The Varieites of Religious Experience

July 2024 Course Schedule & Direct Links

In July, The POP-UP School will host 5 sessions on

The Varieties of Religious Experience

This month we will turn toward a fascinating topic — the ways in which people experience God, the Divine, or the Sacred, or have insight into “ultimate reality.”

William James introduced the idea of different varieities of religious experience in his Gifford Lectures of 1901 and 1902. That’s a long time ago, but his work identifies the basic templates that represent what we intuitively consider “religious experience.”

This year, Thomas Metzinger published a huge report titled The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports. It represents the largest single study of how people experience “religious experience outside a theistic focus” . He calls this general category of experience “pure consciousness” or, “pure awareness, “ using them interchangeably, which he defines as “the simplest kind of conscious experience” one can have. He names this the “Minimum Phenomenal Experience” or MPE. Metzinerger writes:

“The pure-awareness experience must play a central role in the formulation of a first standard model of consciousness.”

How does the phenomenology of religious experience within a primarily theistic context as described by James overlap with the phenomenology of pure awareness?

This is the core exploration in this module.

Here are the dates to the sessions:

Saturday July 13th 12 noon - 2 pm (eastern)

Tuesday July 16th 4 - 6 pm (eastern)

Saturday July 20th 12 noon - 2 pm (eastern)

Thrusday July 25th 6 - 8 pm (eastern)

Saturday August 3 12 noon - 2 pm (eastern)

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