An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Exceptional Human Experience (EHE)
This term was coined by Rhea White, an American parapsychologist, 
to denote these out of the ordinary experiences. Inspired by her own Near 
Death Experience, she studied parapsychology to learn more, and subse-
quently founded the Exceptional Human Experience Network to study 
all kinds of anomalous experiences. She provided a bibliography of books 
and articles on the subject notably with Laura Dale in 
Parapsychology: 
Sources of Information
.
Peak Experience
Abraham Maslow used this term to stress its secular connotation. He saw 
such an experience as indicating a sense of expansion of the self, offering 
an understanding of the ultimate unity of all things and leading to personal 
growth and fulfilment, with no need for a religious context or spiritual 
interpretation. In his view everyone could and should be encouraged to 
cultivate such experiences for their therapeutic value. 
Limit Experience
Revd. Dr. Andrew Greeley, researching in the USA, used the term Limit 
Experience to indicate that these experiences point ‘towards a limit or 
horizon of life’ while hinting that there may be something beyond this 
horizon. In Australia Dr. Paul McQuillan availed himself of the term to 
interview high school students for research, thereby avoiding specifically 
religious language. In this way he was able to elicit the students’ responses 
to the spiritual without limiting their thinking to formal religion. 
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Ecstasy
This
 
was how Marghanita Laski designated the sensation of being out-
side time and in contact with the transcendent spirit in 
Ecstasy in Secular 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
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and Spiritual
Experiences.
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By means of a questionnaire and literary 
and religious experiences from secondary sources she investigated experi-
ences resulting from withdrawal inward, as well as intensity experiences 
triggered by external conditions. She also looked at the similarities and 
differences between natural ecstasy and experiences induced by alcohol 
and drugs and at the effects of such experiences in people’s lives. Above 
all, she was concerned to include the experiences of non-religious people 
although admitting that the language in which such events were described 
was usually religious.