Renewing the senses: conversion experience and the phenomenology of the spiritual life

In his discussion of conversion experience, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James draws attention to a variety of experience which has not been much investigated in the philosophy of religion literature, but which seems to be of some importance religiously-namely, an experience which consists in a re-vivification of the sensory world as a whole. In this paper, I develop four accounts of the nature of this kind of experience, and I show how the experience can inform our conception of the spiritual life, considered as a world-directed mode of experience and practice.