The religious experience: a study of personal reports

This paper continues an earlier article searching for religious experience theoretical definition. This one aims to describe the religious experience structure, based on personal reports. Recent researches on this subject are presented. One personal report, choosen because of its richness of informations, is described and analysed, searching its significant elements and an articulated synthesis. Results are discussed confronting the literature mentioned in this article and in the earlier. The five conclusion points can be sumarysed as follows: religious experience is the experience of a relationship with the absolutly transcendent, lived in the person day-life; it includes the understanding of its religious meaning; it is lived as the experience of an integration between the mundane and the transcendet that is necessary to understant the mundane; it occurs into a process of personal changes that begins with a dialogical relationship with the day-life happenings, and in which the experience as religous becomes clarified and confirmed; and finally, it is an experience that brings some lightness in the personal life, a valorization of what is human and natural, and an active commitment with this world considered from a new perspective.

religious experience; personal repports; phenomenological psychology