Beyond Unity: Religious Experience, Creativity, and Psychology

Religious experience traditionally has been viewed as beginning with self-purgation and reaching its goal in a unitive state. “All the mystics agree that the stripping of personal initiative, the I … is an imperative condition of the attainment of the unitive life” (Underhill, 1911, p. 508). I suggest in this article, however, that Oneness is not the final stage of religious experience. That it, it is not the final stage if the experience is psychologically healthy. It is the final stage when a person avoids the challenges of the next stage by remaining attached to the unitive state, an attachment difficult to resist due to various inducements found in the unitive encounter. This work examines the inducements that forfeit the fullness of a final stage of religious experience, and why this final stage manifests a degree of psychological health not present in the traditional goal of unitive experience.

To accomplish this task, I am suggesting we take a look at creative processes. A final stage of creativity, we will see, marks the artist's emergence out of early creative stages and into mature expressions of what was inspirational in those early stages: a process similar to what takes place in a final stage of religious experience and in the mature expression it gives to earlier illuminative stages.

Ernst Kris (1952) distinguished two stages of creativity. These stages — inspiration and elaboration**–will be useful to understanding a similar process in religious experience. The inspirational stage