ABSTRACT
Religious behaviour and thought seem to possess both primary, universal components and secondary, diverse components. The primary components should be sought in the psychobiology of the human organism. The secondary components can be understood in terms of local cultural, environmental, and historical influences. This chapter discusses three of the many primary universals, perhaps determinants of the religious "instinct", and describes their psychodynamics, their neuroscience background, and how they develop. It addresses these determinants from within the Jewish religious tradition, since the author believes that with respect to the archaic mechanisms, the various religions resemble each other. The author places awe, mysticism, and apocalypse in a specific sequence, the sequence in which they appear at the inception of the prophecies of the three major prophets of Israel. The developmental antecedents of the mystical experience can be recognized in the process of separation-individuation.
