Designing a tourist experience for numen seekers

Purpose Although tourist experience has been considerably studied, there is a dearth of research on spiritual cognitive stages in tourism literature. Therefore, this paper aims to reveal the dimensions of the tourist experience based on numinosity context. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative method is used by the etic and emic approach with an ethnographic background. After observation and active participation in the field, data was collected from 44 participants with semi-structured interviews to reveal their numinous experiences dimensions. Findings The results show that numinous experience in three categories (mysterium, tremendum and fascinans) can be evaluated in seven dimensions including history, story, awe, reverence, atmosphere, place-based and nature-based dimensions. Practical implications This study provides managerial and practical implications for tourism stakeholders to be aware of numinous experiences and to better manage sacred places. Originality/value This paper offers a novel tourist experience design in the numinous context to the best of the authors’ knowledge.

Revisiting Brehier – Differences between Plotinus’ Enneads and Advaita Vedānta

Bréhier revives the possibility of Indian Upaniṣadic influence on Plotinus, specifically in the area of mysticism – asking what in Plotinus’ philosophy is foreign with respect to the Greek philosophical tradition. After Bréhier there are vigorous defenses of Plotinus’ Greek origins – not all of which respond directly to the key issues he raises, or address Plotinus’ mysticism specifically. My purpose in this paper is not to answer Bréhier, but to revisit him, for the purpose of delineating paradigmatic differences between Plotinus’ metaphysics and that in Advaita Vedānta. Starting with differences in their respective texts and conceptions of the Divine, I explore concrete concepts (Māyā, tolma, the forms, gun․as, etc.), so unique to each tradition that they comprise the heart and essence of their differences. I assert as well that their metaphysical distinctions imply dissimilarities in their modes of mysticism. In this effort I uphold numinous experience above historical influences. This paper therefore has four parts: (1) Revisiting Bréhier, Armstrong, and Others; (2) Defining Terms: Texts, Methods, and Conceptions of the Divine (Striking Similarities); (3) Contrasting Advaita Vedānta and the Enneads (Paradigmatic Differences); and (4) Conclusion.

The numinous experience in the context of psychopathology and traumatic stress studies

The psychological phenomenon of a suddenly appearing, extremely enigmatic, and at the same time fascinating state in which one feels influenced by higher powers was described as a “numinous experience” by R. Otto and C. G. Jung. This condition is one of those subjectively non-rational experiences that have so far received little attention in cultural clinical psychology and yet have great potency to explain psychopathological phenomena. In the first section of this paper, we work towards a contemporary psychological definition both by focusing on the roles of paradoxical cognitions and dissociation and by presenting various differentiations and possible explanatory mechanisms. In the second part of this paper, we describe the numinous state as it occurs in selected clinical phenomena such as the subjective experience of potentially traumatic events including near-death experiences, sexual abuse of children, post-traumatic stress disorder, severe states of mourning (diagnosed today as prolonged grief disorder), and sleep paralysis. This paper is intended as a theoretical proposal aimed at better understanding subjectively non-rational states in patients.

Experiência do sagrado e do profano

A fenomenologia de Husserl motivou uma viragem da filosofia da religião, no século XX, através das obras Das Heilige de Rudolf Otto e O sagrado e o profano de M. Eliade. Ambos partem da experiência religiosa concreta, não de conceitos abstratos de Deus e de religião, para fundamentar a crença religiosa na natureza humana. Otto fala do mysterium tremendum et fascinans na experiência do numinoso e Eliade do homo religiosus e do homo profanus.Abstract: Husserl’s phaenomenology caused a revolution in the philosophy of religion in the twentieth century with the studies Das Heilige of Rudolf Otto and The holy and the profane of M. Eliade. Both authors depart from the concret religious experience, not from the abstract concepts of God and religion, to ground the religious belief in the human nature. Otto speaks about the mysterium tremendum et fascinans in the numinous experience and Eliade about the experience of homo religiosus and the homo profanus.Keywords: Religious experience. Numinous, Mysterium tremendum. Rudolf Otto. Mircea Eliade.

Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937)

Rudolf Otto, an early and leading student of religious experience, was a devout Christian thinker (part theologian, part philosopher, part phenomenologist of religious experience) who was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He held that numinous experience – experience of the uncanny that is strongest and most important in cases in which it seems to its subject to be experience of God – is unique in kind. Such experience of God, he held, occurred in both Semitic and South Asian monotheistic traditions. Recognizing the intellectual or doctrinal content of numinous experience, but influenced by Kant’s thesis that knowledge-giving concepts cannot refer beyond possible objects of sensory experience, Otto tried to remain faithful to both numinous experience and Kantian philosophy by talking about ‘ideograms’ that express the content of numinous experience but, allegedly at least, are not concepts.

The Sound of a Small Whisper: Ordinary Religious Experience

An ordinary religious experience does not entail an overwhelming sense of the Divine; it is not a “numinous” experience. It is instead easily ignored. In a phenomenological psychological inquiry into such a religious experience, both the noema, the “what” experienced, and the noesis, the mode of givenness of the experience, manifested themselves in distinctive ways. The paper examines a simple experience of having been guided in making a decision. The guidance was recognized only at the moment of realization. The realization revealed the decision to have been part of a larger drama that transcended the immediate experience. The “world” of this moment of realization included sensing that the sky above-as an “elemental”-was a dome, with allusions to the Noah story. Even at the time, this perception was not experienced as literal, but as symbolic. The social, historical, and theological contexts for the possibility of this experience receive attention. Theological as well as psychological reflection indicate such an experience continues to happen, in memory and thought, and even in action, long after the initial moment. Essential to the meaning of the experience is an admonition to transcend egocentricity.

An aesthetic of the unknown

This paper begins to establish an ‘aesthetic of the unknown’ by drawing together theorists and approaches from mainstream art criticism to provide a starting-point for an aesthetic sympathetic with Jungian perspectives, in an attempt to bridge a gap between contemporary abstract painting, contemporary art theory, and Jungian studies. This is a framework for approaching abstract painting not as an object awaiting interpretation or ‘reading’, but rather as something that offers a numinous experience (or experience of the unknown), which can be thought about but may remain ultimately unknowable and irreducible. Such experience – involving both the unconscious and conscious mind – would provide glimpses of forms of meaning not accessible to full rational exposition. This type of unconsciously understood meaning is explored, acknowledging that there is a need to preserve this encounter with the unknown and a need for a contemporary critical, theoretical framework that recognises the importance of this within abstract painting.