What You Need To Know About Enlightenment Websites
We hear a great deal of folks using the phrase "more spiritual than religious" right now, causing us to ponder what they really mean once they label themselves this way. It's been our experience that there really is a soul deepening distinction among spiritual and religious -- a difference 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. Conversely, there are those who experience what we call religious emergencies, which could cause significant disruptions in their everyday 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 are usually exhilarating and life altering and may also be very transformative -- for those that have moved to a place of being more spiritual than religious. These same experiences, on the contrary, may also be deeply unsettling for those who fall within the category of being more religious than spiritual.
Individuals that will be more spiritual than religious appear to have less difficulty with these types 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 for these life-affirming experiences.
Included in 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 typically foreign, as well as taboo, in regards to 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 could even feel they would 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 evidence of our evolving spirituality (Escuelatarapoto Edu`s recent blog post) 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 based upon embedded religious theology makes it tough to allow spiritual and metaphysical teachings into our world view. What usually happens is the cognitive dissonance brought on by the new mind-stretching 'experiential information' causes people to tighten their dogmatic reins to ensure that any progress -- and openness -- to potentially transformative truths is shut down completely.
As a matter of fact, that's the troublesome dynamic we see occurring in spiritual communities/New Thought churches/liberal churches today. In the event the leadership in those communities is stuck in embedded religious theology, it can make it very difficult for the membership that considers themselves to be more spiritual than religious to get a spiritual, not religious, message. It also causes it to be very hard for the minister and music director to see 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!
Having said that, should the leadership happens to be more spiritual than religious in a church setting (holding services in a church building viewed as stained glass windows and pews), the members who consider themselves to be more religious than spiritual demand a message and music that are more dogmatically religious than universally open and spiritual. The 2 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 have ever been associated with, or are presently involved 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, you know it's really a recipe for conflict and division. Congregations usually blame their difficulties on going from a family size to a pastoral size to a program size, etc. While there's some truth to that perspective, the vast majority of the difficulty lies within the philosophical and religious differences between the spiritual and religious cultures who are at odds.
