Religious Experience Analysis

Religious experiences are sometimes reported as blurry events, happening during a trans sometimes, almost subconscious. Miracles, prophecies and other religious phenomenons all have a certain illusion or some might even say, wizardry. It seems like people experiencing holy events are not fully in control of their body. The letting go of the self, an expression often used nowadays, is also an important theme in James William’s lectures on the Varieties of Religious Experiences. Is letting go of yourself a positive, emancipating experience leading to freedom or is it a period of carelessness where you neglected yourself.

In some stories that the author reports about religious individuals, it looks like letting go of yourself is the key to experience religious experiences. The first mentions of letting go in James’ lectures are in the Reality of the Unseen lectures, where he reports the case of a clergyman; "I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite […]”. The key word here is “opened out," which shows …show more content…
The concept of being “wholly asleep” but experiencing something is hard to picture, the subconscious is a matter of questions and interrogations among people. We still cannot grasp the full effects and power of it. There are four marks of mysticism: ineffability, noetic quality transiency and passivity. They are all important characteristics but the last one is the one we are going to focus on : passivity, which is when “the subject feels a loss of control, of being in the grasp of a superior power” [p 381]. Once again, we see how letting go is primordial in order to experience one of many mystical experiences, which is why the author sees it as very significant; it is a prerequisite to reaching conversion, so if you cannot let go of yourself, you find yourself blocked by your own

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