The importance of religious experience. Part 4

The importance of religious experience

Part 4: Whatever they are, religious experiences are certainly mysterious and wonderful

This leaves unanswered at the moment as to why anyone had the concept of God in the first place, not unless the idea of God was invented in order to try and explain what this strange religious experience is. This line of thinking does emphasise once again that the experience is definitely real, but we are still unsure what’s causing it. There is an option to argue that what we call “God” is really the supremely wonderful experience. The nature of the experience, which appears to fill us from outside, fooled us into thinking it was coming from an external reality – let’s call it “God”, but in fact it was an internally generated directly experienced state of mind within ourselves. So, our discovery of “God” is really a discovery of this supremely wonderful experience which the mind has the capacity to have.

We should note that just because there are several conducive factors all overlapping, there is no guarantee that you will have a religious experience. Perhaps we will be distracted into simply enjoying the shapes of the clouds, or happily wondering what we will do with our holiday. It’s also possible that individuals’ personal make-up makes them more or less likely to have a religious experience. I would say that everyone has the capacity to have one, but, in practice, some people are very open to, for example, a profound, reflective, uplifting experience, while others would say that their mind just doesn’t think very easily in those terms.

We should also note that – if religious experiences are not within our control to guarantee we will have one – there are still ways to promote or facilitate having one. These include typical religious practices such as prayer, soothing or uplifting music, reading from scripture of the reassurance that we are loved, meeting with like-minded people. These practices still don’t mean that we can create a religious experience at will, but they give us more of a chance of reaching a state of mind in which we might have one.

This does mean that – as there is always something out of our control about having a religious experience –  to some degree, they are “not ours”, but external to us. Perhaps this does justify putting religious experiences into a separate category: something that we are experiencing as a direct mental state rather than communicated to us “from the outside”, from an external physical reality, yet still something that is not completely ours, in the way that our happiness or sadness is immediately within our possession. Once the religious experience is happening, it is immediately within our possession, but we do not have the ability to access it by choice. It is not “just there” waiting for us to turn our attention to it, in the way that our happiness or sadness is. Maybe, in the same way that happiness or sadness arises within us till we can feel it, so religious experiences arise within us till we become aware of them. Yet there still seems to be a difference: my happiness is intrinsically mine, and I can nearly always explain why I am experiencing it, yet it appears to me that I have to wait “until a religious experience is given to me” before I can have it. Though, our thoughts earlier about overlapping, correlating factors might explain why our religious experience has arisen (just as our happiness or sadness arose) but we were not aware of these factors in the same way that the reasons for our happiness were obvious to us.