Add & Subtract - Spiritual Experience

Today we explore Spiritual Experience

ADD PERSONAL

Religion is the system of beliefs and practices, that usually has filtered down from another’s spiritual experience. Spirituality is our own personal experience of transcendence.

Historically, controlling spiritual truths has been a way to control people. The ego wants obedient slaves, not illuminated masters. Corrupted religion feels like fear rather than love. Hopefully, it repels us.

More people than ever have broken free of old doctrines, being forced to obey someone else’s version of truth. Living religions encourage everyone to find out for themselves. Most people are on their own experiential spiritual path now, at some stage on the journey, bringing greater light than ever into the world. Herein lies our hope for peace and unity.

Steve McIntosh of the Integral Philosophy Movement:

“Our spiritual experiences are making authentic contact with something that transcends mundane physical reality… a glimpse of something more complete or perfect.

Such experiences confirm that we can and will transcend our current state of development - that we are capable of experiencing spirit more fully and completely as we evolve…

They are a kind of a future echo, a foretaste of our destiny as ascendent pilgrims in time”

Source: The Presence of the Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth and Goodness

SUBTRACT SECOND HAND

Our moments of transcendent revelation are quantum, containing All in an instant. A fleeting moment of touching infinity often changes an entire lifetime. The Masters who have shared their spiritual knowing are reporting higher consciousness back to people in lower consciousness.

If we don’t learn to raise our consciousness personally, following in the footsteps of these evolutionary way-showers, we can end up reducing their great light down to dimness or even darkness. History is full of examples of Perfect being packed into a box of appalling.

Some religions seem to preach a God of anger, hate and vengeance. As if Love Itself would want us to be punished or to persecute others. Such attitudes suggest something very human has contaminated the original message. It is no longer spiritual at all.

We live in an age of greater spiritual freedom than ever before. We have access to all knowledge and varieties of experience. While there is still plenty of persecution and hateful archaic belief being acted out, the spiritual cat is out of the bag. Fear cannot put it back in.

Beyond theory from American author Ken Wilber:

“The integral vision, having served its purpose, is finally outshined by the radiance of a Spirit that is much too obvious to see and much too close to reach…

One abandons a theory of everything in order simply to be Everything, one with the All in this endless awareness that holds the Kosmos kindly in its hand.

And then the true Mystery yields itself, the face of Spirit secretly smiles, the Sun rises in your very own heart and the Earth becomes your very own body, galaxies rush through your veins while the stars light up the neurons of your night, and never again will you search for a mere theory of that which is actually your own Original Face”

Source: A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality