ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about mystical experiences of God. Specifically it is an epistemological inquiry into whether people have had valid, reliable experiential contact with God. Various philosophers have been sympathetic to the idea that people do genuinely know God through mystical experience. Mystical experiences of God come in varied forms. Some occur suddenly and pass quickly, while others involve an ongoing sense of God's presence in one's life. Some experiences arise in prayer and contemplation, as for Teresa of Avila, while others come at unexpected times or circumstances. On both conceptions, and on any other appropriate to this study, we are to think of God as a self-initiating reality, whether literally or in some figurative or analogical sense. William Alston has defended the rationality of one's believing one has had a genuine mystical experience of God in Alston, 1991.
