or the use of entheogens. Yet these experiences are not unrelated to the
resonant or volitional styles: exceptional experiences will be influenced by
the same beliefs and interpreted in the same conceptual framework and by the
same religious community as moderate experiences. When Isaiah ascends to
heaven, he sees the same monotheistic God of Israel (surrounded by angels)
that he believes in just like other Israelites. A shaman under similar circum-
stances, for example, would meet the ancestral spirits and other superhuman
agents that her society postulates. The interpretation of these experiences
occurs in the respective religious systems in ways that are largely constrained
by the different factors considered in this chapter. Exceptional experiences,
however, can also initiate important changes in the religious system or can be
used as sources of inspiration and signs of legitimacy by a movement that
perhaps started due to other socioeconomic or ecological factors.
7.9 CONCLUSIONIn this chapter we addressed the cognitive and neuroscientific aspects of
subjective religious experience in its social and cultural contexts. Drawing
on a growing body of neuroscientific research and theorizing, we outlined two
models in particular: the Lobes Theory based on the volitional–resonant scale
and the model of the two phases of tours of heavens. The Lobes Theory has
been used to address different, usually moderate, experiences in the institu-
tional and theological frameworks of religious groups; the two-phase model, in
turn, was applied to Isaiah’s vision in the Ascension of Isaiah and can be
potentially applied to other tours of heaven, including the Book of Revelation
(cf. Czachesz, 2016b). The two models are complementary in the sense that
they address different aspects of religious experience.
Further domains of investigation in Biblical Studies include (cognitive)
linguistic aspects of religious experience (e.g., Chan, 2016b), ritual practices
and the related use of hallucinogenic techniques and substances (e.g., Merkur,
2004; Czachesz, 2016c), and the neuroscience of the shifting sense of the self
in religious experience (e.g., Czachesz, 2013; Chan, 2016a), among others. If
we take the epistemiological definition of subjective experience seriously we
cannot simply cherry-pick some cases of religious experience and declare them
the center of religion. Consequently, reducing the diverse phenomenology and
structural complexity of religious experience to a simple model seems impos-
sible at the moment. Subjective experience remains the most intimate, but at
the same time also the most amazing, aspect of religious cognition, which is
arguably also the hardest to study.
Religious Experience 165