An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Caroline Franks Davis
Another cumulative argument for the acceptance of religious experience 
is put forward in 
The Evidential Force of Religious Experience 
by 
Caroline Franks Davis. She considers various challenges to the acceptance 
of religious experiences as genuine and suggests four types of experience 
which although different, are not mutually incompatible.
1. Experiences of the awesome ‘numen’
2. Experiences of a loving (etc.) relationship with a personal ‘other’
3. Extrovertive mystical experiences of unity in multiplicity
4. Introvertive mystical experiences of unity devoid of all multiplicity.
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Franks Davis suggests that a sort of common core can be extracted from 
numinous and mystical experiences by using relatively unramified doctrines, 
moving toward ‘broad theism’. These may be summarized as follows: 
that the physical world is not the whole or ultimate reality; 
the ego of everyday consciousness is not the deepest level of the self, 
that deeper self in some way depends on and participates in ultimate 
reality; 
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Religious and Spiritual Experience
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ultimate reality is holy, eternal and of supreme value and everything 
else is dependent on it; 
this may be experienced as a loving, guiding presence with whom 
individuals can have a relationship; 
some mystical experiences are of union with something else, although 
introvertive experiences in themselves cannot show this as only the 
union is experienced; and
some kind of union or harmonious relation with the ultimate reality 
is the human being’s 
summum bonum
, his final liberation or salvation, 
and the means by which he discovers his ‘true self’ or ‘true home’.
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She explains, that although few people are such ‘broad theists’ but belong 
to religions which have far greater ramification, such broad common core 
claims can stand.
Pluralism
This view, reflected in contemporary studies in the work of John Hick, 
and taught in the East centuries ago, notably by Kabir and Rumi, is that 
the same ultimate spiritual reality is discovered and experienced under 
many guises. A similar view of our awareness of reality was also formu-
lated by St Thomas Aquinas.
Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the 
knower.
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It was further developed in Kant’s understanding of our inability as 
humans to know the true nature of reality: 
das Ding an sich
, the thing-in-
itself, the noumenon. Humans can only know the phenomena, the world 
as it appears to us, not as it really is.