The Intuitive Experience 
That Produces True Religion

True religion has its origin in the non-verbal intuition and direct experience of the Reality, Life-Power, and Consciousness that Pervades and Transcends the world and the body-mind of Man. There is truly no verbal-mental argument that can convince anyone that there is this Reality. That is why mere objective science and technology fail to produce an advanced human culture, and it is also why archaic and conventional religious belief systems are inadequate and false means of associating with the Divine Reality. There must be direct and personal intuition and even bodily experience of the Transcendental, inherently Spiritual, and (necessarily) Divine Reality if an individual is to become truly religious and practice the personal, moral, and esoteric psycho-physical disciplines of true religion.

The process wherein anyone may come to the point of this Revelation of the Living God is generally a rather random and chaotic affair, until the individual confronts the influence and Teaching of one who has not only experienced this Revelation but also practiced the life of self-transcending Communion with the Living Reality to the point of ecstatic transformation. But there are two forms of "consideration" that anyone can engage even at this moment that will provide at least a modest intuitive and experiential awareness of the Reality of Which I speak.

First, set aside for a moment all of your knowledge about the universe and all your religious or scientific presumptions about how it all developed to this point in time. Simply "consider" this: Even if all processes and all beings evolved or appear to have evolved mechanically and by accidents of association, rather than Mysteriously, as an expression of an Eternal Divine Radiation of events, then why does any thing or any one exist at all? How does the existence of any thing and every thing come about as an accident? Where did that accident occur? Within what is it all occurring? Where is space?

I cannot "consider" the very existence of any thing and every thing without developing a thrill in My back and head, so that it feels as if My hair is about to stand on end. No one knows what even a single thing is, or why it is, or where it is, or when it is, or how it came to be. Everyone is confronted by an irreducible Mystery, and that Mystery is profound. If you will truly "consider", even for a moment, the matter of the paradox of the existence of any thing whatsoever, you will feel intuitively in touch with the Mystery That is Reality Itself. The mind falls away in that moment, and even though you will not have come up with any "knowing" explanations for the world, you will enjoy a tacit sense of Communion with the Living Reality of the world and of your own mind and body.

As a second exercise, examine yourself for a moment and feel any and all forms of bodily contraction, emotional reactivity, and mental concern that possess you. If you will do this deeply and truly, even for a moment, you will become aware of your chronic state. You are, except in the attitude of total psycho-physical Communion with the Living Divine Reality, in a chronic state of reactive contraction or tension, simultaneously in mind, emotion, and body. If you can observe and feel this for a moment, you will sense how it is all a single gesture—a withdrawal or contraction from release into the condition of unqualified relatedness. And once this becomes clear, on the basis of a moment of insight, you will be able to relax and feel, beyond thought and reactive emotion and bodily tension, into a sense of self-releasing intimacy with all the conditions of the world. And that release will establish you, at least for a moment, in the wordless experiential sense of Communion with the Divine Spirit-Life, or the Nameless Radiance that Pervades the world and the body-mind of Man.

These two "considerations" or exercises are a moment's cure for too much knowledge about things and too much egoically "self-possessed" (or self-absorbed) reacting to things. In the moment in which you stand free of the self-defining contractions of mere knowledge and mere reaction to experience, you stand in direct experiential intuition of the Divine Mystery, or Living Reality, That is the Truth of the world and That is the Very and Eternal Urge to religious consciousness and the true Spiritual development of Man.

(Return to DAbase Main Page)