Share your religious experience

[Paulclem]

Monday morning I spent an hour pursuing samatha-vipassana meditation, and experienced several jhanic states, encountering ecstasy, timelessness, ultimate calm and infinite spaciousness, amongst other things. But usually my religious experiences are exciting as those of Mutatis-Mutandis. Is no religious experience a religious experience? Is that Zen?

Yes.


Boredom is one of the states of mind we have to accept/ understand/ overcome. I haven't yet.

[El Viejo]

My mom was the child of a Catholic mom and a Lutheran dad who had converted to marry her. My dad, in turn, converted from the Methodist church to marry my mom. I am the product of equal parts unswerving faith and pragmatic apostasy.

We kept the sacraments consistently, and although we couldn't afford it they sent my siblings and I to Catholic schools all the way through high school. We were faithful, but not devout. Sometime during my grade school years an aunt of mine had her marriage annulled. The nuns had taught me that divorce was wrong, and I asked how this was different. The answer (the marriage never happened) seemed weaselly to me, and that was where I began to part ways with The Church. Or maybe it was when tongues of fire didn't appear at Confirmation. Both were around the same time.

I remained Catholic through high school. But apart from the formality of maintaining the sacraments my only real religious activity was leafleting against abortion, and writing against it when the opportunity arose in english class.

After high school I stopped going to confession and attending mass, but still considered myself a Catholic. I reacted angrily when my Catholic girlfriend began attending charismatic prayer meetings and trying to evangelize me. But resistance was futile, and I was assimilated, as were my fathers before me. Eventually this path lead me away from The One True Church and I spent a decade trying to find the real one true church. A parade of home prayer meetings, established independent churches, and one DIY startup which struggled along for a couple of years before being assimilated by another, more vigorous startup, occupied my time and attention. Along the way I threw myself into the support structures, helping out with the Sunday school bus runs, ushering, transferring sermons to tape, hosting prayer meetings, and other backgroundy stuff. I also read the Bible extensively, and made myself read it cover to cover in a couple of translations. I've never been able to cite chapter and verse, but I did acquire an overview knowledge, as one does when reading a favorite book two or three times.

But, as that one true church kept eluding me, I eventually became disillusioned and a backslider. As a backslider I had a moment that qualifies as my epiphany. I was re-reading the story of King David and Bathsheba, and suddenly saw the story from a different point of view. Here was David abusing his power, eventually killing Bathsheba's husband and marrying her to cover his tracks. God just kind of watches until the baby is born, then he moves in to strike with his mighty arm. Evil has been done, and someone must pay, so he smites the most obvious character in the story: the baby. And not mercifully. The baby suffers a protracted, lingering death. In his later years David has trouble staying warm at night, and has the country scoured for a pretty young maiden to help out. Apparently his two wives just weren't doing the job. Nevertheless, David is renowned, praised down through the ages as God's favorite king. The only character in the story with any integrity, Uriah, doesn't even get a footnote.

At that point I saw the God of the Bible as a country-clubbin' CEO. The kind of guy who looks out for his executives and their trophy wives, but doesn't hesitate to grind the insignificant under his heel when he wants to make a point. At that point a lot of business and politics that I had seen as sinful suddenly became scriptural.

I figured that God couldn't actually be as cruel, venal, and capricious as the God of scripture, so I stopped believing in Him. Perhaps both that conclusion and that decision were naive. It was a short step though to not believing in a god at all.

Not long after that the girlfriend who had seen to my conversion, whom I had eventually married, left me and our children for someone she'd met via Prodigy.

Today my children are grown, with families of their own, and I have started another family. My older children were raised in that hodgepodge of evangelical experiences, attended Christian Schools from time to time, and were briefly homeschooled. They range from atheistic to strongly evangelical. My younger children have been raised without formal religion. The oldest and I have talked much, and I've explained what I believe and how I got here. I've also explained that I could be dead wrong, because no one knows until they die what's on the other side. My child has adopted a faith or system loosely based on Shinto. My younger child isn't particularly interested in this stuff yet. Based on family history, somewhere between 64% and 99.999999% of my life has passed. I'll be discovering the mystery soon enough.

[mal4mac]

Boredom is one of the states of mind we have to accept/ understand/ overcome. I haven't yet.

Don't say that near a Zen master or he'll hit you with a big stick

[Paulclem]

Don't say that near a Zen master or he'll hit you with a big stick

What Zen master? What stick?

