I find that a snare of spiritual and religious life is the desire to take an essentially passive role and be overwhelmed into assent.
The notion that if only we would stop resisting; then we would quite naturally and spontaneously be convinced and coerced into the proper frame of mind, perspective, way of behaviour.
The idea that a spiritual/ religious awakening/ rebirth - to be valid - ought to hit a mass of people like a tidal wave or a blast of electromagnetic radiation or a mind-warping, psychedelic drug - smashing us into some new mental conformation by main force, whether we like it or like-it-not...
But I am sure that all valid spiritual and religious change is agent - that is, it must come from our freedom, from our true-self thinking;not from animal instinct, nor from derangement or disease or devolution; and indeed I have become ever-more aware that the particular task of modern Man in the modern situation is actively, explicitly, deliberately and by choice to move forward along the line of full consciousness of phenomena.
Modern spiritual rebirth therefore cannot happen without each of us as individuals knowing that it has happened; furthermore it cannot happen unless we will it to happen, want it to happen, work for it to happen... perfectly consciously and explicitly.
The spiritual laziness and self-blinding and self-indulgence of modern Western Man knows no bounds! Yet if we wish to move forward, we must discard our passivity fantasy, our notion that only what is overwhelming and external is 'real' - and accept that we are destined and intended and supposed to be conscious agents - like God.
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NOTE added: Many people believe that only if one is overwhelmed - emotionally, viscerally - is a conversion experience authentic. This seems to be the lesson of some conversion stories from earlier cultural eras - and it was the implicit basis of 1960s countercultural spirituality based on delirious altered states of consciousness (shamanism, drugs, sex etc).
Yet it is characteristic of modern culture that we distrust the validity of any such experience - and disbelieve (in practice) anything which is 'unconscious', 'instinctive', 'nonrational'.
(Despite two centuries of exhortations that our lives should be utterly 'natural', spontaneous, child-like, a restoration of original tribal spirituality... the cultural trend has been unrelebntingly in the opposite direction. We now live under micro-managerial totalitarianism with an all intrusive and pervasive and addictive mass media. A return to instinctive spirituality is just Not Going To Happen.)
This combination of assumptions has been a major reason why spirituality (and serious religion) has been driven utterly out from the domain of public discourse and to the fringes of life, to private subjectivity and 'lifestyle'.
It seems clear to me that for our time and place, spiritual experience must not be either/ or; either bureaucratic materialist rationality or unconscious instinct - but needs to be fully conscious and explicit while also being powerfully intuitive - hence convincing. This combination does not 'come naturally' which is why our spiritual future is one of deliberate purpose and choice... or else it won't happen.
