Religion, Spirituality and the Mystic Experience

Religion and spirituality, in common parlance, may be seen as separate but related concepts. Religious practices and spiritual practices are a mixed bag. They overlap. Religious experience and spiritual experience, on the other hand, are in essence the same phenomena, the dilation or expansion of ordinary egoic consciousness. They are the experience of a new and rarefied state of consciousness and being that saints, sages and the mystic have reported in all cultures, in all ages and on all continents.

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," wrote William James, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."

"This enchantment," James observes, "coming as a gift when it does come - a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say - is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 47-48.]

Writing of this universal experience in an introduction to Swami Prabhavananda's commentary on the Bhagavad Gita ("Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God"), the polymath philosopher, Aldous Huxley, observed that the experience of a higher, unitive consciousness lies at the heart of all the world's great religious and spiritual traditions. Calling it 'the Perennial Philosophy' (a title he would later use for a book examining the religious and spiritual phenomena underlying the world's great faiths), Huxley observed that there are the following four core principals at the heart of all religions and spirituality:

"First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the attached four-part discussion, representatives of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths - a Benedictine monk, a Naqshbandi Sufi teacher, and a Jewish rabbi -  explore the mystical traditions that are their common heritage, and the similarities that the mystical experiences of these faiths have with the same experiences reported in other traditions.

Religious Experience, Cosmic Consciousness, the Universe and Evolutionary Enlightenment

"(O)ur normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness. . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."

-- William James --

In the "Varieties of Religious Experience," William James, one of the fathers of American psychology, recounts a number of enlightenment experiences, including that undergone by Richard M. Bucke, author of "Cosmic Consciousness,' a work that had a profound and continuing effect not only on James, but on generations of spiritual seekers after its publication in 1901.

"I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends reading and discussing poetry and philosophy," Bucke recalls. "We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images and emotions flow, as it were, through my mind."

"All at once, without warning of any kind," he remembers, "I found myself wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagaration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the flame was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe."

"Among other things," Bucke notes, "I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain."

"The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone," Bucke recalls, "but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I must say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 399.]

"Mystical states in general," James observes, "assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. . . . One of these directions is optimism, and the other is monism."

"We pass," he notes, "into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling unifying states."

[Ibid., page 416.]

Both James and Bucke talk of the aliveness of the universe and their experience of oneness with it, a point echoed in the "evolutionary enlightenment" teachings of modern spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen.

At the point of enlightenment, Cohen points out in the attached video, "that is when the evolving Self can begin to authentically discern the difference between what it means to be a world-centrically aware and awake individual versus one who is cosmically awake and aware, in a way that is not merely cognitive. Then, you begin to experience emotionally, psychologically and existentially, and at every other level of yourself, what you are actually dealing with, what you are faced with, which is the future of this whole (evolutionary) process."

Consciousness: The Intersection of Science, Metaphysics and Religion

"We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge."

-- Erwin Schrodinger --

In the true spirit of 'philosophy' - that is, the love of knowledge - the polymath English philosopher, Herbert Spencer, once famously observed: "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." And perhaps nowhere in our modern culture are the bars thicker than between the seemingly exclusive fields of science and religion.

One of the foremost contemporary critics of religion, neuroscientist and author ("Letter to a Christian Nation"), Sam Harris, continually makes the case for an epistemological 'Chinese wall' between science and religion, physics and metaphysics, faith and reason, etc. Yet, in a recent article on the Huffington Post, he not unwittingly (perhaps) highlights the particular area - consciousness studies - in which the seemingly antithetical disciplines of physics and metaphysics seem to intersect.

"There is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention," Harris observes. Speaking only for himself, he observes that he spends much of his waking life "in a neurotic trance." Yet, speaking of his experiences in meditation, he suggests that there is an "alternative" to his state of consciousness and being. "It is possible," he concedes, "to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for a moment."

Such a concession, wittingly or unwittingly made, points to the reality of religious experience as opposed to religious faith. In each of our inner realities, there is the potential for a greater, unitive state of consciousness, a point made by pioneering psychologist, William James in his classic work, "The Varieties of Religious Experience."

"(I)f we look on man's whole mental life as it exists," James notes, "on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial."

"If you have intuitions at all," he points out, "they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rational talk, however clever, that may contradict it."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 73.]

