Factors that cause religious experience

Factors that cause religious experience

1. Meditation

   • A prayerful state
   • Seeks understanding of God
     • However for Buddhism it is to seek enlightenment
       • the loss of self
   • A passive experience
   • trains the mind or induces a mode of consciousness, either to realize some benefit or as an end in itself.
   • promotes relaxation, build internal energy or life force and develops compassion, love, patience, generosity and forgiveness

2. Prayer

   • may experience the divine or Holy Spirit
   • Mystical experience
   • Arch Bishop William Temple said that 'when i pray coincidences happen and when i don't they don't'
   • Speaking in tongues

3. Hall;ucinations

4. Music linked with atmospher

5. Exercise

   • Sufi Whirling
     • A physical act of meditation
     • Aims to reach the source of all perfection
     • sought through abandoning one's nafs, egos or personal desires
     • symbolic imitation of planets in the Solar System orbiting the sun
   • Running in a large communal circle
   • Dance

6. Pain