Mystical Maria: Talk of the spirit of God within is often a way of affirming that we can each have our own personal spiritual experience of God. We do not have to go along with stuffy traditional authority or superficial contemporary enthusiasms—even mine.
Scientific Simon: All over the world, religious experience tends to reflect the religions that people already have. Religions give people expectations of what they can or should or will experience, and people experience what they think they can or should or will experience.
Evangelist Evan: How do you know that God is not communicating with them in ways that make sense within the framework of their religion?
Philosophical Sophia: Simon, what I would say to your observation is that various inputs go into spiritual experience. Sometimes the biological and psychological inputs are so strong, that we cannot truly call it a spiritual experience. Sometimes the spiritual revelation is so dominant, that lower-level inputs play little or no role. But most of the time there some biological and social-psychological component as well as a spiritual component.
Evangelist Evan: It doesn’t deserve to be called a religious experience unless the spiritual component is dominant, and truth prevails.
Scientific Simon: But truth is many-sided, and there are so many more-or-less erroneous versions of it. So how can you talk about truth as a criterion for spiritual experience?
Philosophical Sophia: No one here is pretending to have a criterion that the human mind can apply to draw a line between the true and the false in our own experiences, and especially the experiences of other people. Discernment is a evolutionary work-in-progress.
Miguel from Colombia: But there are tests that are worth remembering. Scripture, tradition, community—none of these, nor all of them together form an absolute criterion. But our wisdom reasonably makes use of them in the adventure of discernment. And most of all, we look at the fruits in a person’s life.
Simon. But what about the person who does not report having any spiritual experience. What are you going to say about that person? Are they lost forever?
Evan: No, certainly not. Faith is what is essential. And when faith is wholehearted, that’s already a kind of spiritual experience. Or think about when you make a great moral decision—or do good for someone else, and you really feel good about that, deep down. That’s a spiritual experience, but most people don’t recognize it. And there are garden-variety experiences that count, too, like prayer, and worship, and service to others. A lot of folks mistakenly assume that unless they have mystical experiences they have no spiritual experience at all.
Sophia: In fact, people have gifts in different areas. There is a body of research that, statistically speaking, women tend to score higher than men on tests designed to measure spirituality. And people come in different flavors—with different types of inherited temperament. Some are more intellectual, some more emotional, some more spiritual.
Evan: And I believe that any genetic deficiency that we suffer in this life and any other disadvantage that affects our responsiveness to spirit stimuli will be overcome in the life beyond this earth.
Mystical Maria: I love all of you, I listened to all of you, and I agree with the heart of everything you have said, and I am sympathetic with all your questions. And I reaffirm what I said at the beginning: Everyone can have spiritual experience of their own, a one-to-one, person-to-Person relationship with the living God!
Ali from Iran began to clap, and everyone joined in. Thank you, Maria. You spoke the most important truth.
