Theos-Talk Archives (August 1998 Message tt00422)

Responding to Dallas

>Should we not first inquire how a "spiritual experience" can be accurately
>defined ?

An excellent idea. Probably the first question to come up in such an
inquiry would be What does "spiritual" mean? One word, with many shades and
layers of meaning that must be crammed into it - and having to be unpacked
at the receiving end.

It makes me think of the word "sky". Try changing "I had a spiritual
experience" into "I had a sky experience". We happen to know that the sky
has a troposphere, a stratosphere, an ionosphere, a van Allen belt, and
more. Then, we could have been just looking at the sky, floating in the sky
under a balloon, flying through it at speed, hovering far above it in a
satellite ... We have probably have more knowledge about the sky than the
spiritual realms. Well, I think I've made the point - several of them.

One of the points, of course, is that with our present state of knowledge,
small as it is, there are still far too many different things that the word
"spiritual" can be legitimately used for, so we need to qualify it with
adjectives - such as there are.

I think that accurate definition is very difficult at present, given that
spiritual experience can be only *very* partially described. That, in fact
is probably one of its main defining features! There are some
characteristics we can probably agree on, though, to define it in a very
modest way. Let's put forward transcendence, expansiveness, sense of light,
joy, all-embracing love, all-knowingness, sense of inner power,
consciousness outside the normal repertoire of states, consciousness
outside the body in another space. These, in varying mixtures and various
degrees, would seem to be pretty common elements in what are often called
spiritual experiences.

We could go on to try to match a theosophical, multi-planed world view with
types of experience, plane by plane, perhaps - a very difficult thing to
do, especially if we're just working in the realm of intellectual models.
And how to convey another person's experience, to do such a cataloging job?
One would need an adept's sheaf of siddhis, to sense another's states to
the depths of their being. Oh, well. :-) It stretches the mind, to think
about these things, at least!

>Are there degrees of "spiritual experience ?"  Has anyone made a catalog of
>these to which we might refer ?

There is a Religious Experience Research Unit (RERU), as it used to be
called, described in the front of the Quest book "The Common Experience -
signposts on the path to enlightenment" by Cohen and Phipps. 'For a full
account of the research of RERU, (now called the Alister Hardy Research
Centre), see Maxwell and Tschudin's "Seeing the Invisible: Modern Religious
and Transcendent Experience (Viking, 1990).' (Quoting from Phipps and
Cohen.) I haven't seen the second book, but Phipps and Cohen is a
delightful collection of first-hand accounts of spiritual or mystical
experience, many taken from the extensive collection at the Research
Centre, and others from historical records of various mystics etc.

>I think if we are going to resolve any of these matters we ought to at least
>have a structure on which we may place such information as may be
>contributed as answers.

Yes, theosophical thought gives us an open framework of such structural
elements. All we have to do is be prepared to expand the structure when
necessary - like when we have something of such an experience ourselves. To
be prepared for our current understanding of the framework to shatter as we
enter a new paradigm of understanding. This is something of a repeating
cycle, as HPB has indicated in Robert Bowen's notes on How to study
theosophy (pages 12 to 13 in the TPH version).

I'd love to discuss, or see others discuss, your other questions, but this
is enough from me for now. They are all thought-provoking, and critically
needing to be considered.

Best Wishes

Murray