This knowing - the same standing "free of the juggernaut of self" that Harris speaks of - lies at the heart of all the world's great religions and wisdom traditions. The miracles, origin mythologies, rites and rituals of organized religion - most of them thousands of years old - are all superfluous to this essential truism: we are far more than the individual self/ego. Religious practice - most particularly, meditation - serves only as an aid for us to experience the wider, selfless state of pure consciousness which exist within us all.

In railing against 'religion' most of the new breed of evangelical atheists (like Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et al.) lose sight of the 'tree' of higher consciousness amid the 'forest' of religious superfluities. If we are to move toward the "unitive, all-embracing knowledge" which Schrodinger sets out as our birthright, it will require open-minded investigation into what consciousness is, and how it manifests individually and collectively. For this, it seems, there may be no better starting place than the experiential insights based on millennia of inner investigation practiced by religionists.

"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism," Sir Francis Bacon observed, "but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." Or, as Einstein remarked: "Science without religion is lame, (while) religion without science is blind."

The Cosmos and Consciousness: A Spiritual Awakening

In discussing Emerson's views on 'religion' in his classic work, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," the great psychologist, William James observed: "The universe has a divine soul of order, which soul is moral, being also the soul within the soul of man. But whether this soul of the universe be a mere quality like the eye's brilliancy or the skin's softness, or whether it be a self-conscious life like the eye's seeing or the skin's feeling, is a decision that never unmistakably appears in Emerson's pages. It quivers on the boundary of these things, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other, to suit the literary rather than the philosophic need. Whatever it is, though, it is active. As much as if it were a God, we can trust it to protect all ideal interests and keep the world's balance straight."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 33.]

James' famous work can undoubtedly be traced to the influence which the American Transcendentalists had on his view of man, the world, the universe and God. Further on in his introduction into the subject, he observes: "At bottom, the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?"

"If we accept the whole," he asks, "shall we do so as if stunned into submission?"

James goes on to examine at great length the "religious experience" of a wide variety of individuals who had been "stunned into submission" by their realization of a greater spiritual reality than they had previously known to exist. For my part, however, I can find no such experience greater - although there are many others that vary solely in the details and circumstances - than that described by Edgar Mitchell, founder of The Institute of Noetic Sciences ("IONS"), and more famously, an astronaut on Apollo 14 who had the rarely privileged experience of walking on the moon.

In a recent article in the IONS newsletter, Mitchell describes the nature and import of the profound spiritual awakening he underwent on viewing the Earth as a distant orb in the vastness of space.

"The first thing that came to mind as I looked at Earth," Mitchell recalls, "was its incredible beauty. Even the spectacular photographs do not do it justice. It was a majestic sight, a splendid blue and white jewel suspended against a velvet black sky. How peacefully, how harmoniously, how marvelously it seemed to fit into the evolutionary pattern by which the universe is maintained. In a peak experience, the presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. This knowledge came to me directly – noetically. It was not a matter of discursive reasoning or logical abstraction. It was an experiential cognition. It was knowledge gained through private subjective awareness, but it was – and still is – every bit as real as the objective data upon which, say, the navigational program or the communications system was based. Clearly, the universe had meaning and direction. It was not perceptible by the sensory organs, but it was there nevertheless – an unseen dimension behind the visible creation that gives it an intelligent design and that gives life purpose."

"Next," he recalls, "I thought of our planet’s life-supporting character. That little globe of water, clouds, and land no bigger than my thumb was home, the haven our spacecraft would seek at the end of our voyage. Buckminster Fuller’s description of the planet as “Spaceship Earth” seemed eminently fitting."

"Then my thoughts turned to daily life on the planet," he remembers. "With that, my sense of wonderment gradually turned into something close to anguish because I realized that at the very moment when I was so privileged to view the planet from 240,000 miles in space, people of Earth were fighting wars; committing murder and other crimes; lying, cheating, and struggling for power and status; abusing the environment by polluting the water and air; wasting natural resources and ravaging the land; acting out of lust and greed; and hurting others through intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, and all the things that add up to man’s inhumanity to man. It seemed as though man were totally unconscious of his individual role in – and individual responsibility for – the future of life on the planet."

"It was also painfully apparent," he recalls, "that the millions of people suffering in conditions of poverty, ill health, misery, fear, and near slavery were in that condition from economic exploitation, political domination, religious and ethnic persecution, and a hundred other demons that spring from the human ego. Science, for all its technological feats, had not – more likely could not – deal with these problems stemming from man’s self-centeredness."

