ABSTRACT
In the modern era mysticism has also been closely associated with the notion of spirituality and with the religions of the East. Today it is not uncommon for people to say that they are spiritual or that they have spiritual beliefs but that they are not religious, meaning of course that they do not affiliate with a particular religious institution or movement but still have some experience of the sacred. This association reflects modern shifts in Western understandings of religion since the Enlightenment and a tendency for many to distinguish between an inward and personal experience of the sacred (spirituality or mysticism) and allegiance to a particular form of organised religion (Carrette and King 2005). In a comparative context mysticism has come to denote those aspects of the various religious traditions which emphasise unmediated experience of oneness with the ultimate reality, however differently conceived. However, in the late twentieth century, the term of choice for those wishing to emphasise a more individualistic and less tradition-bound approach to the mystical, has been the notion of ‘spirituality’. This reflects cultural trends related to secularization and the ‘de-traditionalization’ of contemporary religious forms (as in much of ‘the New Age’) in the West. However, for the sake of understanding the trajectory of twentieth-century scholarship within this field of study, this chapter will generally refer to the phenomenon under discussion as ‘mysticism’ rather than ‘spirituality’ since this was the preferred term within scholarship until fairly recently. The contemporary preference for the language of ‘spirituality’ will be briefly addressed at the end of this chapter.
