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Hi again Beauty4Ashes,

Thank you for being patient and going to some lengths to illustrate exactly what you mean I appreciate that.

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I really thought I covered this as best I could, leaving all mystical ideas out of it
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He didn't literally walk into the room and shake my hand, mind you, but something within my spirit knew it had encountered the Spirit of Truth. It was within me, no doubt about that.

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I'm going to have to use a little of my own interpretation here step in and add to the definition if you think I am not quite in accord with your meaning. The words "spirit" and "Spirit of Truth" are, in themselves, rather mystical terms. By spirit, I take it to mean everything that is our sense of self, our total awareness of ourselves as conscious, living, existing entities. Some people may imagine this like a body made of light, some people may say that it is just our brains and nervous system, some people just call it the mind, but I think I know what you mean it is what lets us know we are real.

Spirit of Truth is a little harder. I know you are alluding to the Holy Ghost here, but because I do not have any special feeling for christian terminology I will try to sketch my understanding using less particular language. Sometimes it is possible to have a feeling come over us, or a state, or a way of being, a configuration of senses, that is more whole and complete-seeming than our usual waking awareness. In this state everything is working in unison, our minds and our emotions and our specific thoughts tie together in an "is-ness" that cannot be analysed without bursting the bubble, or indeed be analysed at all. When entering this state, all the world around us and everything in ourselves seem to work in tandem, it is like the feeling of beauty, or symmetry, or perfection, but these words fall slightly short of the mark. Nevertheless, your description is ringing bells for me, and I understand more than you might expect me too, although it has a different "flavour" for me. When in this state, there are no problems in the usual sense being alive is a reason of its own.

Now, here I have to depart somewhat from how you are describing this. You see, from my reading and my own experience, it looks to me as though people all over the world are experiencing this state, which you call revelaton and the Spirit of Truth, but which actually has many, many names. You will have to take my word for it that I have also had this happen.

In it's pure form, it is a very difficult state to describe. Every culture has attempted to describe it in different terms. The background beliefs, the mindset of each culture, or more importantly each individual's learning and imprinting, colours the experience and forms it slightly differently. Thus, in a christian nation we are inclined to think, "this is Jesus" but to a buddhist it is, "This is enlightenment" or to a hindu, "this is brahman," or too a Taoist, "This is the Tao," or to an Amazonion Shaman, "This is the realm of the ancestors."

For me, with no particular upbringing but a wide range of spiritual inputs during my early life, it takes on no particular form. I have had it in assciation with nature, when I have experienced a tremendous and interconnected lifeforce permeating all that is natural and living, or at other times I have filtered it though a more scinetific membrane and interpreted this mysterious state as a kind of quantum interconnectivity, a timelessness, as "infinity."

I have gone from these experiences uplifted, and they have stayed with me, given me a reason to carry on when I have become depressed and suicidal, but they have not made me follow any of the ready-made doctrines and interpretations written down in old books by people who had this feeling a long time ago, in a different culture, with a very different set of filters flavouring what they thought it must be.

These times are fabulous, and mysterious. You and I appear different, in that you have assumed the christian interpretation, and I did not immediately snap to that conclusion, because, I am inclined to think, there is a great deal of variety in the background of my upbringing.

We are by no means the only people to have had this type of experience, but I have had them reasonably often, whereas, I think, for some people it is exceptionally rare. Not only this, but the terminology and available "databank" with which to make sense of the experience is often limited by the cultural mindset in which a person is raised, or which has had the greatest impact on a person in recent or formative years.

Do I have an overall notion of what it might mean? Not exactly. Physical reality, in this apparently infinite universe, and the reality of consciousness itself, are incredible mysterious by which I mean it is not really possible to grasp the entirety of it. Instead we make maps to try and understand. None of these maps are complete, and many look like gobbledygook without first-hand experience.

Medieval alchemists used to describe it by saying that physical matter and spirit-stuff are all part of the same reality when trying to obtain spirit stuff (read: revelation, gnosis, enlightenment) it could be got from many other substances, and that whatever substance it was obtained from, it would have certain qualities that were akin to those from which it was obtained. This was a metaphor it was a way of saying that if you obtain revelation from christian practice, then it will resemble christian revelation, if you obtain enlightenment from buddhist practice, it will resemble buddhist enlightenment, etc. Perhaps it is possible to obtain a purer form of it, a meta-form, in which particular belief system is used to explain what has been experienced, instead the experience "just is."

But enough of this esoteric speculation.

There is a famous phrase: "The map is not the territory." There is a danger that if you use one set of symbols to explain a mystical experience, you may get caught up in the ramifications of the symbols themselves and lose the essence of the real experience. The menu is not the meal. The finger is not the moon.

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I believe people with split personalitites or those that hear *voices* in their heads are actually demon-possessed or in some serious way, influenced by demons. I suspect this to be the case with your friend here because you sated..

