Three Mesmerizing Facts About Enlightenment Websites
We hear a whole lot of people using the phrase "more spiritual than religious" these days, causing us to ponder what they really mean when they label themselves this way. It has been our experience that there really is a soul deepening distinction among spiritual and religious -- an impact we have termed spiritual emergence versus religious emergency.
Spiritual emergence is a gradual unfoldment of spiritual expression that causes a minimal 'disturbance' in our everyday functioning because we are somewhat prepared for it, given our disposition for the mystical. At the same time, you'll find those who experience what we call religious emergencies, which may cause significant disruptions within their day to day living, because these folks are often unprepared for mystical experiences since they consider themselves to be more religious than spiritual.
Emergent spiritual experiences like visions, deeply felt meditations, out-of-body experiences, apparitions and precognitive dreams tend to be exhilarating and life-changing and can be very transformative -- for those who have moved to a place of being more spiritual than religious. These same experiences, in contrast, could also be deeply unsettling for people who fall in the category of being more religious than spiritual.
Individuals that are more spiritual than religious appear to have less difficulty with these kinds of transcendental experiences. Why? Spiritually-inclined people tend to be more open to mystical experiences. They feel more connected to the transcendentalness of life. They have a spiritual, not religious, mindset! Their openness to the non-material and ethereal dimensions of reality make them the perfect recipients of these life-affirming experiences.
A division of the challenge highly religious people face in transformative experiences is staying grounded once they experience these 'higher octaves' of reality. These 'altered states of being' are usually foreign, and also taboo, in terms of handling their ingrained religiosity.
Because of their denominational inhibitions, mainstream religious people often be quite reluctant to integrate highly spiritual experiences into their religious practices. They can even feel they will be bedeviled by these experiences.
Great spiritual teachers and mystics alike assure us that these transcendent experiences are natural and healthy. They see these experiences as proof of our evolving spirituality and enlightenment. They encourage us to willingly allow highly spiritual/mystical experiences to touch our lives and also to use the memories of those experiences -- and so the transformative value of those experiences -- to flow into our everyday lives.
Living our lives determined by embedded religious theology makes it challenging to allow spiritual and metaphysical teachings into our world view. What usually happens will be the cognitive dissonance caused by the new mind-stretching 'experiential information' causes people to tighten their dogmatic reins so that any progress -- and openness -- to potentially transformative truths is shut down completely.
Actually, that is the troublesome dynamic we see occurring in spiritual communities/New Thought churches/liberal churches today. If the leadership in those communities is stuck in embedded religious theology, it makes it quite hard for the membership that considers themselves to be more spiritual than religious to get a spiritual, not religious, message. It also makes it quite challenging for the minister and music director to view eye-to-eye if the music director is hesitant to -- or outright refuses to -- change the song lyrics to complement the minister's spiritually-oriented message. It's an old story -- you know, the one about pouring new wine into old wineskins!
Then again, if the leadership happens to be more spiritual than religious in a church setting (holding services in a church building described as stained glass windows and pews), the members who consider themselves to be more religious than spiritual demand a message and music that can be more dogmatically religious than universally open and spiritual. The two factions behave like oil and water. And also the ministers who serve those divided communities operate between a rock as well as a hard place because making both factions happy is impossible!
If you've ever been linked to, or are currently associated with, a spiritual/religious community comprised of a culture of religious-oriented and spiritually-oriented folks within the same sanctuary at the exact same time, dharma (use www.learningbridge.edu.pk) you know it's really a recipe for conflict and division. Congregations tend to blame their difficulties on going from a family size to a pastoral size to a program size, etc. While there is some truth to that perspective, nearly all the difficulty lies in the philosophical and religious differences between the spiritual and religious cultures who are at odds.
