Religious experience (sometimes known as a spiritual experience, sacred experience, or mystical experience) is a subjective experience where an individual reports contact with a transcendent reality, an encounter or union with the divine. Many religious and mystical traditions see religious experiences as real encounters with God or gods, or real contact with other realities, while some hold that religious experience is an evolved feature of the human brain amenable to normal scientific study. Differing religious traditions have described this fundamental religious experience in different ways: