Worldview Essence and Cosmic Connotations of Religious Feelings

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the essence and features of the cosmic nature of religious feelings, their various meanings, which are unfolded in the system of the “Person-Absolute” relationship. The author reveals the essence of cosmic religious feeling as the experience of unity, the harmony of a person with nature, with the Universe, in which the experience of beauty (aesthetic feelings), sacred (religious feelings), moral (moral feelings), and intellectual (scientific feelings) are combined. In the trinity of religious feelings — immediate experience, manifestation, and comprehension — certain spiritual existential meanings are fixed, which reflect the unity of the human and the Divine, the finite and the infinite. The author compares such phenomena as “cosmic religious feeling,” “transpersonal experiences,” and “peak experiences” and describes their similarities and differences. Religious feeling is immanently inherent in life-meaning orientation, which is associated with the experience of infinity, immortality, and that is due to socio-cultural realities. Religious feeling “expresses” the desire to go beyond the finite, to establish itself in the infinite, and thereby contribute to the integrity of the personality. It should be noted that these experiences are of great importance for the person, differing in generalization, originality, and relate mainly to the emotional states. The author concludes that the infinity is inherent in religious feelings, which leads to the presentation of them as a cosmic religious feeling that combines religious, intellectual, and aesthetic features resulting in the formation of cosmic consciousness as a certain worldview strategy.

Keywords

• religious feelings
• cosmic religious feeling
• transpersonal experiences
• peak experiences
• cosmism
• william james
• albert einstein
• stanislav grof
• abraham maslow