Spiritual experience flies in the face of what religions often wants to consider. Instead of helping spirituality in society, they actually promote the status quo. Spirituality remains a splintered, almost taboo subject.

The text of a talk for the Unitarian Congregation of Niagara, January 7, 2007.

The title of my talk is The Limits of Spirituality in Religion:

I’m going to describe some of my spiritual journey over the last five years, and from it raise questions about what is allowed in religion.

I was regular, secular guy, having been a manager in big business, and a degree in history and the social sciences.

I had left my religious upbringing behind when I left home, and lived a normal, middle class life, with wife and kids in the suburbs.

Then on the First Day of the First Spring of the New Millennium, I began to have visions, out of the blue.

My critical faculties went into overdrive.

A friend of mine asked me if she was going to be alone for the rest of her life. How was I to know? I wasn’t a psychic.

She insisted, so to humor her, I closed my eyes.

Suddenly I was in front of a mesa, one of the great masses of rock, in the desert of the American Southwest.

There were voices in the distance. One was louder than the others. I opened my eyes and told my friend that must mean she wasn’t to be alone.

For some reason I closed my eyes again. Suddenly all the voices in the distance rushed towards me. The sky was filled with them, like sparkling running water. Each flickering light a voice. Millions of them.

None of the voices were distinct. But they were filled with such joy to see me, as if they had finally been found. It was remarkable.

Then I turned to the east, and could see across to the Holy Land. There, hanging above it, was a statue of Jesus. It wasn’t a crucifix, but a wooden image of Him draped in a robe with His arms at His side. And for some reason, the statue was burned.

My friend told me I was blessed with a vision. I had a choice to make. Follow where the vision take me, or ignore them and continue on as normal.

In the ensuing weeks and months the visions continued, and began an infinite number of other experiences.

At one point, after the first five days, I cried out the Presence: ‘who are You?’ I know that you are the Great Spirit, but You are so free, alive and real, You are not the God of the dusty pages of the Bible.’ At that moment, in words that I can never describe, the Great Spirit and God became One.

From there my tour of spirituality began.

The First Question that arose from the first week of visions was: why had the Creator come not as the Christian God, but as the Native’s Great Spirit?
- I had never had anything to do with the Natives
- Why didn’t the Creator show up as the Christian God?
- By implication, what was wrong with civilization?
- Native spirituality does not come from the qualities of the civilized mind
- What was the Creator saying about religion and civilization if He was acknowledging non-civilized spirituality?

- It brings up the thorny issue of the invisible God we inherit:

> Does He exist?
> Is He there to threaten us, Judge us, love us, give us tons of rules?
> If I had contact with God, was I assuming some authority over others?
The old domination issue that is always linked with God and religion
> And what happens when the Creator gives a message that religion disagrees with?

I was introduced to Past Lives
- in one vision I actually saw my soul
- What is a soul? Religion has always had a very hard time defining it to humans. What does that say about the Church’s struggle with spirituality? Yet it was made plain and obvious to me.

- After discovering several past lives, I began to weave together my soul story, by noticing the character traits and themes that each life had in common

We have a prejudice against reincarnation in the West. It is usually based on criticism of the poverty in India, that excuses abuse against certain castes as punishment for a past life.

Also, few of us have been introduced to our past lives in any experiential way. So it sounds fanciful

Our society runs on another principle: the Zero-Sum Theory of Life. Western religion has taught us that the soul is born in the womb with the body, we have one life to live, and one chance to get into heaven. Science agrees with religion, just leaving out heaven and the soul.

If you consider Western history, religion made people’s lives just as miserable using the Zero-Sum Theory of Life, as India’s religions did with reincarnation.

More seriously for Christianity, the reality of past lives calls into questions about the foundations of its theology.

We are taught that Jesus Resurrection after His death was bizarre and fantastic, proving He was the Son of God. This is based on the Zero-Sum Theory of Life.

The Zero-Sum Theory of Life shows us how the Church misinterpreted Jesus in the first place. And past lives shows us how it falls apart. Being born again happens all the time, literally. It is not fantastic, but normal. So far, I have discovered my soul has done it a dozen times.

From this spiritual ignorance, so much terror has been inflicted on Christians about becoming perfect with the looming deadline of death.

What would happen to the meaning of Christ and the authority of the Church if it did accept reincarnation?

When you stand in front of a grave that your soul has lived, the ‘tomb being empty’ takes on a whole new meaning, let alone being born again.

Encountering past lives in such a personal way, and not as theory, has done much for me to change the meaning of this one life, why the events occurred in a healthy way, not because I am a simple sinner.

It also bridges one’s feeling of separation from spiritual reality. Time and Space become meaningless when you sense your spirit outside of the confines of just one life. You realize your eternal soul being dropped into episodes in this specially created reality called Time.