"The magnitude of the overall problem seemed staggering," he recalls. "Our condition seemed to be one of deepening crises on an unprecedented scale, crises that were mounting faster than we could solve them. There appeared to be the immediate possibility that warfare might destroy vast segments of civilization with one searing burst of atomic fury. Only a little further off appeared the possibility of intolerable levels of polluted air and of undrinkable water. A more remote but no less real likelihood was the death of large portions of the population from starvation, abetted by improper resources management by an exploding population."

"How had the world," he wondered, "come to such a critical situation – and why? Even more important, what could be done to correct it? How could we restore the necessary harmonious relationship between the environment and ourselves? How could a nuclear Armageddon be avoided? How could life be made livable? How could our potential for a peaceful, creative, fulfilling society be realized? How could the highest development of our objective rationality, epitomized by science, be wedded to the highest development of our subjective intuition, epitomized by religion?"

"These thoughts and questions stayed with me through the mission, splashdown, and parades," he recounts. "They stayed long afterward to the point of haunting me with an overwhelming awareness of how limited a view man has of his own life and the planet’s. Sometimes at night I would lie awake for hours struggling with this enigma, trying to understand it and see it in a sensible perspective. How could human beings, the most intelligent creature on earth, be so utterly stupid and shortsighted as to put themselves in a position of possible global extinction? How had insight become divorced from instinct? Was it possible to find a workable solution?"

"Only when man sees his fundamental unity with the processes of nature and the functioning of the universe," Mitchell observes, "will the old ways of thinking and behaving disappear. Only when man moves from his ego-centered self-image to a new image of universal human will the perennial problems that plague us be susceptible of resolution."

"Humanity must rise from man to mankind," he notes,"from the personal to the transpersonal, from self-consciousness to cosmic consciousness."

"Humanity’s multiple problems," he concludes, "resolve themselves into one fundamental problem: how to change consciousness. How," he asks, "can we raise our awareness to a higher level – a level that will restore the unity of human, the planet, and the universe?"

This, to me, is the existential question of our time. Mitchell's experience, and the view of our place in the cosmos which it stamped upon him, suggests the answer.

"Now," he unequivocally notes, "is the time for us to begin building a single whole of humanity. Now is the time to develop our nonrational abilities into a “subjective technology,” which will begin the wedding of science and religion, reason and intuition, the physical and the spiritual. This union of head and heart, insight and instinct, will ensure that as science comes to comprehend the nonmaterial aspect of reality as well as it knows the material – that is, as science approaches omniscience – our knowledge will become wisdom, our love of power will become the power of love, and the universal human of cosmic consciousness can then emerge."

Esoteric Spirituality: The "Inner Teaching" of Christianity

In his masterwork, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” the pioneering American psychologist, William James made a fundamental distinction between what he termed ‘outer religion,’ the dogmas, doctrines, steeples, altars and incense of religious worship, and the ‘inner religion’ of spiritual experience and psychological transformation, a distinguishment which seems fundamental to the seeker of spiritual awakening or enlightenment in this modern Information Age.

In another spiritual masterpiece, “Discover the Power Within You,” the great Unity Church minister and theologian, Eric Butterworth sets out to find the religion of Jesus, rather than the religion about Jesus, noting that there has always been a paradox in the way humanity has reacted to the spiritual truths they have found on the spiritual quest, elevating the teacher while ignoring the teachings of universal spiritual truths:

“The history of man on the eternal quest,” he writes, “has been a strange odyssey. In his search for the ‘holy grail' man has looked everywhere and in vain, but he has failed to look within himself. Occasionally, a prophet came, telling of the world within. But instead of following him into the deeper experience, men invariably made a god of the prophet – worshiped and built monuments to him. They then trapped themselves in a religious practice that had no within.”

“How many times has this happened?,” Butterworth asks rhetorically. “How many religions are there in the world ?”

In a trio of videos from the prodigious author, broadcaster and ordained minister, the Reverend Theodore (Ted) Nottingham goes "within" and examines the "esoteric teachings" of Christianity, the "inner teachings" of Jesus, and the process of "theosis," or "God-realization," the experiential process which lies at the heart of the Christian's spiritual quest, but which is little known or used in the West today.

