Introduction. The common version that mystical experience reveals the deep unity of religious traditions, hiding behind the external facade of their diff erences, seems controversial. Theoretical analysis. It is justifi ed that the similarity between diff erent traditions of mysticism does not express the quintessence of religiosity, as such, but onlyconvergence in a certain phase of the evolution of religions. Mysticism is compared with the entry of religion into the phenomenological phase of development.
