3 Myths About Enlightenment Websites
We hear a lot of men and women using the phrase "more spiritual than religious" currently, causing us to ponder what they really mean once they label themselves this way. It has been our experience that there really is a soul deepening distinction between 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 have been somewhat prepared for it, given our disposition for the mystical. At the same time, you'll find those that experience what we call religious emergencies, which will cause significant disruptions within their daily life, since these folks tend to be 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-changing and may be very transformative -- for those that have moved to a place of being more spiritual than religious. These same experiences, on the other hand, may also be deeply unsettling for individuals that fall in the category of being more religious than spiritual.
Men and women that tend to be more spiritual than religious seem to have less difficulty with these types of transcendental experiences. Why? Spiritually-inclined people are often 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 such life-affirming experiences.
A division of the challenge highly religious people face in transformative experiences is staying grounded after they experience these 'higher octaves' of reality. These 'altered states of being' tend to be foreign, and even taboo, in relation to handling their ingrained religiosity.
As a result of their denominational inhibitions, mainstream religious people usually be quite reluctant to integrate highly spiritual experiences into their religious practices. They may even feel they might 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 Read the Full Posting transformative value of those experiences -- to flow into our everyday lives.
Living our lives based on embedded religious theology causes it to be challenging to allow spiritual and metaphysical teachings into our world view. What usually happens is the cognitive dissonance caused 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.
In fact, that's 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 causes it to be very difficult for the membership that considers themselves to be more spiritual than religious to get a spiritual, not religious, message. Additionally, it can make it quite challenging for the minister and music director to determine 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!
However, in the event the leadership happens to be more spiritual than religious in a church setting (holding services in a church building seen as stained glass windows and pews), the members who consider themselves to be more religious than spiritual demand a message and music that will 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 have ever been involved with, or are now associated with, a spiritual/religious community comprised of a culture of religious-oriented and spiritually-oriented folks in the same sanctuary at the same time, you know it's a recipe for conflict and division. Congregations have a tendency to 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, a large number of the difficulty lies in the philosophical and religious differences between the spiritual and religious cultures who are at odds.