In this subjective selection from Nottingham's wide body of work, it is hoped that the spiritual aspirant's eyes may be opened to the inner potential not only of Christianity, but of all the world's great wisdom traditions, and that any "scales of prejudice" may be removed to make his or her "inner" sight all the clearer.

As Jesus made clear in his ministry, it is not the outer form that is of consequence; quite the opposite. To the Pharisees who were persecuting him for what they saw as his outer practice, he plainly said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21).


"Esotericism and Christianity"





"The Inner Teaching"





"Theosis: The Path of God-Realization"




Author and translator of a dozen books, Ted Nottingham is an ordained minister and currently the pastor of Northwood Christian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. As a student and teacher of practical spiritual development for over thirty years, his books reflect aspects of the spiritual journey for readers of all traditions.

His Youtube videos and PodOmatic podcasts are available here and here.

Spiritual Experience versus Religious Belief

"Spiritual . . . But Not Religious" on tumblr

When I say that I am "spiritual but not religious," it is not to say that I have conflict with any outwardly religious tradition or particular teachings, nor do I point (as many do) to the 'religious' wars that seem to be a sustained motif of violent conflict through out all ages - yet, I suspect, if peoples did not fight over religion, war would just be 'justified' in different terms. Rather, it is simply that I am intensely interested in the "inner" spiritual (or religious) "experience," but not in the "outer" content and forms of religions, except to the extent they are used to produce higher spiritual experiences and/or higher states of consciousness.

In a recent issue of Psychology Today, writer Massimo Pigliucci asks "what, exactly, does it mean to be "spiritual but not religious," or for that matter, just plain "spiritual?" Unfortunately, of the three possible alternatives Pigliucci examines, none of them differentiate between 'inner' religious or spiritual experience and 'outer' religious observance, ritual or identification.

Pigliucci postulates that the descriptor "spiritual but not religious'" popularly utilized in any number of research studies, opinion polls and social media sites could mean either: (a) that the person so described believes in "spirits' a rather pinched and narrow view, even Pigliucci suspects (b) one who devotes part of her time and energy to cultivate her "spirit," as opposed to just being concerned with "material" things, or, finally (c) someone who takes care of cultivating and reflecting on his ethics, of behaving justly and compassionately toward his fellow human beings, and of nurturing his aesthetic sense through arts and letters.

I feel that none of these give a whole picture or descriptios of what it means to be "spiritual but not religious." I flatter myself that I am a very 'spiritual', and rather narrowly limited 'religious person.' I seek an inner religious/spiritual experience that will improve my ability to realize higher states of consciousnsess and awareness. Pigliucci's first possibility, even he rejects; while his third category, cultivating ethics and acting compassionately - which may, perhaps, be a byproduct of spiritual or religious practice - can be equally descriptive of the true religionist, agnostic or atheist alike.

For more on 'Higher Consciousness'
check out: ". . . tran.ZEN.dance. . ."

I am "spiritual but not religious" because one's adherence to 'outer religions,' while they provide much good to virtually all of their adherents (saving, perhaps, those who become ravingly "fundamentalist" in their beliefs and actions), does not necessarily indicate one is seeking an 'inner' religious or spiritual experience. If I found that adherence to one particular faith, denomination or creed would provide me with a shortcut to the attainment of the highest 'inner religious' or 'spiritual experience' I would likely join it. Yet, I have seen no evidence that this is the case for anyone. Rather, all wisdom traditions and religions throughout the world and throughout all times seem to have triggered such inner awakenings in at least some of their adherents.

Not surprisingly, as on the big questions of consciousness the perspective of Psychology Today temds to fall into the paradgmatic materialist/empiricist camp, giving little credence to intuitive and subjective studies, a more balanced viewpoint may be found in a Beliefnet.com excerpt of Robert Fuller's new work, "Spiritual but Not Religious."

"The increasing prestige of the mind sciences, the insights of modern biblical scholarship, and greater awareness of cultural relativism," Fuller writes, have "all made it more difficult for educated Americans to sustain unqualified loyalty to religious institutions." Fuller's thesis is that many Americans (and by extension most Westerners), have begun "to associate genuine faith with the 'private' realm of personal experience rather than with the 'public' realm of institutions, creeds, and rituals." As this trend grew, he notes, even "(t)he word spiritual gradually came to be associated with a private realm of thought and experience while the word religious came to be connected with the public realm of membership in religious institutions, participation in formal rituals, and adherence to official denominational doctrines."

