An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Rudolf Otto (1869–1937)
In 
The Idea of the Holy 
Rudolf Otto coined the adjective ‘numinous’ 
from the latin ‘numen’ meaning holy power, to describe a mental state 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
242
which he saw as sui generis, a category of its own. For Otto this was the 
mysterium tremendum et fascinans,
a sense of awe before the majesty of 
God as well as an attraction to it. He writes that in order to explain the 
concept, 
the reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt 
religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of 
consciousness.
and continues immediately with a startling piece of advice,
Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his 
experience, is requested to read no farther.
225
So, according to Otto, it is only through experience that the concept can 
really be understood, through direct perception of a transcendent power 
which is totally ‘other’ and which fills the human with a sense of his own 
insignificance, his ‘creature consciousness’.
In 
Mysticism East and West. A Comparative Analysis of the Nature 
of Mysticism
Otto turns his attention to the similarities and differences 
within mysticism as expressed, ‘from the East by the great Indian Acharya 
Sankara, and from the West the great German Meister Eckhart.’
226
 He 
contends that there are similarities of the inner spiritual life which are 
unaffected by differences of race or location or historical period, yet 
that it is false to maintain that mysticism is always just mysticism, is 
always and everywhere one and the same quantity.
227
He shows the cross-cultural similarities to be found between the inward 
way of retreat into one’s own soul, ‘The Way of Introspection’ and the 
outward way of reaching unity through multiplicity, ‘The Way of Unify-
ing Vision’. It is Otto’s contention that both ways converge within East-
ern and Western mysticism. Otto also shows how both mystics transcend 
the concept of the ultimate as expressed in their respective traditions. 
Sankara refers to the personal deity Isvara and to Brahman as Being itself, 
and Eckhart has the personal God, Deus with the Godhead, Deitas.