11.1 Spiritual experience  (Page 2/3)

Transcendence

In religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God is seen as transcendent – which means that God is outside this reality and separate from human beings. He is usually seen as the all powerful Creator and King of the Universe. Although God is transcendent, he is also near and a believer can have a personal relationship with him. In these traditions a person who has a spiritual experience will often explain that she was intensely aware of the presence of God, that God was all around her, or that she felt that God held her in the hollow of his hand.

The usual pattern of experience of a transcendent kind will involve a person feeling acutely aware of her own insignificance before the Creator. This feeling is sometimes called a feeling of creature–consciousness. In other words, the feeling of a mere creature before the majesty of the divine Creator. This leads to the second stage in the pattern, namely self–surrender. When a person surrenders to God she says as in the Bible “ not my will, but thine be done '. This surrender to God also implies obedience to God and this often means living a transformed life or answering a call to service. A person might sometimes feel that she was called to become a nun or a missionary after such an experience.

There is some disagreement among followers of the transcendent path whether a person can initiate such an experience or whether it is from God alone that the experience comes. Some, in the Christian Protestant tradition will for instance say that this surrender is a gift from God and that one cannot compel it, while people in the Jewish tradition will maintain that a person has an active role to play in his or her own salvation.

These experiences are often called theistic mysticism – "theistic" because they are experiences of God, and "mysticism" because of their depth and intensity.

Immanence

In the second category of spiritual experiences, a person who has a spiritual experience will interpret it in an immanent manner – which means that the ultimate will be experienced as within – in the depth of existence. Here salvation is not a gift from a transcendent God, but something a person should him– or herself pursue. The Buddha, for instance, explicitly told his followers that they should work out their own salvation. This will often involve a rigorous path of spiritual discipline (mostly involving diligent meditation). Just as in the category of transcendence there is disagreement about whether this path is an active or a passive path. While the Buddhist monk will constantly meditate, the Taoist believes that:

He who takes action fails

He who grasps things loses them

For this reason the sage takes no action and therefore does not fail;

He grasps nothing and therefore he does not lose anything. (Tao te Ching)

The pattern of experience in the immanence category of spiritual experience involves firstly a quest in which a seeker commits herself to seek enlightenment. She then embarks on a path in which the journey within begins with the practice of meditation in order to still the mind so that the truth which lies deeply within the person can arise to consciousness.