This examination began with a description of paul's ecstatic experience as a curiosity. By this point in the examination, I hope that it seems much less curious but no less intriguing as a result. The preceding chapters have presented evidence for the widespread and enduring fact of ecstatic religious experience as a meaningful part of the lives of individuals and a contributing factor in the health and growth (as well as some of the conflicts) of their communities. Such positive effects derive in part from the fact that the neurological mechanisms that permit ecstatic experience also provide access to rich ways of knowing that are otherwise often veiled from consciousness. For Paul and these first communities, religious ecstasy helped to make the world meaningful and to orient them in the midst of change and contingency. When they were gathered for worship, their corporate ecstasy became sacred experience and, because the body is inextricably bound to the experience itself, even their bodies were partly redeemed through their participation. Through religious ecstasy, they felt they were in the process of being transformed, as Paul put it, from one glory to another (2 Cor 3:18).