Mystical and religious experiences can be classified in various ways, in addition to the
built-in difference between mystical super sense-perceptual and sub sense-perceptual
experiences. This section notes two common distinctions.
3.1 Extrovertive and Introvertive
When an experience includes sense-perceptual content, we may say it is an extrovertive
experience. There are mystical extrovertive experiences, as in a consciousness of the
unity of all of nature, as well as numinous extrovertive experiences, as when
experiencing God's presence when gazing at a snowflake. When wholly nonsensory, we
may say an experience is introvertive. An experience of nothingness or emptiness, in
some mystical traditions, and an experience of God resulting from a disengagement from
sense experience would be examples of introvertive experiences (see sections 5 and 6).
3.2 Theistic and Nontheistic
A favorite distinction of Western philosophers is between theistic experiences, which are
purportedly of God, and nontheistic ones. Nontheistic experiences can be of an ultimate
reality other than God or of no reality at all. Numinous theistic experiences are dualistic,
where God and the subject remain clearly distinct, while theistic mysticism pertains to
either union or identity with God.
3.2.1 Union with God
Philosophers have identified a mystical experience of “union” with God, where this
signifies a rich family of experiences rather than a single experience. “Union” involves a
falling away of the separation between a person and God, short of identity. Christian
mystics have variously described union with the Divine. This includes Bernard of
Clairvaux's unification by “mutuality of love,” Henry Suso's likening himself in union to
a drop of water falling into wine, taking on the taste and color of the wine (1953, 185),
and Jan van Ruysbroeck's description of “iron within the fire and the fire within the iron”
(see Pike 1992, ch. 2). Nelson Pike has identified three stages in the union experience:
quiet, full union, and rapture (ch. 1).
end p.142