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You might be inclined to think this, because this is the interpretation that comes part and parcel of the symbols which you relate to best. But you have not had direct experience of demons. The revelation you talked about did not prove this to you. Instead it is a secondary conclusion which is suggested by the whole package of christian ideas. To put it poetically, you reach into the pond to pull up the shiny object, and a whole tangle of weeds and muddy flotsum snags and gets pulled up with it.

I think we need to be careful to keep to the facts, to stick to what we have actually experienced, and not embrace a whole belief system simply because we have been through an experience that we don't quite know how to explain.

I really did appreciate you taking the trouble to talk about these difficult ideas, and I hope we can continue to do so. I hope you can see that I do know what you were trying to tell me, but I have a very different view of what actually happened to you. I think it is safe to say that you are the first christian I have talked to who has dared to share these deep "secrets" in an open manner. I don't find it easy to capture it with words either, but we ought to try, and you seem to understand that.

Best regards,
Gram

Mandi,

As a natural sceptic, it is in my very bones, so to speak, to ask questions, even of my own most profound experiences and realisations. However, I draw the line at becoming a "cynical sceptic," which is what the esteemed Malkut suggested most people here in fact are. Therefore, in the spirit of honest enquiry, if I may carry on...?

There is a risk that we might end up talking at cross-purposes (no, I'm not making puns) with such an esoteric discussion, so, step by step, I think it is necessary to check we are both understanding each other as we go.

Regarding our definition of "spirit" you conceptualise it as something drifting, but contained for the time being "in" your body, and not only that but "in" your soul. At this point I feel we must be careful not to confuse the map with the territory again. I was attempting to use the term in a very limited sense here, lets be careful to stick to the context and not bring in the trimmings and trappings that associate with that poetically loaded word. You said your whole spirit became aware of a presence, the presence you decided must be Jesus. I wanted to show I understood how this whole being sense was possible. I did not intend to resort to theories about the real existence of an actual something called spirit. So we were not quite in accord here. When you said that about sitting on your sofa and then you feeling something in your spirit, you had one notion of spirit as a non-physical stuff somehow super-imposed over your tangible body, but I took it in a more abstract way, not drawing on ideas of what spirit may be, but a in simpler sense: just as a word for our sense of self, our consciousness, our gestalt sensory awareness that includes the sensation of I and the sense of knowing. I dont want to get into difficult waters here when we say a word, our minds immediately try to form the reality of that word, but it is just a word, handy for illustrating what we mean, perhaps, but not in itself a real thing.

We were in better agreement about the Spirit of Truth, although once again, you conceptualise this as an aspect of a higher reality, and I was just using it to mean a type of state we can be in, an effect within our nerves, our mind, or senses at this stage I dont want to speculate on the cause, only to look at what the state is like, so that we both can see that we know what state we are talking about. I knew that you meant Holy Ghost, but can you see that I was trying to avoid bringing in the trimmings and trappings of Christian history, and just to focus on the experience at hand?

One step at a time, if we may?

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Now allow me to state here that this experience of revelation by the Holy Ghost is not the same as what is experienced in other cultures. It is not achieved by an altared state of any kind, which occurs in other traditions.

I would like to argue that the experience with the Holy Ghost is the real thing, while other cultures and religions offer similar but manufactured experiences - I believe what you say, that you have experienced it, but I also believe your encounter was not with the Holy Ghost, or the Spirit of Truth.

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This is rather unfair of you to say, and I would like to be a little more rigorous in making the distinction between the real thing and a manufactured version. I think I can grasp your view here you wish to say that if one sits and meditates for a day, and something comes of it, this is not the same as when a similar thing occurs spontaneously, sitting on the sofa reading, or whatever. But is it different? To me it looks like the same thing, and there is more than just my opinion to suggest this.

For the record, Ive taken drugs of various kinds too, and I did not mean to imply that was what I was on about. Of course, ingesting substances will alter our state, but there is absolutely no guarantee that it will be pleasant or spiritual seeming. Lets leave drugs out of this, for now. Like dreams, the experience of drugs fades and cant be recreated (except with more and greater numbers of drugs), and we are talking about more lasting effects here.

From where I stand, it is not unreasonable to say that your state, during the revelatory experience was indeed altered. One minute, sitting on the sofa reading, maybe thinking about the odd bill that needs paying or what to cook for dinner, and the next, bam! Your whole sense of self and reality and everything around you, changed holy seeming. It happened naturally, which is even better, but you cant rule out the fact that at this moment something was happening in your brain, as well as, perhaps, your spirit.

There are stronger parallels between this and the similar but manufactured experiences of other cultures than you have allowed for, as yet. For a start, many devoted Christians throughout history and done things to reach this state that look very much like the techniques used by Hindu yogis or primitive shaman. For example, sitting very quietly for a long time. Fasting. Focussing attention on the image that represents holiness (i.e. holding a cross or prayer beads, imagining the crucifixion), chanting or singing, spending very long periods alone, etc. Christian saints are renowned for doing these things, and monks are still encouraged to do so today.

