mysticism

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. Immediate consciousness of the transcendent or ultimate reality or God.
2. n. The experience of such communion as described by mystics.
3. n. A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience.
4. n. Vague, groundless speculation.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The character of being mystic or mystical; mysticalness.
2. n. Any mode of thought, or phase of intellectual or reli'gious life, in which reliance is placed upon a spiritual illumination believed to transcend the ordinary powers of the understanding.
3. n. Specifically, a form of religious belief which is founded upon spiritual experience, not discriminated or tested and systematized in thought. Mysticism and rationalism represent opposite poles of theology, rationalism regarding the reason as the highest faculty of man and the sole arbiter in all matters of religious doctrine; mysticism, on the other hand, declaring that spiritual truth cannot be apprehended by the logical faculty, nor adequately expressed in terms of the understanding.

Wiktionary

1. n. The beliefs, ideas, or thoughts of mystics.
2. n. A doctrine of direct communication or spiritual intuition of divine truth.
3. n. A transcendental union of soul or mind with the divine reality or divinity.
4. n. Obscure thoughts and speculations.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. Obscurity of doctrine.
2. n. (Eccl. Hist.) The doctrine of the Mystics, who professed a pure, sublime, and wholly disinterested devotion, and maintained that they had direct intercourse with the divine Spirit, and aquired a knowledge of God and of spiritual things unattainable by the natural intellect, and such as can not be analyzed or explained.
3. n. (Philos.) The doctrine that the ultimate elements or principles of knowledge or belief are gained by an act or process akin to feeling or faith.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a religion based on mystical communion with an ultimate reality
2. n. obscure or irrational thought