key words

• KW- corporeal visions

  Vision Relating to a person’s body. A corporeal vision is one that comes through the physical sense of sight.
• KW- Empirical

  Empirical religious experiences are those which are experienced by the senses of touch, taste, hearing, smell, and sight. E.g. corporeal visions
• KW- Extrovertive

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

  Causing hallucinations, e.g. hallucinogenic drugs.
• KW- 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.
• KW- Imaginative Vision

  A vision seen in the mind, usually through a dream experience.

  Immaculate
• KW- 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.
• KW- Ineffable

  For William James – an aspect of mystical religious experience not describable in words, so cannot be imparted to others.
• KW- intellectual vision

  A vision without any visual image, where the experience is an ‘illumination’ of the soul.
• KW- 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.
• KW- Mysterium Tremendm et Fascinans

  ‘A tremendous and fascinating mystery’ – part of Otto’s description of numinous religious experiences.
• KW- Noetic

  For William James – an aspect of mystical religious experience – that such experiences are states of knowledge as well as feelings, but the knowledge is spiritual and non-transferable as well as authoritative.
• KW- Non-intellectual

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

  Not involving the physical senses.
• KW- Numinous

  Relating to the power or presence of a deity.
• KW- Passive

  Passive For William James – an aspect of mystical religious experiences, that the mystic does not control the experience but is controlled by it.
• KW- 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.
• KW- transient

  For William James – an aspect of mystical religious experiences – that they generally last no more than half an hour, perhaps two hours at the most, although the effects are long-lasting, especially with recurrent experiences