For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the intricate ways we define and study religious experiences.
What constitutes a religious experience? It depends, of course, on who you ask. Even among academics who study religion and psychology, whether an experience is regarded as religious rather than simply unusual depends on the expectations of both the one who asks and the one who answers — one person’s mystical trance may be another person’s psychotic episode.
Over the past several years, religious studies professor Ann Taves of the University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist Michael Barlev, and ethnographer Michael Kinsella have developed a set of cross-cultural data-gathering tools to assess extraordinary experiences and the ways that such experiences are categorized by individuals and by cultural groups. Now, funded in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Taves and her colleagues are working to validate the Inventory of Non-Ordinary Experiences (INOE) through a series of tests of the experiences and interpretations reported by thousands of participants in the United States and India.