An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Cosmic Consciousness
R. M. Bucke used this as the title of his book published in 1901. The term 
indicated the final stage of the development of consciousness, in a 
progression from instinctual to self-consciousness and ultimately to 
cosmic consciousness. 
Mystical Experience
A mystical experience is often described as an intense experience of the 
unity of all things or a state of achieving unity with the divine. There are 
mystical movements and techniques within most religious traditions, 
examples being the Sufis of Islam and the Kabbalists and Hasidim 
of Judaism. In 1899 Dean W. R. Inge noted that there were twenty-five 
different definitions of mysticism, and it is an elusive concept. The term is 
also occasionally used as a generic term for all such experiences, whatever 
the focus or intensity. William James suggested that all personal religious 
experience had its roots in mystical states of consciousness and he identi-
fied four features in his lectures on mysticism, published as 
The Varieties 
of Religious Experience.
Essentialists consider all mystical experience to be the same or of the 
same transcendent reality, seeing a common core. Empiricists focus on the 
differences between mystics as they deny any unmediated experience and 
maintain that the mystic’s cultural and linguistic milieu are formative of 
the experience itself.
Absolute Unitary Being
AUB
 
and Hyperlucid Unitary State
 
are terms used by Eugene d’Aquili 
and Andrew B. Newberg in 
The Mystical Mind, Probing the Biology
of 

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Terminology
17
Religious Experience
for experiences arising from meditation, religious 
ritual and spontaneous spiritual events, with AUB referring to the most 
extreme state of mystic union. Theirs is a neuropsychological approach to 
theology, which they call neurotheology. They studied the mind/brain 
relationship to spiritual experience, by monitoring the brain activity of 
people involved in spiritual practice.