Daniel Lev Shkolnik
Why didn't Jesus appear to Buddhists? Or Vishnu to the Aztecs?
If there really were a single divine reality, wouldn't the "true God" be seen all over the world? In all cultures? With the same or similar messages?
William James wrote about this in his book "Varieties of Religious Experience" and one of the things he proposed is that every religious or spiritual experience is filtered through the symbols, names, and meaning-making constructs of the culture / tradition a person is a part of.
So a Muslim Egyptian and an ancient Egyptian may have both had a near death experience, but one may come back reporting he was greeted by the angel Gabriel while the other may say it was Anubis.
In short, people can have the same experience but come away with very different interpretations of their experience.
And this is why secular spiritual experience isn't an oxymoron.
When I was a kid I would wander around the cemetery at night and have these moments of profound connection with the world and intense clarity about what it meant to be alive. Years later, the closest thing I ever found to my experiences was a collection of recollections of mystical experiences collected by William James. I recognized every one of those experiences as similar to my own.
Except I never interpreted them as "mystical" or "religious" in any way. I was raised in a secular household and I simply thought to myself "this is what it means to truly LIVE." And I felt a deep desire to share this with others and help them feel this way, too.
Today, more and more people are experiencing mystical states through psychedelics, meditation, and other mind-altering practices. Yet for the growing number of people with a secular or agnostic worldview, there aren't many frameworks to help them make sense of what these powerful, life-giving phenomena are about.
Part of my mission is to help people talk about non-ordinary states of consciousness without imposing religious or metaphysical interpretations on these experiences. I believe much of what we encounter in these states aren't angels or deities, ghosts or ancestors, but a direct encounter with our own inner world. Our deepest feelings and truths being expressed in the symbolic language of dream, metaphor, and archetype.
Comments