which are more likely than not to“differ widely in both cognitive content and
corresponding neural correlates”(p. 312). He concluded that“in many cul-
tures there are no phenomenological equivalents to the Western concept of
religious experience or the Eastern concept of meditation”(p. 333) and the
only shared feature of all the phenomena to be studied is a link to a super-
natural instance. Let us note, however, that the concept of the“supernatural”
is far from being unproblematic and recognizing when such a link exists in
subjective experience could be very difficult (if we accept that verbal reports
are imperfect versions of one’s subjective experience).
7.2 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN CONTEXTSubjective experiences are embedded in cultural and institutional structures.
Anthropological approaches to religious experience have traditionally empha-
sized the embedded nature of religious experience (Cole & Engeström, 1993;
Apud Peláez, 2015). In this section, I propose a model that accounts for the
contextual and dynamic nature of religious experience, including the factors
that are involved in the genesis and transmission of religious experience in
historical religions. Figure 7.1 shows how religious experience interacts with a
number of other psychological and contextual factors.
A crucial fact about subjective religious experience is that we have no access to
experience that would bypass a subject’s memory. We can of course take objective
measures, such as by means of recording physiological states and applying
neuroimaging technology, yet the subjective nature of the experience will be
available only through self-report (explicit or implicit), which, in turn, will
be based on the subject’s recollections. Taking subjects’recollections as a starting
point, however, implies further challenges for the study of religious experience.
First, there is overwhelming evidence thatremembering is a constructive process
(e.g., Schacter, 1995; Schacter & Slotnick, 2004; Schacter & Addis, 2007; Curci &
Lanciano, 2009; cf. section 4.6). What gets encoded into long-term memory,
how memories are reconfigured with time, and how recollection takes place will
shape subjective experience as remembered by the subject. Further psychologic-
al, social, and environmental factors will influence how this recollection is put
intowords.Finally,thesubjectiveexperienceofpeoplewholivedinthepastis
only accessible to us in the form of external representations, which is subsumed
under the category of “texts” in the diagram. Archeological evidence, for
example, constitutes another significant group of external representations and
belongs to the same box.
The creation and transmission of texts poses a separate problem, which we
discussed in Chapter 4 and are not going to analyze in more detail here. The
question as to whether accounts of visions in biblical and related texts from
146 Cognitive Science and the New Testament