spiritual highs

I put this off till the last minute, so this is going to be more of a list of bullet points than a post.

I've been thinking about spiritual highs--the mind-altering experiences that some people have that seem to have some element of blissful hyper-awareness involved. These experiences become a kind of holy grail, an state of mind that people chase after, because they've heard it's so amazing. There's a lot to unpack here. The experience of transcendence or spiritual bliss or whatever your particular tradition encourages can be and often is life-changing.

But there are some things about the idea that are-- well, if not disturbing, at least troubling. For one thing, it's this kind of spiritual experience that tends to make people think they've found The Truth. If you're Buddhist or Christian or whatever, and you have a mind-blowing spiritual experience in the context of your faith, it convinces you that your tradition is Right. In future times of doubt or uncertainty, that moment of conversion or enlightenment or whatever will be the thing that you look back to convince yourself that you're on the right track.

The problem with that is that people of all religious traditions have mind-blowing experiences. There are Christians who have amazing conversion stories to tell-- addictions ended, diseases healed. Saint Theresa is famous for her exalted experience of God. Buddhists have enlightenment. Sufis have ecstatic whirling. I'm very quickly getting out of things I can knowledgeably discuss, but I've investigated enough spiritual traditions to be sure that every tradition offers a path to transcendence. So that confidence that your tradition is the Right Tradition because "look at these amazing experiences that we have!" is a false confidence. The fact that people experience spiritual highs in your tradition just means that yup, it's a legitimate spiritual tradition.

And then there's the whole element of spiritual snobbery. Oh, you haven't experienced enlightenment? Oh, you haven't spoken in tongues? Oh, you haven't (fill in the blank with whatever spiritual experience is the cool, popular experience of the moment)? It's a strong enough thing that people are known to lie about it, or to think they've experienced it when they really haven't, because surely someone who has been meditating faithfully for x number of years has experienced something that a newbie who sits down for the first time can experience.

The mainline church I attend (more on that another time) is full of people who have faithfully followed the teaching of their church for their entire lives, and yet have never had a conversion experience, because they've been attending our church since birth. Does that make them less Christian than the person whose remarkable conversion experience included coming back from the brink of death by addiction?

And can't the small, mini-mind-blowing experiences that all of us experience every time we learn something new add up over time to something more solid, more real than a one-time experience of "enlightenment" or "conversion" that peters out over the following years because it wasn't followed up by anything else?

Maybe this is just sour grapes on my part, because I've had plenty of the mini-mind-altering experiences, the a-ha! moment that changes perceptions and feelings and leads to small-scale but perceptible growth, but I've never experienced "enlightenment," full stop. Since I was raised Evangelical, I never experienced conversion (unless you count my reverse conversion away from Evangelicalism in my twenties, but that wasn't a one-time event).

I think it's typical of the American mindset, including my own, that we hear about the big bang, the WOW factor of a spiritual tradition, and that's what we want. We don't want the hours of practice, the days of grinding work to feed the poor or visit the sick, we don't want to give up our creature comforts, we just want the fireworks, and quickly.

I don't have much else to say about this, and obviously this isn't something I've got any answers to, beccause I'm not even sure this makes sense. But it's what I've been thinking about quite a bit after listening to a podcast last week. And since I'm so tired I can barely hold my eyes open, I may have to come back and edit this or write more on this topic another time.