Inexplicable Experiences…

(an excerpt from the new book Finding Deep Water, coming soon)

… What you do with inexplicable experiences, whenever and however they first come to you, may have a profound impact on your life.  I say “may” intentionally, because our first response is usually denial.  But even if we receive these invitations with open arms, we must also face many hidden barriers.  I’ll get to those later.

Most people, at some time in their lives, have something strange happen to them. Maybe it’s a premonition, a hunch that you may have seen an angel, or a certainty something was going to happen…

Sometimes we experience nothing more unusual than disturbing questions, or the tug of an unseen wind as we go through life, stirring us to wonder if there could be more.  And then, by way of contrast, there are moments when the invisible dimension crashes full force into our awareness, the same way a runaway truck might slam through the wall of your bedroom.

Whatever strange experiences come to us, whether they are faint ripples or sudden collisions, and however they stir or slash through the fabric of our perceptions, all of them include a message that challenges us to expand our understanding of life’s depths and heights.  How we handle these longings and encounters, how we respond, is crucial.

Now I want to clarify that I am not talking specifically about religion, or religious experience, in all its many forms and expressions.  People regularly attribute certain experiences to some set of religious doctrines and beliefs.

In the process (and struggle) of seeking alignment between experience and doctrine, we tend to lump faith, belief, spirituality and religion together, as if they are interchangeable, like the wheels on a car.  These concepts can be very confusing, so I will outline their differences and what I understand each of them to mean.

To use an analogy, if faith represents the actual force of gravity, then religion is that collection of ideas and theories which tries to explain what this force is.  You can immediately see that explanations do not create or control the movements of tides or how an object falls to the ground.

Religion is quite powerless, as many people eventually discover.  Although you may have been taught that religion is both a guard and a gateway, it is neither.  Religion’s endless rituals often mask and drain our longing for raw experience.  We may become numb and apathetic, abandoning not only religious formulas and programs, but our hopes that anything survives within and beyond them.  Church, temple and practice can become wearying beyond words.  Gravity, on the other hand, like faith, is a force of immense and genuine power.

Einstein shocked the scientific world with his ideas that gravity could (and does) bend light.  In a similar way, faith “bends” our material world.  Genuine faith has immense energy.  And yet most people on earth, when it comes to understanding the nature of faith, are living as if they were born and raised in deep space.  Faith is spoken of in the same way they might discuss gravity as a force that probably exists, but has never really been experienced.

This is not to say that genuine spiritual encounters are therefore hindered or prevented by religious doctrines and expressions.  Gravity (like faith) is a reality, whether we understand it, or not.  Everyone on the planet lives in obedience to its power.  No one escapes, not even (for example) orbiting astronauts, who understand that their temporary weightlessness does not indicate gravity’s absence.  They know that the earth’s gravitational pull has merely been counterbalanced by their orbital speed.

This reality: that opposing physical forces can be balanced against each other, has profound implications, not only in physical realms, but also in the spiritual world.”

(excerpted by permission from Finding Deep Water)

© 2014 C. S. McMinn