Otherness as preassumption to have mystical /religious experience

During the conference “Gestures: religion qua preformance” of the NWO programme “The Future of the Religious Past” I had very interesting discussions. One question pups up imediatly: Is mystical experience possible without normative contraints, concepts and a concept of otherness (religious experience is in my eyes already intertwined with concepts)?

Here are some humble thoughts

First I Think that the concept of experience is in this question a bit confusing because in most theory experience is already internalised by the worldviews people have. So a better question in my eyes is: Can people have mystical feelings or feelings beyond themselves?

Second I think that this concept of otherness and how it is used has something to do with the processes of individualisation and the subjectivation of the self and how these processes are used in scientific theories. In this time where the focus is mostly on personalised identities it is not strange that one askes how selfconciencesness and identitymaking takes place. The basic assumption in this proces of identitymaking and selfconciencesness is that people has to reflect on themselves, by meeting others or creating otherness. [In] order to become aware of himself as much he must […] become an object to himself, or enter his own experience as an object, and by only by social means - only by taking that attitude of others towards himself- he is able to become an object to himself” (Mead 1959: 226).

Third I am still working on this concept of communitas and the differentation between spontaneous, ideological and normative communitas by Victor Turner. Communitas or proto-structure is “the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints” (Turner 1982: 44).

“Spontaneous communitas is a direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities. […] Subjectively there is in it a feeling of endless power, […] a flash of lucid mutual understanding on the existential level, when they feel that all problems, […] could be resolved, whether emotional or cognitive, if only the group which felt (in the first person) as ‘essentially us’ could sustain its intersubjective illumination. […] Individuals who interact with one another in the mode of spontaneous communitas become totally absorbed into a single synchronized fluid event.” (Turner 1982: 47-48)

Spontaneous communitas can transform to normative or ideological communitas but when and how there is really something going on like spontaneous communitas? Is this kind of communitas possible without ritualised acts towards it, without some direction (worldviews, concepts etc.)?

For analysing the Dutch practice I studied, I used the concept of flow. Turner already related this concept with liminality, communitas and the liminoid. But for feelings of flow there has to be according to Csikszentmihalyi some sort of focus or attention.

So: Can people have mystical feelings or feelings beyond themselfs?

I hope by doing more research on new ritualised practices to come closer to an answer.