religious experience as tended to
conceive as a religion, can more rewardingly, more
truly, be conceived in terms of two factors,
different in kind, both dynamic: a historical
‘cumulative tradition’, and the personal faith of
men and women.
7. He viewed religion as composed of seven different
dimensions, one of which was the Experiential and
Emotional Dimension.

8. One of those who tried to explain religious

experience says that it involves --------
of the invisible world, equal in that some visible
person or thing is a manifestation of the invisible
world.

9. This may be preferred for experiences which do

not reflect any specifically religious beliefs, but
which give an indication of an influence which is
inexplicable in any down to-earth way.

10. This is frequently referred to as religious

experience, since it also uses the term as it
enables to distinguish the experience of a power
beyond the individual self from the concept of
religion.

11. He used the term (the answer for number 10) in

his research for Inglorious Words worth in which he
elicited descriptions of such experiences from his
sixth form boys using Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey
as a stimulus.

12. It is usually referred to powers which have not yet

been explained by science and are seen as beyond
the norm. This includes such events as telepathy,
telekinesis and clairvoyance.

13. This term was coined by Rhea White, an American

parapsychologist, to denote these out of the
ordinary experiences.

14. Abraham Maslow used this term to stress its

secular connotation. He saw such an experience as
indicating a sense of expansion of the self, offering
an understanding of the ultimate unity of all things
and leading to personal growth and fulfilment, with
no need for a religious context or spiritual
interpretation.

15. This type of experience tried to indicate that these

experiences point ‘towards a limit or horizon of
 life’ while hinting that there may be something
beyond this horizon.

16. This was how Marghanita Laski designated the

sensation of being outside time and in contact with
the transcendent spirit.

17. This indicated the final stage of the development

of consciousness, in a progression from instinctual
to self-consciousness and ultimately to cosmic
consciousness.

18. It is often described as an intense experience of

the unity of all things or a state of achieving unity
with the divine.

19. This is referring to the most extreme state of

mystic union. There is a neuropsychological
approach to theology, which they call
neurotheology.

20. At times people feel themselves to be separate

from their own body, usually watching it from the
outside, often above. Moreover, this tends to
happen at times of stress or during accidents and
traumatic situations.

21. This is often preceded by an OBE and takes place

when the individual is clinically dead but has a
coherent experience before being revived.

22. They focus on the differences between mystics as

they deny any unmediated experience and
maintain that the mystic’s cultural and linguistic
milieu are formative of the experience itself.

23. He noted that there were twenty-five different

definitions of mysticism, and it is an elusive
concept. The term is also occasionally used as a
generic term for all such experiences, whatever
the focus or intensity.

24. You will know them by their fruits

25. He made used of this experience as a term to

interview high school students for research,
 thereby avoiding specifically religious language. In
this way he was able to elicit the students’
responses to the spiritual without limiting their
thinking to formal religion.

ESSAY (5 points)

In a maximum of 50 words write your own understanding of religious

experience.