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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.
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