Transcendental experience

This form of consciousness is one characteristic of the mystic experience. The individual loses the usual sense of time and space and is not oriented in terms of any three-dimensional perception of his environment or any sense of past and future. He experiences a sense of timelessness and spacelessness which are felt to be related to the concept of eternity and infinity respectively.

The normal identity-anchored, space-time-bound experience is recognized by contemporary research to be historically and ontologically relative, as well as being relative from a cultural and socio-economic perspective. The consensual and interpersonal confirmation it offers does however provide a sense of ontological security whose validity is experienced by the individual as self-validating, despite the knowledge that historically, ontologically, socio-economically and culturally the apparent absolute validity is an illusion.