Maik Patzelt gave a working paper on 'The Significance of Religious Experience in Seneca’s Works: The Case of the Silent Prayer'

This contribution aims to argue that Seneca attempts to promote a religious experience as well as the essential technique to that end. Whereas his philosophical views elaborate a concept of divine proximity, the religious experience of divine presence is realized through ritualized practices of ecstasy. Seneca elaborates a ritualized technique of silent prayer that fulfills, cognitive psychologically speaking, all conditions of a so-called ‘mystical’ prayer. The prayer style as well as its experience is quite hidden behind a special narratological structure, which the following approach has to reveal. This structure is characterized by the opposition of the silent prayers with those prayers of the ‘wrongdoers’. Seneca strategically opposes two sorts of experiences this way.