I was Introduced to the Spirit World

The Spirit World is strange to Western religion.

The Church spent 1000 years wiping out all knowledge of the spirit world because it was competing with it.

We are left spiritually with only God, humans and inert matter.

Science wiped out the last spirit, God.

We are left with humans living in inert matter. All else is optional.

It highlights how human-centered civilization is. We treat animals and plants like we do inert matter. We will put our family dog to sleep, but keep a human vegetable alive for decades. Nothing is more important than the human.

Even God is defined by the services He provides humans.

This situation occurred because of the Ten Commandments. We were told to have no other God, but God. This has come to mean there is no spirit world.

Only 4 spirits are allowed: God, Jesus, souls and the devil. Everything else defaults to the latter.

But the Commandment didn’t say there was no spirit world. Just don’t treat the other spirits as God. How did Western religion get this wrong?

The Great Spirit actually introduced me to the Spirit of Mother Earth. That gave Her some credibility.

> It was not a flash-in-the pan; I have met Her several times since then
> I came to realize the infinite number of spirits, whose consciousness is as invisible as a human’s thoughts.

It begs the question: how do we relate to another spirit, when we have so many issues with just one invisible God?
> Do they want to control us?
> How do we control them?
> Why are they silent like God, and not obvious?
> Can we patent them like we do human genes, or control their meaning like religion does God?
> The last thing we need are more ‘Greater Powers’ around to dominate us, and restricting our hard-won freedoms.
> The issues are endless and can create a Fear of the Unknown
> We have lost the sensibility to perceive them, and resist even consider it as a society, including religions
> Telling this to religious types, they draw a BLANK
> The knowledge has been wiped clean
> Western religious spirituality is only a pipe, with humans at one end and God at the other. There is nothing outside of the pipe

Spiritual reality was fleshed out more when I explored Shamanism, the practice of Native medicine men and women found around the world.

Through traveling into the Spirit World, they provide both healing and answers

I went on a journey to find an answer for a man, without him telling me his question first. When I returned and told him of what happened, he was astonished, because it contained the answer to the question I was unaware of.

This kind of active spirit world engagement is foreign to religion

Also, those journeys showed that the spirit world is as dangerous as our own, not the heavenly bliss that is preached to us. Without the Great Spirit and animal guides, you can get into real trouble.

Besides its other mysteries, it provided a bridge from our dominant view that reality is split into three separate parts, between God, humans and inert matter.

All things are spirit. Creation is more than the dust described in Genesis.

I went on a three-day Fast
Just starving in a stone circle, doing nothing for three days under the hottest sun imaginable … waiting.

Being still in Nature really showed me the modern addiction to constant activity, not just of the body, but the mind as well. It can’t be appreciated until you experience shutting down all your faculties. Then the greater awareness of how you live, let alone your lack of relationship and awareness of the Natural world around you becomes real.

Every religion has a form of fasting, like Lent and Ramadan. But they are sold as sacrifices, of offering to the greater God.

They may center one’s focus one’s self, but does not stress both one’s connection to nature and spiritual reality, letting go of one’s security to invisible will.

This was re-connection, it was whole, not just self-denial and worship, but seeking wisdom from self-induced deprivation. Letting go of this life, as Jesus would have put it, to find a new kind of spiritual reality.

It re-opens the question of our own suffering: whether we alone create it, or if it has some positive connection with God.

That is not a popular view today. Religion has re-defined God, to distance Him from the Holocaust, and to compete against secular society as effective pain relief. God is love, God does not hurt.

We have lost a connection between suffering and reality. Pain is meaningless, caused by abusive dominance or the natural laws of germs and cancer. It has no meaning outside of the need to eliminate it.

I induced it, something strange, and found much that is whole in personal meaning, healing, connection with nature and with spiritual reality. Suffering wasn’t so scary, permanent, or negative as we are lead to believe, when it was connected to spirituality.

If Jesus told us to eliminate suffering, how could that be? Our society, culture and economy is built on relieving pain and maximizing abundance, comfort, and pleasure, not starvation and poverty.

But the representation of the Great Spirit is not a man, but a killer: the Owl > part of the natural world > both wisdom and talons in one. Not human-centered, like religion, but one of the fellow earth-dwellers of homo sapiens.

It highlights how religion has used the pain/pleasure principle to promote a different relationship God.

I was told by a friend 1000 miles away to go to the forest and receive a gift

- I went
- Opened my eyes
- And found a rock
- It had 3 faces on it: joy, agony and wisdom
- How did that happen?
- It was the message I needed at that moment
- And ancient wisdom has known this for millennia
- You cannot have one without the others
- But modern society is concerned about joy, controls agony, and much prefers knowledge over wisdom, because humans control knowledge, whereas wisdom you just have to accept

Yet, from a 1000 miles away, someone told me to go to the forest and receive a Gift from the Great Spirit > how did she know? > how did the rock get there? > and how did I happen to find it?

