Quotes About Experience

Begin with a concrete moment of encounter, based in this physical world, and the soul universalizes from there, so that what is true here becomes true everywhere else too.

God can never be experienced apart from your best interests being involved.

Both Catholics and Protestants have failed our people by mystifying the very notion of mysticism. The word itself has become relegated to a "misty" and distant realm that implies it is only available to very few and something not to be trusted, much less attractive or desirable. For me, the word "mysticism" simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.

Jesus is not telling us to believe unbelievable things, as if that would somehow please God. He is much more saying to us, "Try this," and you will see for yourself that it is true. But that initial trying is always a leap of faith into some kind of action or practice.

With this access point, God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is Someone dancing with you and you no longer need to prove to anyone that you are right, nor are you afraid of making mistakes. Another word for that is faith.

That is the rub of any conversion experience: We only realize how much we needed it when we are on the other side! That is why we need the tenacity of faith and hope to carry us across to most transformational experiences. When we can let others actually influence us and change us, our heart space is open.

Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us. Just the Biblical notion of absolute forgiveness, once experienced, should be enough to make us trust and seek and love God.

reality itself, our reality, my limited and sometimes misinterpreted experience, still becomes the revelatory place for God.

you never think yourself into a new way of living. You invariably live yourself into a new way of thinking.

Any kind of authentic God experience will usually feel like love or suffering, or both. It will connect you to Full Reality at ever-new breadths, and depths "until God will be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28).

Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you transcend your small ego, the more you can include.

Presence is experienced in a participative way, outside the mind.

spirituality" which means that things are only found to be true in the doing of them.

experience as "mercy, within mercy, within mercy."6 There's always a lot of anxiety and insecurity in letting go of your current images of yourselves and your images of God.

Juniors" on the first part of the journey invariably think that true elders are naive, simplistic, "out of it," or just superfluous. They cannot understand what they have not yet experienced. They are totally involved in their first task, and cannot see beyond it.

You see, authentic God experience always "burns" you, yet does not destroy you (Exodus 3:2–3), just as the burning bush did to Moses.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience.

Theologically and objectively speaking, we are already in union with God. But it is very hard for people to believe or experience this when they have no positive sense of identity

n the second day, God separated heaven from earth (Genesis 1:6-8). Genesis does not say that the second day was good, because it is not good to separate heaven from earth. A deep religious experience will reveal that there is only one world, one reality, and it is all supernatural.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

Falling upward is a "secret" of the soul, known not by thinking about it or proving it but only by risking it—at least once.

Magdalene loved a very concrete Jesus who led her to a ubiquitous and Risen Christ. Paul started with a Universal Christ and grounded it all in a quite homely and lovable Jesus, who was rejected, crucified, and resurrected. Working together, Magdalene and Paul guide and direct the Christian experience in truly helpful ways toward both Jesus and Christ, but from opposite sides.

All religious language is metaphor by necessity. Religion is always pointing towards this Mystery that you don't know — can't know — until you have experienced it.