religious mysticism
Sacred spiritual experience
Religious mysticism is the pursuit of direct, personal experience of the divine or ultimate reality, often through contemplation, meditation, or spiritual practices.
Mystics across traditions—Christian, Sufi, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist—seek union or communion with God or the transcendent, bypassing ordinary religious observance: The medieval mystics wrote of visions and ecstatic states.
Mystical experience is typically described as ineffable, transformative, and marked by dissolution of the boundary between self and sacred.
- SufismIslamic spiritual mysticism
- KabbalahJewish esoteric tradition
- prayerAddress to deity
- meditationFocused attention practice
- iconPictorial screen symbol
transcendence · ineffability · fasting · non-duality · silence · spiritual ecstasy · union with God · Theosophy · chanting · vision · dark night of the soul · desert fathers · cosmic consciousness · higher consciousness · altered states · esotericism · timelessness · Gnosticism
religious mysticismritual
Ceremonial set of actions
religious ritual · ceremonialism · liturgy · formalism · religious observance
religious mysticismmaterialism
Prioritizing goods over spirit
atheism · empiricism · physicalism · naturalism · secularism
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