Religious Experience and Its Relationship with Mystical Experience and Revelation

Religious experience is one of the issues developed in the fields of new theology and philosophy of religion and in the context of new religious studies. Religious experience has a special role in pious life and consists of a vast scope including prayer, supplication, answering supplication, spiritualintuitions, etc. Mystical experience, which is closely related to religious experience, gives meaning to mystics’ life. In this kind of experience, the mystic unites with ultimate reality and attains an indescribable state. This unity is most important distinction between religious experience and mystical experience. Religious experience is different from mystical experience and every religious experience is not necessarily a mystical experience. However, since both are a kind of experience, the present paper compares them. Revelation is also an experience exclusive to prophet, with features not found in the two other experiences.