If I found that wisdom in Nature, it begs of the question of how much contact we have with nature on a daily basis, let alone receiving wisdom from it.

And how much do we just rely on humans using their minds and old books about human experiences to glean our spiritual sense and wisdom in religion.

Everything Speaks To Us

Consciousness is all around us

I began to see how events at work conformed to patterns:
- every autumn the automotive manager would quit
- executives would turn up on the same day of every week for a period, even though they thought it was random in their minds
- and every fall we would have a big customer issue with a compressor
- I noticed that Time didn’t even conform to our linear understanding of it:
- I took the kids horse back riding, 3 miles west of Port Colborne
- Left late, and I estimated that I would be 20 minutes to a half hour late, if I hurried
- But the traffic was against me, and every light in Port Colborne was red
- When we walked into the lobby, the clock was exactly on 11:00
- It could have been an anomaly, but this kind of thing would repeatedly occur, like traffic jams on the QEW, but arriving on time
- Consciousness was making our reality conform to it, not the other way around

Everyone has had weird experiences
- Saying the right thing at the right moment when you weren’t even thinking it
- Déjà vu, dreams, spirit encounters, surviving something that should have killed you, things that worked out when they shouldn’t have, or being frustrated, only to find out if you acted, a disaster would’ve occurred
- Meaning is all around us, but we dismiss it as a society because it does not fit our rational cause-and-effect minds, and religion is not interested in it. So we are silent, with little to expand what it really means.
- We are comfortable, secure and in control with the fundamental scientific framework that reality is humans in relation to the world as inert matter.

Religion supports this. They created the perspective in the first place.

These are just a few of the experiences that I have had that raise the question of why so many people are falling asleep in religion, or just leaving.

If science can show us so much more about reality as inert matter, why can’t religion expand spiritual reality in a real way outside of the Jesus Story, sanctuaries and complex, mind-twisting theology from a single book?

Talking about spirituality is also difficult because everyone has had different experiences. Many ministers have never had a spiritual experience, having come to the cloth because the Bible seemed reasonable. For others, an encounter with the spirit of Christ is like a drug, because there is no greater context. Jesus is the only thing in the heavens, and the tunnel vision brings on righteousness. So even within religion it is difficult to talk about spiritual experience.

If we want more, we are on our own. Luckily we have access today to all the spiritualities in the world. So we can pick and choose what we like from the smorgasbord. Meaning, after all, is relative, just like wisdom.

It appears that religion and modern secular society support each other on their approach to reality. God is the optional spiritual component, leaving humans at the center of this dry matter around us.

Spirituality is almost a taboo in our society, though everyone wants to talk about it. They just don’t want any hint of the heavy hand of religion. So it remains under the radar and splintered into small camps of like-experience, inside each religion, between religions, and in the secular world.

We are happy in our lives of abundance, and happy to have slain the dragon of religion and gained our freedom. We are in control, but so many feel that something is missing in their lives, in artificial cities that has little relation to life in nature, outside of raw resources and recreation.

We fail to realize that modern civilization by Christianity eliminated spiritual reality, outside of humans living in inert matter. Science only reinforces this. And religion cannot help us. It supports it, and wiped out the abilities we once had. We are humans living in inert matter and we can’t figure out what the problem is clearly and simply. We are civilized.

God, spirits, nature, Mother Earth, consciousness… and human beings.

We are faced with global warming. Civilization is convinced it can fix the environment like a car engine, technological will allow us to carry on as usual. But to us, the environment is just a concept, knowledge we can control. Nature, on the other hand, is alive. Is there something wrong with our words?

How do we relate to non-human life? What contact do we have on a daily basis with Nature, in our cars and office buildings? Our survival system is based on money, grocery stores, science and business. Not on our personal contact with the life in Nature.

We can see the problem, but what can we do about it?

We are prisoners of this society built on the human relationship with inert matter. The spirit world is hardly a factor in our considerations, let alone understanding what it is telling us. The most important thing is humans.

Religion cannot help us out of our perceptual crisis. It does not want to face its own shortcomings. That would undermine its authority.

The limits put on spiritual reality by religion and science helps humans feel in control, and we like it that way. But what do we know of civilization, if all we know is our civilized way of acting and thinking?

Spirit is simply consciousness, and consciousness is invisible, like all our human thought. Invisible thoughts. Society ignores it, keeps it splintered, and carries on with its consumer agenda.

If we cannot break through this stranglehold that both religion and business have on our perception of life and consciousness in all things, then the Earth will end up treating us just as we have managed Her, as an object, and not as the life She has Created with the Creator.