ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the vexing problem of ‘religious experience’ – terms which one scholar once described as twofold ‘weasel words’. It outlines the cognitive and social implications of religious experience. The chapter aims to apply two epistemological models such as internalism and externalism, to relevant Indian soteriologies and arrives at some conclusions concerning the cognitive dimension of religious experience. Although epistemologists have not used the terms ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’ unambiguously, a generalization can nevertheless be made which applies to justification and the account of knowledge. The discussion of Ramanuja’s mystical perception is appropriate, since an important part of Alston’s project demonstrated the structural continuities between sense perception and mystical perception. This is not to say that the frequency of mystical perception or the number of persons who experience it is identical with that of sense perception, but it is to say that there are structural similarities, the most significant of which is that something is ‘given’ to consciousness.