[cacian]

Hi Pendragon forgive me if this is not what you are looking for but as someone who does not adhere to books and politics about religions, but all the same have my own beliefs personal to me and god that I decide to know for myself.
I find nothing in religions today that entice my time and so have my own little niche of gods and goddesses.
So I would like to have a go. I would not say I am of the spiritual kind as I have my feet both stuck on the ground for the sake of me and people I am with and know.
Religion I find as a whole a distraction from the real thing, an annoyance if you like, which gets in the way of me trying to understand everything around me without being given the third degree about what a god might do If I step out of line.
It is all well and good to have discipline but if I am going to listen and respond it better be coming from the god himself ie face to face but as it goes this is not possible and there lies the issue.
I am not here to justify religion or god I am here to jusfity me and the one way to do would be to hear it from the man himself but yet Again god fails not answer me back or waves at me. Oh well unlucky me. May be god is not interested haha. He does not like me or does he?
So since I hear not the voice of god so I must go with what I know and that is to turn to how I grew up and how surrounded by adults telling me what to do all the time. Obedience as child is what we all do and learn because we have to if adults are going to let us get away with things.
So it is a habit and I listen better when someones tells me things it face to face directly and with words I can understand.
Call it a bad habit but if that means the words of god from the pages of a book will suffer then so be it. I will go with I know.
My religious experience/views has not altered my personality and turned me into someone I do not like but what I have retained from it is that if God is not around then I better find a god in everyone here on earth and use it to my advantage to make myself and others happy. Why fly when I can walk.
Until then I retain God as the existent one with the exception, objection, which is this: Whatever you do not mentinon Lucifer as I could not be bothered to start with this one.
In life one has to make choices and is allowed to chose one at a time, just like marriage you chose the one, and god is the one I chose. The rest including lucifer can do whatever. That is all.

[ancast]

This is something I just needed to get out--this morning God saved my life, or maybe one of his angels. I was driving down I-35 and heading back to school, the weather was rough and there was rain coming down so hard it was hard to see at times. I will admit that I do not like to drive in bad weather, but I am no stranger to driving in fog, rain, or snow to get back to OSU after a weekend at the family’s. And I was listening to K-LUV, singing along with the Christian hits for comfort. And a couple of times by now, I reminded myself of the part in the Bible—where Jesus’s disciples are on this boat in a lake and a storm hits and they are freaking out and wake up Jesus. Who asks them why they are afraid, for he is with them. Well, I hit a rock or a pothole and suddenly I my car’s front end swings to the cement shoulder—straight ahead all I see is a wall of cement and I thought “Oh No.” . Mind you I was going the speed limit ~65 mph in a 70 zone, there is not a lot of traffic at 6:50, and already I have seen a lot of emergency vehicles on the road. My arms locked up, I couldn’t move—, and suddenly the front end of my car begins being pushed away from the median and the cement shoulder. It felt rough and bumpy, as my car straightened out; and I still fully expected to be crashing soon. The car straightens and no longer am I expecting to crash. I am just looking at my windshield driving in wonder. It takes a second or two to see it. There is a handprint on my windshield, at least two if not three lengths of my hand long and the fingers are pretty slim. It was there, against the lines of the rain, and it takes two to three swipes of my windshield wipers for them to fade. All I could say was “Thank you.” I finished the drive in kind of a daze, my mouth hanging open and trying to talk myself out of having seen that. The song that comes on next with perfect timing was, “Today is day one of the rest of my life...” and honestly I’m still kinda freaking out about it and it’s been about 11 hours. I am so grateful, Praise God! And I hope that if anyone out there is holding themselves back from God that they will read about this and let Jesus into their hearts.

[ancast]

Guess I should give a little of my background.
1. My early experience in religion was in the Sunday School in the Southern Baptist Church down the road from my grandparents home.
2. My mother was a single teen mom and very busy working and my grandparents would go when they felt like it.
3. My mother eventually married my step-dad, whom I just call "dad" and is pretty strictly atheist--though he does not discount ghosts, poltergeists, or psychics.
4. Mom from about 1999 to 2003 was Wicca and practiced tarot card readings on our neighbors and friends, the only church on base was Lutheran-based.
5. The month before 9'11 all of mom's reading pulled the towers.
6. Before moving back to southern Oklahoma mom basically became a christian Wicca
7. Recently, my mother has been moving more and more towards simpler Christianity and we have favored the Methodist denomination in our community, while dad still is pretty down on Christianity and Abrahamic religions.
8. I have always been christian, though I have occasionally wrestled with my faith and dedication.

So it's not like I have a narrow exposure to religions; Catholics, wiccans, druids, protestants, Pentecostal, evangelists, Mormons, , Methodists, atheists, Lutherans, agnostics, deists, Jedis, and Baptists. I mean the military is a pretty varied place, at least from the military brat perspective.

[YesNo]

5. The month before 9'11 all of mom's reading pulled the towers.

That was a strange experience you had driving in the car with the large hand print on the windshield.

I also heard stories about premonitions of the twin tower event. Rachel Pollack in her "The New Tarot Handbook" wrote something similar to what your mother experienced (page 78):

After September 11, 2001, Tarot readers as far from New York as Australia reported that for some two weeks before the terrorist attack on the twin towers, the Tower card appeared in every reading they did, no matter the subject.

I also heard that there were fewer passengers on the planes than normal, almost as if people seemed to know not to take that flight, but there may be other reasons why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_175

It had 168 seats (10 in first class, 32 in business class, and 126 in economy class). On the day of the attacks, the flight carried only 56 passengers and 9 crew members, which represented a 33 percent load factor — well below the average load factor of 49 percent in the three months preceding September 11.

[affu933]

of course, i'll abide by the rules...