 William James, in his "The Varieties of Religious Experience", was highly influential in further popularising this perennial approach and the notion of personal experience as a validation of religious truths.The essentialist model argues that mystical experience is independent of the sociocultural, historical and religious context in which it occurs, and regards all mystical experience in its essence to be the same.According to this "common core-thesis", different descriptions can mask quite similar if not identical experiences