Religious ecstasy is an altered state of consciousness characterized by greatly reduced external awareness and expanded interior mental and spiritual awareness which is frequently accompanied by visions and emotional/intuitive (and sometimes physical) euphoria. Although the experience is usually brief in time, there are records of such experiences lasting several days or even more, and of recurring experiences of ecstasy during one's lifetime. Subjective perception of time, space and/or self may strongly change or disappear during ecstasy.
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Famous quotes containing the words religious and/or ecstasy:
“I have been grateful to you from the day you turned your attention to the follies and fanaticisms of religious sects. Against those fools and impostors you employ the most appropriate weapons: to use others would be to imitate them. It is by ridicule that they must be attacked, and by scorn that they must be punished.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)