What Is A Meaningful Spiritual Experience?

[Sunstone]

What constitutes a meaningful spiritual experience? What makes it meaningful? What makes it spiritual?

 

[Random]

Myself, I understand it to be an action based on conscious unity of opposites: a sort of intercourse if I may use that word, that makes the experience unworldly by virtue of its transcendence of the conditionality of the material realm.

I would emphasise that these experiences are always purely subjective but @ the same time wholly rational.

However, there are only a few people inclined towards them: sadly, the majority lack the mental faculties of intelligence and discipline to pursue the goals of finding true meaning through spirituality.

 

[Ozzie]

What constitutes a meaningful spiritual experience? What makes it meaningful? What makes it spiritual?

Are you looking for a discrepancy? That one is easy for me based on a subjective/objective distinction. But that may not be acceptable to others. That is: language determines meaning and is objective, whilst spiritual involves emotions and is necessarily subjective. This distinction in no way disputes meaning in spiritual experience as psychologically real and therefore valid, but it does predicate that spiritual experience must be communicated in order to be meaningful in a shared sense.

 

[opensoul7]

Simply , It depends on the individual.

 

[Willamena]

What constitutes a meaningful spiritual experience? What makes it meaningful? What makes it spiritual?

A meaningful spiritual experience is one that makes you aware of spirit. What makes it meaningful is you. What makes it spiritual is your awareness.

 

[autonomous1one1]

What constitutes a meaningful spiritual experience? What makes it meaningful? What makes it spiritual?

Greetings Sunstone. Guess my thoughts are in agreement with every single post so far. I would say that the spiritual experience and the value of its meaning is according to the subjective interpretation of the individual. It would include an event brought within the awareness of the individual that transcends the individual to/from God. God could be thought of with different concepts such as the Eternal, Infinite, Absolute, Tao, Ultimate Reality, etc. Also, my thoughts agree with Godlike that there is one particular experience, that we have called Enlightenment in other threads, which is difficult for realization. I am reminded of a post by Xexon in which he wrote the path to getting there was like a razor’s edge which in turn reminded me of “The Razor’s Edge” by Somerset Maugham which was about the same experience; which reminded me of….

.(no, just kidding on this last remembrance, just wanted to make your eyes roll). Only, today I would say the path towards realization of this spiritual experience is more like an electric razor because we have billions more information available to the individual; but with so much there are little pit holes where one can fall and get chewed up. The 'razor's edge' implication of a narrow journey is probably still applicable, however.

 

[maggie2]

IMO each individual human can have meaningful spiritual experiences that may not be meaningful to anyone but them. We all connect to the Divine in different ways, so what might be meaningful for me might leave someone else cold, and vice versa.

I think we give experiences their meaning in our lives.

What makes it spiritual, to me, is that it connects us in some way with a Source, the Divine, the Creator, whatever name one might want to use.

 

[ayani]

one which both pierces the heart and draws the heart out from the breast, and into the breath of God's will.

 

[Guitar's Cry]

I think that anything can be a meaningful spiritual experience. Life is about meaning (without it, there is only existence), and spirituality is about meaning. Whatever you go through in life can have a profound effect on the Self, and can therefore be meaningful.

 

[charles brough]

Spiritual experience? I have never had one and cannot imagine what one would be. Since there are no such things as "spirits", how can they be experienced!

However, there are many uplifting, inspiring, wonderful feelings that do occurr and which anyone can experience whatever their beliefs. Psychologists have been able to isolate and describe them. For example, some people actually see images that do not exist. These are people who have sub-clinical temperal lobe epilipsy. Drugs and hypnosis can induce others. The feeling of "oneness" say, with the universe can develop among members of a tight-night social group or commune. Then there is what blood derivation to the brain can do when the heart stops in surery. The list is long.

Religions come and religions go . It has been that way all through human history. If people believe in spirits, they call their unusual feelings "spiritual," but if they do not believe in them, and in the next society and civilization they will not, then they have the same feelings and experiences but call it something else!

charles, http://humanpurpose.simplenet.com (430 hits PER DAY in January!)

 

[Gentoo]

What constitutes a meaningful spiritual experience? What makes it meaningful? What makes it spiritual?

Things are only meaningful if you make them as such. I very much believe that meaning, like beauty, is in the beholder rather than in the event itself. Personal interpretation is Everything.