Religious Experience

Chapter three defines a religious experience as "any experience that initiates or strengthens, maintains or weakens, or terminates a person's reliance on or commitment to a pivotal value.

• God initiates the call; the response is up to Moses
• The call leads to both questioning of Moses' pivotal values as well as a deepened commitment.
• Part of the encounter with God leads to a significantly deeper knowledge of the identity and nature of God.

• Gautama's religious experience is actually the culmination of a long quest that began with the termination of his prior pivotal values.
• Notice that in contrast to the call of Moses, Gautama's experience of enlightenment was self-initiated.
• Gautama's experience led him to formulate a new pivotal value, the key insight of Buddhism: "Life contains suffering because humans selfishly desire physical, spiritual, and intellectual attainments and satisfactions."

• Recall that sufism is an expression of Islam that emphasizes direct mystical experience or union with God.
• Notice that the text does not actually describe a sufi's encounter with God. Direct experience or union with God is sought through a number of means including:
  • asceticism (self-denial)
  • trance-like states induced or heightened with music and dance
• The sufi experience may both modify pivotal values and deepen them. In other words, it modifies the traditional servant-master relationship between the believer and Allah by emphasizing a relationship of love and devotion.

• Teresa' ecstatic experiences are both self initiated and divinely given. Notice that in her account, the individual is responsible for the initial discipline of prayers, but the ecstatic experience is a gift from God.
• Saint Teresa also set a standard for distinguishing between a true experience and a hallucinatory one: the influence of the experience on the rest of one's life. Put another way, the experience both is integrated into and serves to integrate all elements of one's religious life.

• Like Moses, Juan Diego's experience was initiated by the Divine through an unusual occurrence.
• Like Moses, the experience is a call to perform a particular action.
• Like Moses, Juan is sent to a leader with a message and performs divinely given signs to convince the leader of the truth of the message.

• Gandhi does not seem to have a single experience; rather it is an ongoing sense of an "inner voice"
• Gandhi saw truth in Christianity, Hinduism and Islam.
• Formulated the strategy of satyagraha.