Abstract:

The concept of mystical experience is today defined as a pure, indirect experience of unification with the Ultimate Reality, named in different forms, such as Absolute, God, Absence, Vacuum. This definition is relatively new, since the concept was used by the Christian saints from the side to the side by about the 19th century in the meaning of “accessing to religious truths”. In the 19th century, mystical experience was linked to psychosomatic diseases and mystics were seen as a par-chae of distortion religious movements. But in the twentieth century, studies have argued that mystical experience is a universal phenomenon and that it can be treated and understood independently of religion in terms of being a phenomenon. Without a doubt, William James (1842-1910) was a leading philosopher who made a significant contribution to these discussions, claiming that the mystical experience, which is considered a condition of disease, is actually a valuable element of human experience. In a period in which the materialistic conception of nature was dominated and the contradiction of religion with science was accepted, James, one of his most famous works, The Varieties of Religious Expe-rience: A Study in Human Nature (The Varieties of Religious Expe-rience: A Study in Human Nature) in the Humanity book, founded an individual religious idea based on a mystical experience that does not contradict nature. This is based on the objective/fenomenological evaluation of mythical experience.

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Abstract:

The concept of mystical experience is defined today as an experience of uniting with the Ultimate Reality, which is named as Absolute, God and Nothingness, in a pure and direct way. The aforementioned definition is relatively new since this concept had been used by Christian saints to mean “attaining religious truths” until about the 19th century. In the 19th century, mystical experiences were associated with psychosomatic illnesses and that mystics were considered as being part of deviant religious movements. By the 20th century, however, new academic debates emerged claiming that mystical experience was a universal phenomenon and that it could be understood independent of religion as a separate a phenomenon. Undoubtedly, William James (1842-1910) was the leading philosopher who uniquely contributed to these debates claiming that mystical experi-ence, which had been accepted as a state of illness, was a valuable element of human experience. In an age where materialistic naturalism was rising and the understanding that science and religion contradict one another was prevalent, James asserted that the idea of an individual religion against materialism, which depends on mystical experience and does not conflict with the idea of nature in his well-known work, The Varieties of Reli-gious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. This claim of James is rooted in the objec-tive/phenomenological analysis of mystic experience.