The term sacred is stretched beyond ‘religion’, leaving traditional truths and
virtues behind it, and used interchangeably with terms like ‘spiritual’. A person
need not recognise the authority of any religion, and may insist upon a highly
individualistic claim to the truth or validity of their experience. Certain kinds
of experience might be considered an experience of the ‘sacred’. We might
include amongst these altered states of consciousness such as ecstasy, a special
way of knowing or hyper-consciousness, visions and auditions, the experience
of paranormal or occult phenomena, or the experience of a connection with the
earth, for example, as in ‘nature mysticism’.