Constructing Religious Experience: Sacralized Interpretation of Daily Life

Abstract

The article presents the results of a theoretical analysis of the features of constructing religious experience through sacral interpretation of everyday life of the individual. It is shown that religious categories and means to interpret them not just «express», but also determine what and how a person feels in daily life and religious practice. Emphasis is placed on the study of the variability of interpretations of everyday life and the search for personal identity, in particular through the sacral base being. This gives access to individual forms of religious experience crystalli- zation and taking into account multiplicity of religious manifestations, opens up new possibilities in the study of emotions and determines the deployment of various interpretations of the inner world of the individual. Analyzed approaches to the interpretation of the sacred in the scientific and humanitarian discourse, which are designed to explain the specificity of formation in human representations of the supernatural. On one hand, under the sacred understood all otherworld and extraordi- nary. Also, as the sacred can act a certain steady process of unified institutional actions  or ideal to aspire to. Carried out analysis of the sacrality relationship and daily life. Where daily life is defined as the natural condition of human activity, the collection  of those functions, values, norms, and based on their attitudes and actions of the individual, which is «life-world» of the person from the moment of his birth until his death. Exactly daily life serves the space in which a believer tries to implement the requirements of the religious teachings. Described the features of religious feelings, namely: their intentionality (object orientation), exclusivity (contrast to the ordinary) and formation of the sense. Clarified the concepts of «experience» and «religious experience», the latter is interpreted as the totality of complex forms of direct expe- rience of the person associated with his interaction with the environment through religious ideas and religious experiences. Also highlighted the sources of religious experiences, including the recognition of the objective or imaginary existence of the supernatural, the believerʼs relationship with his social environment and  the individual importance of experiences themselves.