The Structure of Religious Mystical Experience in Relation to Pre- and Postexperience Lifestyles

Abstract

Understanding experience constitutes one of the perennial problems of the psychology of religion. Though formal work on this topic began almost a century ago (Coe, 1990; Cutten, 1908; Hall, 1904; James, 1902; Starbuck, 1899), the questions phrased by early scholars have still to be definitively answered. Following the landmark research of E. T. Clark in 1929 on religious awakening, research on experience essentially disappeared from mainstream psychology until about 1960 (W. H. Clark, 1971; W. H. Clark, Malony, Daane, & Tippett, 1973; Godin, 1985; Stark, 1965). Ralph Hood rapidly became the key research scholar in this area (Hood, 1985, 1986; Spilka, Hood, & Gorsuch, 1985). Despite his very significant efforts, including the construction of a mysticism scale (Hood, 1975), there is still a need for theoretically and operationally understanding the complex nature of intense experience. Specifically, this domain merits examination in terms of (a) possible pre-experience correl...