Experience
It is the basis of all religious feeling, and while all things are about experience, religious experience is a deeply personal aspect of what makes us so often want to fight to preserve our religions and all the things they represent in our lives. But what exactly is religious experience? How is it different from just having a good time?
My own religious experience has been one rife with self questioning analysis. I can't help it, it is just the way I am that I seldom simply take things as "mystical" or "divine" at first glance. I tend to think that cold feeling when passing a certain spot in the forest is just because of the shade of the tree canopy, but if one searches one's soul a bit, one can often not explain such things that simply, so we attribute to such things a sense of mysticism and divinity that we often have a hard time explaining.
I have, over my life, felt certain things that have, in many ways, always fit into whatever I believed at the time, yet when taken out of context, could easily fit anywhere else. In other words, some of the things I experienced felt easily into my beliefs when I was young and a Christian, but the same things can easily fit into my later pagan beliefs. It led me to my belief that all religions hold within them the truth, whatever that truth may be, and that it is the institutions that form the political power base of those religions that are at odds with each other and cause so much suffering in the world. It is these churches and mosques and temples and their very human hierarchies of priests that manipulate the very real religious experiences of their followers to get them to do their bidding. Sometimes with disastrous effects.
I remember a few experiences, and one was just a few years ago while riding a bus south from Dayton into Kettering (Ohio) and as I was listening to a particularly soothing song, I felt the world turn a different shade. It seemed that the world was suddenly greener and bluer and redder. The light was more stunning, the darkness more fearsome, and the sounds of the bus around me seemed to disappear. It was as if I had moved away from what was and was seeing it as it should be. It lasted only a few seconds, but in my mind it was an eternal moment. Frozen forever in my memory, which if you knew me, you would know is a miracle in itself since my memory is quite damaged in many ways.
It wasn't until it was over that I had a moment to think clearly about it, since while it was happening I was not really thinking in any way I could describe to you, and I thought of it all as "A God just passed by here."
That was the only way for me to really describe what I saw and felt, that for a brief moment I had been in the presence of something divine, and it had altered how I saw the world around me.
It is experiences like this that people have all over the world, in all religions, and they can be interpreted in the context of any religion. A Christian would not think "A God was here" but they might think an angel was. A Hindu would, perhaps, think of it as one of the devas, with all of the connected religious implications of that, and, of course, I saw it as one of the Gods.
Experiencing the unexpected and sometimes unexplainable things the universe throws our way is how we become convinced of the existence of the Gods. How we interpret these things helps us cement how we think about the Gods and help ground us in our beliefs.
Religion is nothing without religious experience.
What are yours? I would be interested in hearing about them. Send them to me.