MYSTICISM [FIRST EDITION]. No definition could be both meaningful and sufficiently comprehensive to include all experiences that, at some point or other, have been described as "mystical." In 1899 Dean W. R. Inge listed twenty-five...

Mysticism, History Of Mystical experience is a major form of religious experience, but it is hard to delineate by a simple definition for two main reasons. First, mystics often describe their experiences partly in terms of doctrines presupposed to be...

Mysticism, Nature and Assessment Of Attempts to define mystical experience have been as diversified and as conflicting as attempts to interpret and assess its significance. This is not surprising, for the language used to express and describe mystical...

MYSTICISM [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS]. The term mysticism, like the term religion itself, is a problematic but indispensable one. Identifying a broad spectrum of ideas, experiences, and practices across a diversity of cultures and traditions, it is a...

. Word now most often used for what would have been called “contemplation” (contemplatio) in the medieval Latin tradition. In its narrowest meaning, mysticism involves a personal experience of the unmediated presence of Absolute Reality or,...

Mysticism, Nature and Assessment of [addendum] Since the 1960s, philosophical controversies concerning the nature of mysticism mainly surround the relationship between mysticism and language, and the typology of mysticism. Moreover, as standard...

Spiritual quest for union with the divine. Forms of mysticism are found in all major religions. Hinduism, with its goal of absorption of the soul in the All, is inherently predisposed to mystical experience. Buddhism emphasizes meditation as a means of...

An awareness of the essential Oneness of the universe and all in it, achieved by a faculty beyond the intellect. There is mysticism in the Theravāda, but in the Mahāyāna it appears in many forms, and great mystical works are freely used...

See...

Mysticism (from the Greek μυστικÏς – mystikos, an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries; μυστήρια – mysteria meaning "initiation"[1]) is the pursuit of achieving communion, identity with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality,...