William James (1842-1910)

Sadly, 'outer' religious rituals and forms need not be antithetical to deep 'inner' religious or spiritual experience, a point made by William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience." 'Inner' and 'outer' religious experience are not antithetical to one another, it is just that the latter is not prdictive other, and one suspects that the correlation is very, very low. at least in traditional Western religious movements. One suspects there may be a higher correlation in the Eastern wisdom traditions, which would partially explain their rising popularity amongst Westerners apt to describe themselves as "Spiritual but not religious."

Yet, as Fuller eloquently concludes in his excerpted article, 'inner' spiritual (and dare I say, 'inner religious') experience is a nearly universal, if almost wholly unrecognized, phenomena. He rightly observes that "(w)e encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world."

Fuller notes that "(a)n idea or practice is "spiritual" when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life." He or she who pursues that desire with single minded devotion and great effort is likely to experience that "felt-relationship,"which the religious and wisdom traditions of all ages and all countries identify with a higher consciousness which is the essential trait of higher religious or spiritual experience. And it really does not matter what you call it; the point is that you experience it.

Spiritual But Not . . . 'Outwardly' . . . Relgious

In a Psych 101 text - long ago, when I knew nothing of life, nor of its depth - I learned that the two 'Fathers of American Psychology' were the humanist, William James, and the early behaviorist, John Watson. As in most instances, I did not know when this tidbit of seeming trivia would rise again, nor what its later significance would mean to me.

John Watson left academia to apply the principles of behaviorism to the world of advertising. On Madison Avenue, his application of scientific methodologies to marketing ushered in the era of focus groups, consumer surveys, metrics and polling that we all are now so familiar with. He taught corporate America how to create the 'desires' that fuel our consumer society. Watson was figuratively the original dreamweaver who spun and wove the "American Dream."

William James, on the other hand, stayed on as a professor at Harvard. In one of his  seminal books, the Varieties of Religious Experience, he outlined the various higher religious states of consciousness that have been documented throughout the ages. Although he exhibited little exposure to Eastern religions, his work served as a bridge uniting both the earlier American Transcendentalist tradition to the late 19th-early 20th century's New Thought Movement, and the new Thought Movement to the mid-20th century spread of Eastern wisdom traditions and the blossoming of interest in higher consciousness which flowered in the 1960's.

If James were to describe his personal beliefs and experience in one-sentence, he could probably do no better than the ever-more popular and pervasive description: "spiritual, but not religious." In the Varieties (which are, in essence, the notes James used in delivering the prestigious Gifford Lectures at St. Andrew's College), he made it clear that the subject matter of his interest was the 'inner religious' experience of the individual, rather than the 'outer religious' worlds of doctrines, creeds, temples, churches, steeples, priests and incense.

"Churches, he wrote,"when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. . . .

"Religion, therefore . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude. So far as they apprehend to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."

When I had once glimpsed or "apprehended" this "divine" a course was set. Most of humankind, I believe, have consciously experienced one or two such glimpses in their lives; although, even then, they may not appreciate the nature of what it is they  experienced. I was very fortunate. My first such experience in adulthood was sudden, powerful and enlightening; albeit, however brief. Thereafter, I spent many hours and days - which have since turned into years - trying to understand what this 'mystery of consciousness' (or 'mystery of the divine,' if you prefer) is, and how it interrelates with the physical world, the psyche and the metaphysical 'divine.'

Several times, I have again experienced this state in its full power and intensity; and, once, this lasted for several days. It is these times which spark my resolve to attain to this consciousness once again; and perhaps, some time, maintain my being there. 'To die before dying,' as the yogis and reishis would say; or "to die to self," in the manner of St. Francis is an aspiration I was unaware of and/or did not understand in the flower of my youth and manhood. Only on passing middle age did I learn that there is a far more important timeless quest that underlies what can be both a carnival of delight and a dirge of despair.

I did not realize, of course, that this is the selfsame quest that has always ultimately underpinned all of humankind's knowledge and accomplishments, and that humankind has always sought a greater knowledge and experience of this ultimate 'divine' since we first walked forth upright through the mists of time. As Einstein, a professed atheist (in the most strictly limited sense of this word) reportedly observed: "I want to know the thoughts of God. The rest are all just details."

