Exceptional experiences (ExE) differ deviate from everyday experience. They can be experienced positively or negatively and can confirm, question or even shake person’s the world view. How these experiences are dealt with and how they are integrated biographically depends on many factors. In addition to the world view, existing personal and cultural patterns of interpretation, previous experiences, and the context in which the ExE occour play an important role in their impact on beliefs and the narrative construction of one’s own biography.
ExE can occur spontaneously, without any direct cause being identifiable. This can lead to astonishment, but also to doubts as to whether one could have succumbed to a sensory illusion. The situation is somewhat different when ExE occur in the context of religious, spiritual or magical practices. There they can take on important functions. The importance of ExE for the process of adopting a heterodox belief system or an alternative religious worldview has often been neglected in the research literature. Religious scholars are primarily concerned with the sociological or psychological process of religious conversion, which they divide into different phases. While ExE condsidered as potential internal triggers (e.g. mystical experiences or near-death experiences), but the special quality of these experiences is often not taken into account.
We investigated the question of the particular significance of ExE for the adoption of heterodox beliefs on the basis of interview material collected in three field studies in German-speaking countries.
