Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Subcategories

Mystical Practices

3 of 330 entries in Practices. Click any to see everything it connects to.

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A practice aimed at direct, unmediated experience of the divine or of ultimate reality, the mystical strand within a tradition rather than its ordinary devotional life. Coverage here is well short of what the mystical literature across the traditions would support.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
Practices aimed at a direct, unmediated apprehension of the divine or of ultimate reality. Whether such experiences form a single cross-cultural class is the central dispute in the study of mysticism: the perennialist claim of a common core has been answered by the argument that the tradition a practitioner is formed in shapes the experience itself, and neither position has carried the field. 2
Origins
Whose Classification This Is
Mysticism as a single comparative category took its modern shape in the early twentieth century with William James in 1902 and Evelyn Underhill in 1911, and was reopened by Steven Katz's constructivist critique in 1978. It is a scholars' frame, not a term most of the traditions collected under it use of themselves. 3
Directory
Category
Practices 1
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 2
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The mystical practices

This small group holds a mystical practice, a discipline directed at direct, immediate experience of the divine or ultimate reality, the inner heart of the contemplative traditions.

The browser will find the practice the atlas classes here. The entry describes its technique and aim, noting the tradition in which it is transmitted.

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