Religious Experience

Abstract

Theistic or monistic, pantheistic or panentheistic, only in some sort of a superhuman experience, the religious man finds his own fulfilment. Whenever the finite encounters the inexhaustibility of the Infinite, it opens up new avenues of religious experience, giving birth to different types of mysticism, all of which, in spite of their distinctive notes, tend to be the expressions of a great converging' experience of humanity. Our world of time is so tiny, and the need for transcendence is so great, that from the beginning of history we find- men who sought the meaning of their life in transcendence. Whatever be its form, mysticism presupposes man's openness to the other and is based on his inner communication with what he is not, be it defined in positive or negative terms. It is dialogal by nature, which may be a dialogue between jivatman and paramatman, between man and God, between the finite consciousness and the Infinite consciousness or between the two poles of his own very being characterized by becoming. Implied, therefore, in every type of mysticism, is man's basic call to the beyond and the boundless, uttered in the innermost depth of his being which bears the divine reflection as its very constitutive base.