Friday, 9 December 2016

Belief versus experience - and experience is what is needed

In the past, many people would experience contact with 'the spiritual' and 'the divine'  - it was not that they 'believed' it, but that it was a matter of their personal experience and the experience of people whom that they trusted and others in authority.

'Belief' in God, in our Heavenly Father, is not - then - what we want or need. What is required is experience.

And yet, the kind of experience people had in the past (before 'The Enlightenment', before the Industrial Revolution, before the era of Mass Media) is no longer available to us, or rather seems available only in altered states of consciousness - and as such it seems to us a kind of delusional wishful thinking, or a mental pathology.

What is wanted and needed is experience of the divine and spiritual but which is wholly integrated with alert and everyday thinking, but which casts a luminosity over that thinking so as to transform it, and transform our understanding of reality: to restore the meaning of lived-experience and remind us continually of lived-purpose.

It is into our everyday thinking which we need to welcome this transformation - that direct knowledge, direct perception, direct conviction of purpose which is called imagination and arrived not by the senses or from memory or from reasoning... by which arrives nonetheless, and carrying its own experiential conviction; which we ('merely') need to acknowledge, and appreciate as valid.