Religious ecstasy
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel in bodily form ... He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angel who seem to be all afire ... In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by the intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one's soul be content with anything less than God." --The Complete Works Of Saint Teresa Of Jesus Volume I, transl. by Allison Peers |
Illustration: The Ecstatic Virgin Anna Katharina Emmerich by (1885) by Gabriel Cornelius von Max
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Religious ecstasy is an altered state of consciousness characterized by greatly reduced external awareness and expanded interior mental and spiritual awareness which is frequently accompanied by visions and emotional/intuitive (and sometimes physical) euphoria. Although the experience is usually brief in physical time, there are records of such experiences lasting several days or even more, and of recurring experiences of ecstasy during one's lifetime. Subjective perception of time, space and/or self may strongly change or disappear during ecstasy.
See also
See also
- Altered state of consciousness
- Ecstasy (philosophy)
- Ecstasy (emotion)
- Enlightenment (spiritual)
- Entheogen
- Higher consciousness
- Mast (Sufism)
- Mysticism
- Neurotheology
- Nirvana
- Religious experience
- Sex magic
- Wajad
Notable individuals or movements
- Anastenaria
- St. Thomas Aquinas experienced an ecstasy during a church service towards the end of his life that caused him to stop writing.
- Dionysus
- St. Teresa of Avila, Roman Catholic mystic, first entered states of ecstasy while studying religious texts when taken ill in a Carmelite cloister.
- Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, founder of the Gaudiya Vaishnavism religious movement of Bengal, immersed into deeper and deeper stages of ecstasy towards Krishna during the last 24 years of his life.
