keywords

• empirical


  Empirical religious experiences are those which are experienced by the senses of touch, taste, hearing, smell, and sight. E.g. A corporeal vision.
• extrovertive


  According to Stace’s definition, this is a kind of half-way house’ to introvertive religious experience. Unlike introvertive experience, in the extrovertive type, sense experience is still active although objects are transformed by the ‘unity that shines through’.
• illumination


  To illuminate is to cast light on. In religious terms the doctrine of illumination holds that when the biblical writers wrote their books, the Holy Spirit illuminated their minds with the truth. In Intellectual visions, the vision illuminates the soul without any kind of visual image.
• immaculate conception


  The Catholic doctrine of the conception of the Virgin Mary in the womb of her mother (Saint Anne), free from ‘original sin’ through the merits of her son Jesus Christ. The term is also used as a way of referring to Mary.
• introvertive


  According to Stace’s definition, this is a religious experience in which sense experience is totally suppressed and the conscious ‘I’ is replaced by pure consciousness / the One / the Void.
• non intellectual


  The ‘I’ of the rational intellect is replaced by ‘pure consciousness’.
• non sensuous


  Not involving the physical senses.
• numinous


  Relating to the power or presence of a deity
• sui generis


  Unique or in a class of its own. An idea or reality that cannot be reduced to a lower concept or included in a higher concept.