Abstract:
Ninan Smart's article on "Understanding Religious Experience" is very important due to the presentation of some methodological and epistemological issues that are necessary for any research in the field of mysticism. The merit of Smart's writing is that it emphasizes the complexity of the issues involved and takes a balanced and nuanced methodological stance against the "all or nothing" views of most early scholars of mystical texts, views that either a person is a mystic.And he sees the issues very clearly, or he is not a mystic and therefore remains silent, because his considerations are off topic. The area that Smart's article specifically addresses is the meaning of the word "experience" as it is used in the context of the discussion of religious experience, a topic that certainly requires considerable clarity, more phenomenological research, and double precision.
Machine summary:
Another observation that should be made is that although we can consider some traditions as religious traditions, there are also traditions and movements that may not be called religious in general, but they still have formal characteristics that make them at least similar to religions. They show similar human thoughts, motives and feelings. That argument, in a nutshell, is this: if religion typically involves various aspects or dimensions—as I have named them elsewhere.It means doctrine, myth, moral education, rituals, experience and social institutionalization, so Maoism is similar to religion. The summary of the speech so far is as follows: from the religious experiences, which are influenced and/or interpreted, which occur inside or outside religious and pseudo-religious traditions, existential and/or theoretical understanding (to different degrees) can exist. For though there are various forms of observation which apparently have nothing to do with the worship of God—for example, that which is found in the Trojan Buddha.A yogic quest might be interpreted in this way, just as we might view washing dishes as a form of service to God. One measure of adequacy here is: do we have enough understanding of what those experiences are like to reasonably convince us that experiences A, B, C, and so on from different contexts are relatively similar? Because if they are like this, results will be obtained about the formation and validity of religious experience.