ABSTRACT
This chapter goes from approaches to religious experience from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience to issues about the social construction of religious experience, and involves the processes of interpretation. Some religious experiences arise from deliberate preparations such as those associated with meditation. Social constructionists generally want to define it in terms of the religious interpretative frame of reference, whereas perennialists tend to define it in terms of the distinct content of the experience. The social constructionist approach really arises from a basic assumption about how, as a matter of empirical fact, all experience arises, including religious experience. There are other methods of studying mysticism besides the study of the classic mystical texts, such as the empirical research methods of the modern human sciences. The chapter discusses implications of general theoretical psychology for current debates about the role of interpretation in religious experience.
