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.

Reading for Psyche:

Because of imaginative literature’s extensive renderings of numinous experiences in symbolic forms, a focus on numinous moments in a text can yield an ever-unfolding understanding of the complexity of the factors affecting both positive and negative transformation. Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation” illustrates typical optimism of religious treatments of numinous experiences with regard to transformation; E. M. Forster’s “The Road from Colonus” exemplifies non-integration of a numinous experience; and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle offers a vision of integration of numinous experiences as shared in the realm of psyche. These three works are analyzed to demonstrate that each literary treatment of numinous experiences potentially offers specific understanding of the complexities of integrating or failing to integrate numinous experiences; therefore reading literature with a focus on its renderings of numinous experiences is a revelatory approach to reading literature for psyche.

Lyttkens on Religious Experience and Transcendence

In his paper Hampus Lyttkens tries to explore the relation between religious experience and the concept of transcendence. Lyttkens limits his enquiry to religious experience in the sense of ‘specific and extraordinary psychic experiences’ (such as visions, numinous experiences, etc.) which are interpreted as experiences of a transcendent God. By ‘transcendence’ Lyttkens means more than ‘objective reference’. The object of religious experiences in the above sense is not only claimed to transcend the experience itself, in the sense in which the external world is claimed to transcend our perception of it. It is also claimed to be transcendent with respect to the spatio-temporal world as such, by existing ‘beyond space and time’ in some sense or other, or in the sense put forward by Karl Heim, as existing in an extra dimension beside the four dimensions of space and time.

Mysticism and Sense Perception

In this paper I propose to examine the cognitive status of mystical experience.There are, I think, (at least) three distinct but overlapping sorts of religious experience. (1) In the first place, there are two kinds of mystical experience. The extrovertive or nature mystic (in some sense) identifies himself with a world which is both transfigured and one. The introvertive mystic withdraws from the world and, after stripping the mind of concepts and images, experiences union with something which (in some respects at least) can be described as an undifferentiated unity. Introvertive mysticism is a more important phenomenon than extrovertive mysticism. (2) Numinous experiences are complex experiences involving dread, awe, wonder, and fascination. One (apparently) finds oneself confronted with something which is radically unlike ordinary objects. Before its overwhelming majesty and power, one is nothing but dust and ashes. In contrasting oneself with its uncanny beauty and goodness, one experiences one's own uncleanness and ugliness. (3) The experiences bound up with the devotional life of the ordinary believer (gratitude, love, trust, filial fear, etc.) are also religious in character. Nevertheless these more ordinary experiences should, I think, be distinguished both from numinous experiences and from mystical experiences, for they do not appear to involve the sense of immediate presence which characterises the latter.