Social Correlates of Transcendental Experiences

This paper focuses on what can variously be called the ecstatic, transcendental, or mystical experience. It is our contention that study of such experiences allows us to focus on that feeling state which differentiates religion from all other social institutions. We suggest that the unique significance of religion in society is not its role as a certain kind of professional career, social action movement, or economic political establishment. In addition, we state that the type of feeling states which are characteristic of religion can also be found in other, more secular, aesthetic environments. To the extent that this is true, religion is more similar to art than it is to politics. In this particular study we found that persons do have ecstatic-transcendental experiences, that they occur both within the religious environment and within more secular environments, and that the differences between the resultant experiences are less qualitative in nature than they are a product of the environment in which they occur. Thus, aesthetic experiences are described and utilized using secular referents, while religious experiences are described and utilized using formal religious referents. At the same time, there is some evidence that the very existence of the ecstatic-transcendental experience even if it is in a secular environment demands the construction of some social institution for its protection. Such a re-institutionalization can be seen in the drug user's attempt to surround himself with ritual.