A New Basis for Faith
Our traditional religions, rooted in 2000-year old Axial Age spirituality, tend to be belief-oriented. That is to say, being religious is understood as primarily a cognitive act of choosing to think that certain propositions, as articulated in specific creeds, sacred texts, dogmas, theologies, etc., are true. However, the credibility of sacred texts and detailed doctrinal beliefs has been significantly diminished by the epistemological humility which, as described in a previous post, has emerged as a consequence of recognizing the cultural and historical contextual nature of all such propositional statements. But if the future of religion is not grounded in doctrine, dogma, and reliance on divinely revealed sacred texts, then what will it be based on? What’s left as the basis for religious faith once our confidence in these traditional Axial Age elements of religion has been substantially diminished? We are suggesting that the religion of the future will likely be less rooted in declarative statements, theological arguments, and stories from ancient texts, and more grounded in the everyday awareness of the sacred quality of reality that remains available to people of faith even after the legitimacy of the doctrines and texts of the past have lost much of their credibility. In other words, religious faith will be grounded in experience, which is to say, an empirical awareness of the sacred dimension of existence in its countless manifestations. Religious experience will replace propositional belief as we move further into a post-Axial 21st century spirituality. Understanding Religious Experience Of course, one might reasonably ask: What exactly is a religious experience? What’s it like to have a religious experience? How do I have a religious experience? Things get quite tricky here, since “religious experience” is an overly broad term that encompasses an extraordinary range of diverse and even sometimes contradictory experiences. It also is something that, to someone who has never had such an experience, can seem to be remote, vague, and perhaps even unintelligible, while to the person who has had a religious experience, even if only on one occasion for a few seconds, the impact can be life changing and long lasting. So briefly, let’s try to make sense of it. Put simply, religious experience in the most general terms simply refers to a deeply felt sense of the sacred, an awareness of Spirit, an immediate experience that conveys a sense that there is a spiritual dimension to existence, which in turn affirms a deep sense that we live in a meaningful Cosmos. Reality is experienced as more than just particles in various arrangements positioned in time and space. Reality is experienced as something with a fundamental, real, essential element of value, meaning, and goodness. Such an experience can occur in the context of the symbols and constructs of one’s own religion, but a religious experience can equally occur as simply a vague but powerful and convincing intuition which is completely independent of the beliefs and doctrines of any specific religious tradition. A religious experience is one which conveys a clear and powerful sense that there is “Something More” to reality than just matter and energy, and that Something More is what gives meaning and value and goodness to existence – even though the precise nature of that Something More might be vague and elusive. Such an experience of Spirit is, of course, quite different from the cognitive act of belief in Spirit. It is quite different from an intellectual understanding of propositional statements found in doctrine and dogma. It is an experience which is direct, powerful, and laden with a sense of ultimate truth. For someone who has not had a direct experience of Spirit, perhaps the best way to convey the unique nature of religious experience and its difference from traditional proposition-based faith is by analogy to something from everyday life: just as talking or reading about the taste of salt is one thing and actually experiencing the taste of salt is quite another, so with religious experience we see the difference between talking and reading about Spirit (in doctrines, dogma, sacred texts, etc.) and actually having a direct experiential encounter with the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos. Indeed, some would argue that religious experience is the very foundation of religion, with doctrines and texts representing inadequate attempts to put into words an actual experience of sacred reality, an experience which – not unlike the taste of salt, but magnified infinitely – can never be adequately put into words since what one is encountering – Spirit, God, the sacred – is so infinitely different than anything else that we experience as human creatures. But, for reasons that we don’t have space to go into here, humans experience Spirit in many different ways. The ecstatic experience of an indigenous shaman, the meditative Samadhi of a Buddhist meditator, the emotional experience of a Pentecostal Christian, the Hindu’s experience of the sweet, loving quality of Lord Krishna, the Daoist experience of the Cosmic order of the Universe, Thoreau’s experience of the sacred quality of the natural world so beautifully described in the Solitude chapter of Walden: all of these are religious experiences in the sense that they are direct encounters with an aspect of the sacred or Spirit. William James was perhaps the first to attempt to categorize the diversity of religious experience in his 1902 classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Others have followed in James’ footsteps, including Ken Wilber’s more contemporary attempt to categorize different types of spiritual experience in terms of a hierarchical model of transpersonal states of consciousness. But religious experience often is difficult to categorize since it can be just part of everyday life, occurring with such profound subtlety that it can be difficult to even articulate exactly what constitutes the essential characteristics of such an experience. Accordingly, when we suggest that religion in the 21st century will be grounded in religious experience, we are not suggesting that future believers will be full-blown mystics who walk around in something like altered states of consciousness rooted in intense, prolonged, ecstatic experiences of the Sacred. Such overwhelming, rapturous experiences do indeed occur, but they are just one type of spiritual experience. Equally valid and compelling is the everyday, ordinary sense of a spiritual dimension to the Cosmos, an often vague but also confident sense that there really is “Something More” than a Universe of time, space, matter, and energy. This perception of a spiritual dimension does not require intensive and difficult spiritual practices leading to a clearly identifiable moment of overwhelming spiritual illumination. Certainly such extraordinary religious experiences happen, and they are profoundly meaningful in the spiritual lives of those who have them. But for the everyday person of faith who has neither the opportunity nor the interest to pursue the rigorous practices that lead to such experiences, there is the simple, humble, easily acquired sense of Something – a Something which is supremely Good and which confers meaning to the Cosmos, even in spite of the daily messes, challenges, and tragedies of normal, everyday human existence. Leaving doctrines and sacred texts aside, each person still has access to those subtle, quiet, yet powerfully meaningful moments when one senses the presence of Spirit, the presence of the indefinable Something More that has never been adequately captured in doctrinal statements or pronouncements in sacred texts. Signs of a Transition We can already see the emergence of this more experientially-oriented approach to religion in the growth of the “spiritual but not religious” population. Numerous polls have consistently found a steady growth in the number of people who, on the one hand, do not consider themselves to be “religious” in the sense of formally belonging to an existing tradition or accepting the doctrines of a given faith, while on the other hand identifying as “believers” in the sense of affirming the existence of a spiritual reality. In a sense, this trend is the leading edge of what might likely continue to evolve from a fringe movement to the most common expression of religion in the future: experiential, or empirical spirituality. Some would contend that returning to a more experiential-based faith will actually be equivalent to a return to a meaning of “faith” that brings us back to the origin of religion and that from which verbal expressions of faith (texts, doctrine, dogma, etc.) function as secondarily derived elements. Belief in a proposition about an event in history whose veracity must be accepted without evidence, or “blind faith,” is quite different from belief in a statement about the nature of reality that can be confirmed by one’s own immediate awareness, or experiential faith. In the present era when many of the traditional bases for religious faith are no longer credible for much of the educated population that thinks in 21st century terms, religious experience stands out as the most reliable, substantial, unassailable basis for belief in a spiritual reality. Hence, rather paradoxically, after three millennia religion may be evolving forward toward something that was prominent in the distant past: a direct, immediate awareness of the presence of the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos.
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