<p>Often religious experience has been used in its broad sense to include the notion of spiritual experience. The present essay, after considering various views through a comparative analysis, attempts to delineate the latter from the former by using what is termed as the principle of detachment. It goes further to propose two types of spiritual experience, namely, the meditative and the encounter. The two types roughly correspond to the understanding of spirituality and spiritual experience in the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. While the meditative type of experience is characterized as an inward directed consciousness for the realization of the self, the encounter type is an outward directed experience of the self with some higher or divine being. Noting the resurgence of interest to study spiritual experience in the recent time, it suggests the need to explore deeper into the concept to gain more clarity and understanding. By identifying and employing key terms to characterize spiritual experience, the essay at the same time seeks to bring further conceptual clarity among cognate concepts like self-realization, spiritual realization, ultimate experience and ultimate meaning. It suggests that gaining conceptual clarity is important to bridge different views and approaches to the study of spiritual experience.</p>