A religious experience is not only a crucial factor in understanding a religion but also a key to understanding the spirituality. Such religious experience is momentary and temporary, and at the same time it is a wider phenomenon in one’s religious life. In other words, a religious experience could be a one-off event but it could also occur throughout one’s entire life. Therefore, we can argue that a religious experience is a phenomenon that occurs in the entire duration of our religious life within God’s existence.
Depending on the philosophical viewpoint and the interpretation, the content and the form of religious experience can vary. Some academics analyze the form of religious experience whilst analyzing the status of one’s consciousness, others differentiate the religious experience from a psychological viewpoint into introverted and extroverted experiences. Furthermore, another group of academics categorizes the religious experience into atheistic and theistic experiences. Thus, the form of religious experience can be categorized and interpreted differently depending on the academic background and biases.
If we contextually analyze the different forms, they can generally divided into three categories or theories. First theory interprets a religious experience from a viewpoint that all religious experiences are fundamentally the same. Second theory argues that all religious experiences are the same but can be expressed differently depending on the cultural and social environment. Last theory concludes that the religious experiences can occur in a similar fashion but the contents will differ fundamentally. However, as shown in the semantic analysis of the religious experience, although the general forms of different religious experiences may be similar, we know that there is a clear distinction in the religious experience in terms of the consciousness of the individual before experiencing such religious experience. In other words, the individual’s epistemological structure and ontological intervention, and metaphysical superstructure makes each religious experience different. From this, we discover that our religious experience does not occur identically in different religions. Also, this shows that the fundamental aspects of a religion cannot be understood through the study of religious experiences alone. The distinct characteristics of one’s religion can be found through the interaction between the doctrines and religious experiences.