Core religious experience and the process of self actualization within the context of a religious congregation.

Abstract

This study was designed to examine intense religious experience within the constructs of self-actualization and core religious experience proposed by Maslow. Three groups of 26 religious women each were studied over a 28 day period in settings allowing for graded degrees of solitude, i.e. work, vacation and retreat. The results show that a high degree of solitude (retreat condition) is necessary but not sufficient for the occurance of core religious experiences. That is, those who had core religious experiences were also significantly more time-competent and had a constructive view of the Nature of Man as measured by the POI scale. A covariate analysis of the post-test scores showed no significant differences between those who had core religious experiences and those who did not. However, an interesting trend was revealed across 10 of the 12 POI scales which showed that those on retreat who had core religious experiences had increased self-actualization scores while those who did not have core religious experiences actually decreased in level of self-actualization.