Spiritual transcendence
Submitted by Heather on July 29 1999 at 22:45:44
In reply to Re: Hey, if they let a nonboylover take part . . . Submitted by Gerald for New Zealand on July 29 1999 at 18:51:34
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"Yes, I agree with you that such spiritual transcencence might not necessarily be experienced by church people" Sorry, I don't seem to have worded myself very well; what I was trying to say was that I thought both religious and nonreligious people experience spiritual transcendence, but they often use different words to describe their experiences, so they don't realize that they hold these experiences in common. "I am sure that this phenomenon is the same as what Jesus refers to when he speaks of 'entering the kingdom of heaven'. Others refer to it as enlightenment or nirvana etc." I'd agree in a cautious sort of way. The people who have great knowledge of comparative religion – and I'm afraid I'm not among them – say that it's superficial to say that people of different religions (say a Christian and a Buddhist) are experiencing the same thing, because the experiences they describe are radically different. What apparently can be said is that they are all experiencing different levels of spirituality, and in certain ways these spiritual experiences are similar and in certain ways they are different. For example, Buddha's idea of letting go of all desires (as far as I can understand it) has a certain resemblance to the Christian doctrine of letting go of worldly desire, but Christians then go on to say that one should passionately desire heavenly things – and as far as I can tell (again, my grasp of Buddhist teachings is quite minimal) Buddha doesn't say this. Thus Buddha's concept of nirvana – the cessation of desires – seems to be quite different from Jesus' concept of heaven – the satisfying of desires. Yet it may simply be that they are talking about different levels of the same experience. "The spiritual road was hard work, and I had to do this without any help or encouragement. I have not found many like minded people, have you?" Absolutely not. I was discussing this a while back at Religious Debate Chat with Rags, who is Native American. He was describing to me the Native American view of how humans have direct contact with the divine through the material world, and I was telling him how this matched early Christian beliefs. The disaster that befell the Christian Church was the revival of Aristotle and the development of a mechanistic worldview that could find no room in it for direct contact between God and man. Fortunately, with the failure of the mechanistic worldview in the twentieth century, some Christians are beginning to take seriously again the view of the early Church that spiritual transcendence is common and not simply reserved for great saints. Alas, this viewpoint is still in the minority. I'm worshipping these days with the Quakers, who are among the few who have retained the idea of direct communion with God, but within my native denomination, the Episcopal Church, you have to scratch hard to find such beliefs. Christians have really lost a sense of their roots. Heather |