Religious Experiencing Without Religion

Upon reaching the stream on the outskirts of town, the wind began to blow, and rain threatened. Dark, lowering clouds swirled around me, banking against the hills and gathering into huge masses over the fields, heightening one’s senses.

Do I stay, and risk rain, or worse, lightning? Having grown up in a region of frequent thunderstorms, the risk of lightning seemed minimal. And if it started to rain, I’d just ride the bike back.

Sitting under a great, bifurcated sycamore, I watched three dramatic changes in weather within an hour, from clear to heavily overcast, from calm to roiling skies.

Standing and walking a few meters back to the bike, I was transfixed looking to the east over the tree under which I had meditated. It was the strangest and most beautiful sky I’ve ever seen.

The white bark of the sycamore gleamed in the bright, setting sun, with an intensely blue-black sky as a backdrop. It began to drizzle, but I saw more drops on the placid current of the creek in front of me than I felt on my back from the wind coming out of the south.

A few miles away, to the north and west over the canyon and foothills, rain was falling harder. There were still a few clear patches to the east and north.

Suddenly hail began to fall, small pellets of precipitation that made little splashes in the stream. A seagull tacked against the wind, and a large flock of small birds scattered in the distance. Feeling protected somehow amidst all nature’s fury and tumult, I didn’t move.

The hail, which never reached sufficient intensity or size to sting, stopped as quickly as it started. The sky to the west began to open; within a quarter hour the sun was shining again, with small, fleecy clouds above the horizon evoking a pleasant spring afternoon.

To the east however, the clouds had piled into each other and taken on an ominous hue, a black sheen that could not have provided a greater contrast.

I walked back and forth along the stream for some timeless minutes, taking in the incredible variation of light, color and shape of clouds and sky. The “I” was not, and one was agape – completely open and in a state of wonder.

True religious feeling is a wordless combination of awe, humility and love in the presence of overwhelming beauty.

Religious experiencing occurs within the individual when the mind is deeply quiet. It is like death; indeed, it is a kind of death. When it happens, there’s little that can be said, because the sacred begins where words and knowledge, experience and the known leave off.

To grow in awareness and be renewed by the omnipresent actuality of death, one can’t just carry on in this dead world with one’s mundane and self-centered activities. That way of living, so prevalent in the rich portion of the world, is unbecoming for people who don’t have to struggle to put food on the table every day. Coasting precludes inward growth, much less understanding and transcending death.

Inward growth requires a non-accumulative kind of learning. And that’s where the contradiction at the heart of organized religion comes in. The experiencing of God (without the implication of a “Creator”) is beyond all words, beliefs, ideas, images, knowledge, scriptures, texts and traditions. Even one’s own prior experience of the sacred is an impediment to experiencing the benediction.

Yet religions would not exist without the intermediation of text and tradition, as well as some form of priestly class. Even Buddhists have their own priests and nuns. Therefore religions impede, if not deny, the very experiencing of sacredness that they purport to support!

Awareness and communion with immanence – that which is completely beyond thought and knowledge – can only occur within the individual. A teacher can point the way, but the moment his or her teachings become more important than one’s own solitary inquiry, one’s capacity for direct perception of the truth and the sacred is denied.

Religious feeling is not a personal thing however, but rather an inherently private and individual matter. The personal is oriented to the self, revolves around ego, and is driven by will. Whereas the individual’s experiencing of God (or whatever one wants to call the essence of beauty, mystery, creation, intelligence and love that permeates nature and the universe), is interior and private, but not personal.

If wordless experiencing of sacredness in the individual is what religiosity really is, then what place do the diversity of religious and cultural traditions have in the awakening of the individual?

What matters is what one puts first: scriptures, or seeing for oneself; belief, or actual experiencing; insight, or the accretions of theology?

If one opts to remain in a religious tradition, one has to hold it lightly, mining for insight while being mindful that texts and traditions are never the truth, but at best an echo of the truth.

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