The
major objective of this thesis is to explore the social/personal factors
that facilitate or impede personal mystical experiences of Taiwanese. The
data-set used was collected by the research project" Taiwan Social
Change Survey (Phase 4, Year 5): Religion". Two major aspects of
Taiwanese’ mystical experiences, i.e. "mystical perception" and
"seeing gods/ghosts/ spirits", were found for a set of
religiosity measures through Factor Analyses. Cross-sectional and Multiple
Regressions were then used to single out factors that either associate
with or influence the two aspects.
The results
revealed that people who go to temple/alter/church more often tend to have
more mystical perceptions. Also those who devoted to a certain spiritual
activities (e.g conserving Qi), aware of one's own eight characters (one's
own exact birth time), believing in mystical powers and ever with
physical, prolong illness are also tend to incur mystical perceptions.
Quite similar factors contribute also to one's reported seeing
gods/ghosts/spirits, except spiritual activities. However, for the former,
there is no significant differences found among people of different
religious affiliations in mystical perceptions, yet in seeing
gods/ghosts/spirits, religious differences were found. To be more
specific, those who self-identified as Taoism believers or new religions
believers are more prone to report such experiences as opposed to those
non-believers..
