156 actas del ii congreso internacional de literatura mística or outcomes, and moreover the patterns of variance in terms of religious doctrine. This experience in the traditions in this investigation culminates in a higher state of existence, which offers opportunities for transcendence in terms of worldview, self-actualization, and religious and/or intercultural understanding and tolerance. The explanations of this level of existence and experience are described in and through the religious and cultural contexts, but the essences of the phenomenon are unitive. A fuller understanding of the path of spiritual ascendancy and mystical experience in Buddhism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam can make valuable contributions to the feasibility and desirability of subjective investigation and method, in a manner that is totally different from the Western approach, but that is logically coherent and extremely effective in terms of the insight, mastery (and happiness) that it produces in the practitioner. The subjective domain is not anti-empirical or unscientific. Buddhism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam have developed rigorous methods to arrive at valid and reliable subjective knowledge and have reached separate but essential patterns of invariance that reflect insight into some of the issues that are most important to humankind, (i.e., love, joy, experience, beauty, will, values, meaning, and knowledge). This is accomplished through the diminished use of objective studies of the external, to the perfection of the subjective study of self. These traditions rely on a combination of two interrelated processes (a) shifting the borders of observation inwards, and (b) refinement of the instrumental nature. It is proposed that to the extent that the self-centric ego is transcended, a wider, purer, more powerful and integrative form of consciousness that is aligned to the cosmos, in a manner that allows effective and wholesome ‘right action’, emerges. Although this is often regarded only from its soteriological aspect, within the traditions in this investigation, and perhaps even primarily, this is seen as a way to arrive at reliable knowledge. The path of spiritual ascendancy and mystical experience in Buddhism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam might then be described as the disentanglement of the consciousness from its identification with the false and invented self, which is materially bound, to the perception of spiritual reality, integration, non-duality and cosmic consciousness and consequences. According
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