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We hear a whole lot of people using the phrase "more spiritual than religious" right now, causing us to ponder what they really mean when they label themselves this way. It has been our experience that there really is a soul deepening distinction between spiritual and religious -- a difference we have termed spiritual emergence versus religious emergency.
Spiritual emergence is a gradual unfoldment of spiritual expression that causes a minimal 'disturbance' in our everyday functioning because we are somewhat prepared for it, given our disposition for the mystical. Then again, there are those who experience what we call religious emergencies, which will cause significant disruptions in their daily life, as these folks are often unprepared for mystical experiences since they consider themselves to be more religious than spiritual.
Emergent spiritual experiences like visions, deeply felt meditations, out-of-body experiences, apparitions and precognitive dreams tend to be exhilarating and life altering and may also be very transformative -- for anyone who have moved to an area of being more spiritual than religious. These same experiences, however, could also be deeply unsettling for individuals who fall in the category of being more religious than spiritual.
Those that tend to be more spiritual than religious seem to have less difficulty with one of these types of transcendental experiences. Why? Spiritually-inclined people are usually more open to mystical experiences. They feel more connected to the transcendentalness of life. They have a spiritual, not religious, mindset! Their openness to the non-material and ethereal dimensions of reality make them the perfect recipients of these life-affirming experiences.
Included in the challenge highly religious people face in transformative experiences is staying grounded once they experience these 'higher octaves' of reality. These 'altered states of being' are usually foreign, as well as taboo, when it comes to handling their ingrained religiosity.
Because of their denominational inhibitions, mainstream religious people tend to be quite reluctant to integrate highly spiritual experiences into their religious practices. They could even feel they can be bedeviled by these experiences.
Great spiritual teachers and mystics alike assure us that these transcendent experiences are natural and healthy. They see these experiences as evidence of our evolving spirituality and enlightenment - Read More On this page -. They encourage us to willingly allow highly spiritual/mystical experiences to touch our lives as well as to use the memories of those experiences -- and thus the transformative value of those experiences -- to flow into our everyday lives.
Living our lives based upon embedded religious theology makes it tough to allow spiritual and metaphysical teachings into our world view. What usually happens is the cognitive dissonance brought on by the new mind-stretching 'experiential information' causes people to tighten their dogmatic reins so that any progress -- and openness -- to potentially transformative truths is shut down completely.
In all reality, that is the troublesome dynamic we see occurring in spiritual communities/New Thought churches/liberal churches today. If the leadership in those communities is stuck in embedded religious theology, it can make it really hard for the membership that considers themselves to be more spiritual than religious to get a spiritual, not religious, message. It also causes it to be extremely hard for the minister and music director to view eye-to-eye should the music director is hesitant to -- or outright refuses to -- change the song lyrics to complement the minister's spiritually-oriented message. It is an old story -- you know, the one about pouring new wine into old wineskins!
On the other hand, should the leadership is actually more spiritual than religious in a church setting (holding services in a church building characterized by stained glass windows and pews), the members who consider themselves to be more religious than spiritual demand a message and music that are more dogmatically religious than universally open and spiritual. The two factions behave like oil and water. And the ministers who serve those divided communities operate between a rock as well as a hard place because making both factions happy is impossible!
If you've ever been associated with, or are now associated with, a spiritual/religious community comprised of a culture of religious-oriented and spiritually-oriented folks within the same sanctuary at the exact same time, you know it's a recipe for conflict and division. Congregations often blame their difficulties on going from a family size to a pastoral size to a program size, etc. While there is some truth to that perspective, the vast majority of the difficulty lies within the philosophical and religious differences between the spiritual and religious cultures who are at odds.
