146 actas del ii congreso internacional de literatura mística experiential data can be analyzed. Nine themes emerged from this analysis including: (a) self-concept and ontological separation; (b) reality and spiritual cognition; (c) purification; (d) perfection; (e) unitive experience; (f) knowledge and discernment; (g) enlightenment of worldview; (h) meaning, purpose, and self-actualization; and (i) solidarity, mutual responsibility, and tolerance (see Appendix B). 3.3 textural and structural descriptions From the thematic analysis, the researcher provided a textural description of what was experienced and a structural description of the context of the experience (Creswell, 2007). The focus is on “descriptions of what people experience and how it is that they experience what they experience” (Patton, 2002 p. 107). According to the Buddhist, Eastern Orthodox, Hindu, and Islamic sources used in this study, the texture of the path of spiritual ascendancy and mystical experience cannot be adequately described in terms of the senseperception testimonies and/or external relationships and conditions, situations, or circumstances, but can be primarily experienced, perceived, and understood through the supersensory organ of spiritual cognition in a place that is invisible, infinite, immutable, and empty but filled with silence, and which in turn is filled with the oneness of God. The structural description involved cognitive processing and described the context of the experience through concrete concepts. The process of ‘imaginative variation’ led to the structural textures resulting in the invariant structures of the phenomenon (see Appendix C). 3.4 combined textural-structural descriptions The phenomenological sequence of presenting the textural description and the structural description simultaneously in tabular form assisted in shifting the emphasis of the data analysis from intuitive and cognitive to integrative, and eliminated the need for a combined textural-structural description, which was important in view of the restrictions on the length of this paper. The combination of the textural and structural descriptions into one table assisted in providing a sense of balance between the spiritual and material, and the intuitive and the cognitive in the two accounts. Nevertheless, much of which was on the agenda for discussion, was in reality beyond words.
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