Secondly, not all other cultures are seen to induce these states. There is a strong understanding in some traditions that it can happen spontaneously too. I am particularly interested in Zen Buddhism, which differs greatly from other schools in that they do not bother with beliefs or explanations at all. Everything you can think about spiritual reality is just excess baggage to Zen. Rather, they put stock in the sudden, spontaneous Aha! moment of enlightenment. What are the reported results of this experience? Primarily: a type of knowledge that goes beyond words, sustained and permanent peace with oneself, an absence of fear, even of death, coupled with deep commitment to responsibility and compassion for others. We arent talking about a flash in the pan here, but a lasting transformation.

You wrote:

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None of that compares to the experience of the Holy Spirit falling on you for the first time and staying with you throughout your life to sustain you and cleanse you spiritually, making you a new person

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But it plainly does compare. The difference, as I see it, is that Christianity tries to put a conceptual overlay of explanations and ideas onto the experience, whereas Zen just says, It happened, that will do.

Forgive me for seeming rude or presumptuous, but I am not seeing why you are upholding the Christian theory, the network of ideas built up over centuries, when all you have to go on is the experience itself. That is the nuts and bolts of it, the rest is froth within the mind, as I have said before, the trimmings and trappings of thought. It is the map. But the experience itself is the territory. The idea has all kinds of baggage, that distorts what is really going on.

There is more.

Are you one of these people who is deeply mistrustful of science? I am. Im a true sceptic, as I have already mentioned. Nevertheless, scientists put up satellites that allow us to have this conversation on the internet, and do other quite brilliant things, like opening people up and fixing something that has gone bad in their brain, like a tumour or blood clot. I dont know whether scientists are very good at Truth, but they are quite good at physical things. So I feel safe in talking about the research that has been done on what happens, physically, when people enter spiritual states.

Basically, no matter whether the spiritual practice is prayer, meditation, drumming, dancing, focussing on a symbol of love and supreme devotion, singing holy songs, performing ritual, or any of the many activities known to cultivate spirit, even walking in a special place or entering a sacred building, the same things happen physiologically. There is actually a place in the brain that is never used, except during these activities. It can be seen to activate, on a standard brain-scan, when the subject begins to enter their version of the revelation state. Scientists, rather cynically, have called this the God-spot. I expect you have heard of this before. Also, theta waves, a type of brain wave associated with deep peace, can be seen on ECG graphs. People report feeling all the feelings we have been talking about when this happens.

Please understand I am not even slightly suggesting there is no God, no spirit, no supreme or higher reality. All I am saying is that the experiences of different cultures are the same, and it is not fair to say, mines real, yours isnt. So many things point to the fact that they are the same.

You seem to think that my experiences are not like yours. I see a lot of similarities. Dont forget that I have mentioned how my deep experiences do sustain me. At times in my life I have felt rather suicidal, but I remember the deep experiences I have had, I go inside myself and draw out reasons to carry on, based on these special states I have been in. You describe it almost exactly the same way:

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On one particular afternoon, I was outside, sitting in my garden, praying. For whatever reason, I was feeling particularly melancholy that day so this is why I was praying. I was seeking to be closer to Christ so that my spirits could be lifted.

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You do say that the change is lasting and permanent, but that doesnt mean there arent off-days, points in which it is necessary to rekindle the convictions that were put in place during revelation.

I think our experiences are very alike. Only, I dont draw conclusions from mine, and you do.

May I ask you about your mind-set prior to the time when you experienced revelation? You see, all through my life, from my early teens onwards, I have been exposed to a huge variety of different ideas about what spirit really is. So, when I had my first spiritual experiences, no one idea about it was stronger than the rest. In the place where you come from, your town or your family or in the culture which you feel part of, was Christianity the prevailing form of everything that was spiritual? Had you pondered the question of God for a while already? Was the bible at all familiar too you? Was it a lot more familiar than any other spiritual tradition?

I am prying again, Im sorry, its just that Im trying to understand what makes a person have an amazing experience, and instead of becoming fascinated with the mysteries of life immediately snap into the mold of a ready-made religion. There is so much baggage tacked onto Christianity that has nothing to do with the spiritual experience itself. All I can do is stand, gobsmacked and go wow, but you are able to take on the whole Christian way of life and speak using its terminology as though the ideas were 100% perfect in every way.

What is the connection between having a spiritual experience and taking on a system of thought, wholesale? Is it not better to see all the worlds traditions as part of a huge treasure map every culture has one torn off piece of the map but to never forget that the map is just a pointer to the real thing, and that the real thing is bigger and better and greater than any one cultures map can ever show?

Thats enough from me for now, but please, lets continue exploring this. Im far more interested in our similarities than our differences.

Very best,
Gram