So what about spiritual experiences? Are they a meaningful and/or necessary part of faith?
What Martha has to say . . . I think of my spiritual state as the closeness of my working partnership with God. To my surprise and delight, I’ve found the best measure of this is how comfortable I am in my own skin. Why? Because the closer my working relationship is with God, the easier it is to be who I am in the world as it actually is, and the less I need to pretend, hustle, prevaricate, bluff, cheat, or waste time feeding my own ego. Living in partnership with God, I can just be a person among other persons, getting on with it. Such simplicity of being is, to me, one of the great gifts of faith.
I think of spiritual experiences as the times I’m fully aware of the presence of God. I acknowledge and possibly envy the spiritual experiences that many religious people have through ritual (in Joseph Campbell’s sense of ritual being one’s passage to the wisdom—the force—behind the ritual). The religious people I talk to really do seem to become as aware as they ever are of God while participating in their chosen religious practices. . . . (read more of Martha’s thoughts here)
Absolutely necessary as part of our lives, howevere minute!
I’m all for spiritual experiences. They are, however, private experiences and should not be foisted on me.
From your essay, I cannot ascertain what you mean by: “I’m not now; nor—God willing—ever will be, conventionally religious—so that particular constellation of spiritual experiences is probably closed to me.” Meditation? Prayer?
Life experiences, mystical experiences, paranormal experiences… what are spiritual experiences?
Words can hardly describe spiritual experiences and then to discuss whether they are meaningful or necessary….
I suppose I differentiate between the mystical and the paranormal… but not that it is necessary, good, or helpful. It’s just my experience.
Paranormal experiences (e.g., out of body experiences, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, visions, etc.) generally fascinate while mystical experiences move me. It’s sort of like the difference between watching an accident and watching a beautiful sunset or hearing a piece of music that transports.
Not that the two kinds of experiences are mutually exclusive; in my experience, there’s overlap. I can imagine there are people that have experienced both who would not necessarily distinguish between the two. They are simply different flavors or different parts of the elephant that a blind person might feel and I happen to prefer one over the other.
For me, paranormal experiences are more like bells and whistles (even if they helped me understand that there’s more to what is than can be sensed by our five senses). Mystical experiences, on the other hand, are experienced as THE POINT. Yet, when described to someone who says they have experienced neither, mystical experiences can appear to be the sleeper of the two. (Because, well, paranormal experiences are fascinating to many people.) It’s only in the experiencing of them that the mystical shines and draws me deeper into my faith.
Are spiritual experiences meaningful? Well, paranormal can be, and both mystical and life experiences are. Mystical experiences give me first hand experience of the oneness of creation, and as a result, I don’t need faith in that. It’s not rational. It’s not irrational. It’s transrational.
I remember a time when I denied the existence of the paranormal and mystical experiences, preferring psychological explanations for the phenomena. (Reminds me of how we people are often in denial about real life experiences and feelings that disturb or put us or our egos at risk.) That was a time when I tried to rely on reason alone.
Now, I apply the use of reason, and the wisdom of my gut, to my transrational experiences to help me translate what I’ve learned into life-affirming action. Same for my life experiences, all of which appear to me to be spiritual in nature. (Some would call the individual, interior experience of life psychological, biosocial, psychosocial, spiritual, or some a combination of the aforementioned.)
I make sense of my experiences and translate them into action because like you, “the important part of one’s awareness that God is, is not how one feels because of that connection, but what one does because of it.”
Are spiritual experiences necessary? I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have spiritual experiences and so I can’t answer that question.
I can say that life experience is inevitable, though whether we learn anything is optional. And meaning is something we ascribe. So my life experiences, my paranormal experiences, my mystical experiences may mean absolutely nothing to someone else.