Shortly after the spiritual experience that propelled me on this most perpetual of quests, I began to learn that I, too, like so many I had labeled superstitious cranks, was innately religious, as well as spiritual.  Although this was in a very limited and narrow sense.

In a book one of my spiritual mentors affectionately called his "Book of Soul Realization" (How to Know God: Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms, with commentary by Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabavananda) I learned that "yoga," the word denoting religion in India, has the same Sanskrit root as the English word "yoke" - as in a 'yoke of oxen,' or the device that attaches a horse to the plough. Yoga, therefore, means 'to yoke,' bind, or unite; and the practice of any one of the 'branches' of yoga is a methodology to reunite the consciousness of the individual with the universal consciousness that is the godhead or the 'divine.'

A month or two later, my newfound 'teacher' (for want of a better word) took me to a lunchtime meditation at the parish hall of the local Catholic church. There, an acquaintance led a meditation that started with a reading and appreciation by Eckhart Tolle, a modern sage and best-selling author. The acquaintance (who, unbeknownst to me then, was both a PhD and a 'retired' nun) later explained the origin of the much-misunderstood word "religion" to me.

"Religion," she explained, "is from the Latin re ligare." The meaning of ligare, she told me, quite coincidentally, is to tie, bind or unite; as a 'ligament' ties a muscle to a bone, or a 'ligature' (or stitch) is used to sew up or bind a wound. Thus re ligare is to retie or unite, the limited consciousness of the egoic self with the limitless consciousness of the whole, with consciousness itself, or (if one is truly open-minded, perhaps) the consciousness of God.

Years later, when studying A Course in Miracles, and in light of the the further spiritual awakenings I had undergone and the deeper state of my limited consciousness, I was able to put together some of the lessons that  I had learned (and been shown). It was then that I began to understand the true import of a New Testament passage I had always instinctively dismissed, since first hearing it as a boy, in one of the few instances that I was coerced into attending Sunday school.

In Matthew 11:30 (which I had to look up using Google), Jesus reportedly said, "My yoke is easy, my burden light." In thinking of this, I had always pictured Jesus having to drag a heavy cross he balanced on his shoulder - like Atlas shouldering the world - and dismissing the heaviness and pain he was experiencing. But then later, having experienced (however briefly) that ineffable state of higher consciousness, which can best be described as a certain 'lightness of being' achieved through meditation, I understood a deeper meaning in this seemingly improbable passage.

Jesus was saying his 'yoga' or 'religion' - i.e., how he united his consciousness with the All, with Consciousness itself, with the Godhead - was 'simple' if, perhaps, at first difficult to achieve. The 'burden' of his yogic or religious efforts, meanwhile, (the message he was bearing for those who hadn't experienced or had not understood the import of his or her religious glimpses) was 'light' itself - i.e., the "lightness" of the extraordinary higher consciousness, or God-consciousness which exists within us all, as thoroughly masked as it may be by the 'mind-chatter' of the egoic, self-consciousness we gradually assume as growing children, and which becomes (for the vastest majority of us) who we are as adults.

The Varieties of Religious Experiences (and one of its source books, Richard M. Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness) describes the experiences of those fortunate few who have experienced, understood and described in detail this higher consciousness which exists within each of us. Or perhaps, more aptly put, they described that higher-consciousness or God-consciousness "within which we live and move, and have our being."

While I can attest that fundamentally I am spiritual, it is a misstatement to say that I am "spiritual but not religious." For 'yogic' or religious, meditation is the methodology through which we can go beneath the 'mind-chatter' of the ego to forge a connection in consciousness with the 'spirit'  that is the 'essence' (or being) of who and what we are, and of that within which we exist.

'Spirit' and 'light' are, of course, mere descriptions of the higher 'desireless states' that the humanist William James sought to explore and understand, as opposed to the instinctive, near-animalistic appetite of 'desires' which Watson sought create and whet through modern Madison Avenue-style advertising. Of necessity, as a wanderer on the path to a greater understanding of what and who we are, I must be at least 'inwardly religious' to appreciate the spirituality of this life and the consciousness which is a fundamental unitive principle of this universe.

Spiritual, but not 'outwardly' religious? Yes, by choice. Spiritual, yet 'inwardly' religious? Yes, of necessity.