What are the common elements of an intense mystical experience? Are these experiences the same across faith traditions?
Absolutely. There is an awareness of overpowering love. There’s a sense of being at one with the universe, as if there are no boundaries between you and nature or other people. Often there’s a feeling that a benign force has temporarily taken over, as if you’ve been pushed from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat for a wild ride. The feeling is physical, often like sexual ecstasy (which always made me blush a bit when people described it)! And it happens to people from different faiths or no religion at all. I talked with Catholics, Episcopalians, Jews, Sufis, Buddhists, people who claim to be spiritual but not religious, and they all describe the same “Other,” the same spiritual presence and experience. What’s so cool about this is that these are the elements that mystics like Teresa of Avila have described down through the ages. So did Williams James, the Harvard psychologist who wrote a seminal book on the subject more than a hundred years ago, The Varieties of Religious Experie
