What characterizes a spiritual experience, and how is it distinguished from a religious experience? Can failure to discover and express one's identity lead to a spiritual experience?

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Religion is not spirituality and spirituality is not religion. You can be spiritual and religious, spiritual and irreligious, non-spiritual and religious, and non-spiritual and irreligious. You have experiences that are tailored towards your beliefs.

The brain is not the mind. The brain just does things, the mind is what makes sense of them. Higher experiences are felt by everybody, but your position on spirituality and religion is going to govern how your mind makes sense of them. If you are a religious and spiritual person, when you have higher experiences, you are going to make religious spiritual sense out of it. You’ll relate it to the spiritual reality as determined by your understanding of your religion.

These four basic attitudes refer to your conception of causality, specifically what is causing things to happen when the impetus isn’t obvious and clear. Spiritual people attribute non-obvious happenings to a spiritual reason, while non-spiritual people attribute things to lack of reason, i.e. luck.

Religion, being a social construct, is far more interested in morality, and so religious people will attribute non-obvious happenings to personal virtues or shortcomings, and tailor their responses accordingly.

Your second question makes less sense to me, but maybe I can help bring a little clarification. If you think carefully about the above dynamic, it will eventually dawn that in a very real sense, reality issues from the mind, not from the physical world. If you’ve had a spiritual awakening, then it’s the only sense, there is no further sense in which reality comes from the physical world. Reality is spiritual, and obeys rules that come from mind’s beliefs.

Awakening doesn’t change anything, it simply makes it all clear. It was always spiritual the entire time. Before awakening, one has a number of spiritual experiences that prime the pump, so to speak. One needs to be disciplined in their approach to keep pushing towards awakening. Belief is the currency of spiritual experience.

And so a non-spiritual religious person, whose causality is going to focus on morality, is less likely to start having spiritual experiences, but it does happen, moreso than someone who isn’t spiritual or religious. Religion primes you for spirituality, but isn’t necessary. Religion does help with discipline, I personally used a religion, Wicca, to develop it.

Non-spiritual irreligious types are even less likely to have spiritual experiences, as they haven’t geared their minds up to consider their higher experiences as being spiritual in nature. A spiritual experience is kind of like the high you get from petting a really cute animal or climbing a mountain or something, only it latches on to that belief portion in mind and so further pushes you in that direction.

Identity, the discovery and expression of, is the ultimate purpose behind spiritual progression. The various gates you pass through carry you ever closer to a kind of existence in which your inner lived existence and the world around you coordinate to reflect and express that identity. I call this mythic existence, and it’s quite rare to see in this world.

If you fail to discover and express your identity, that is no bar to spiritual experience. Spirituality is built up in the mind through belief, think of belief as being the fire underneath the kettle. When the kettle starts boiling, pressure builds up in the air above the water. When the pressure overcomes the valve, it escapes, causing the kettle to whistle. Spiritual experience is the whistle, the escaping of air into the rest of the world. The experience both announces to you that the world has a spiritual component to it, and it also lets off some of the pressure.

But in the end, it’s just a whistle, a bunch of noise that happens as a result of pressure. You have to keep building up pressure until you break out of the vessel keeping you contained, this is awakening.

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I shall continue through the map for completeness sake, but the above should suffice to answer the question. For those followers of mine who need the dots I’ve sprinkled in earlier answers connected, read on.

An awakened person is half inside the kettle, half outside, like a genie trying to free himself from the lamp. You are turning your water into air. Water takes the form of the kettle, this is why it’s important in the beginning what you believe. If you don’t believe in spirituality, if you don’t form your self like a kettle, then no matter what you do, your self can’t escape the shape your belief forms. Just like not being spiritual or religious cuts you off from this wider world, just being religious and not spiritual also pushes down higher experience and forces it into a mold determined by the religion. No escape valve.

An awakened person needs not tend to the fire, remember the fire is the coordinated actions taken in order to build up steam so that one can escape. There’s impurities, uncoordinated bits of self that just won’t get through the valve. Existing in two worlds is exhausting, but it can be overwhelmingly difficult to keep adjusting oneself so it can all get out. And the discipline one needed to build the fire can get in the way of this, it’s ease and wisdom that allow the genie to pull the rest of himself out of his lamp. Many awakened leave this world without ever doing so.

When a person manages to do this, we call this person enlightened. You have become one with the air, unsure, unclear about your identity. You may even have lingering beliefs that are wrong, but were helpful in escaping your kettle.

Buddhist dogma can be pretty bad at this. One of the doctrines of Buddhism, from the very beginning in the sramana days, focuses on the lack of self, anatta. This is very much misinterpreted by most to mean that we are all the same, there is no uniqueness between us, and Western Buddhists take this as dogmatically as fundamentalist Christians take their “world was created in 6000 years” bit.

Despite this, continually denying the self is one of those techniques that can get all those bits that just won’t escape the kettle to play ball and deflate just enough to get out of there. The downside is that it’s especially difficult to regenerate what I will later call ‘self-structures’ to proceed from enlightenment to mythic existence. How can you generate something that you believe doesn’t exist! It’s similar to the above belief conundrum but subtler and ultimately harder to get over, thus why mythic existence is so rare to identify in this world.

I’ve encountered many people whom I would have characterized as newly enlightened, and it was clear that they needed lots of time in the state to acclimate to it before they could bring themselves to continue the journey. When you’re air, you can go everywhere, anywhere, anytime, but there’s no structure to the self so there’s no impetus to do anything.

Mythic existence is all about learning how to create self-structures instead of just going on with the one you were born with. The genie needs not live in a lamp, you’re a genie, make yourself a pirate ship or something! These self-structures in an important way need to reflect the world around you. You can easily just create little worlds for yourself, and you’ll find yourself retreating back into them from time to time, but it’s an insular, dry existence, so invariably you’ll find yourself back out in the world.

All these vehicles will reflect the self, and inviting others into them, as is necessary, will bring their self-influences into the mix. When Osho created his retreat in Oregon, modeled on the Indian ashram, he completely failed to take into account American society and culture and cutthroatness. As a result, a very callous and psychopathic individual wormed her way into his good graces, and brought immense shame onto the entire enterprise.

Mythic existence is a constantly inflating balloon, you inspire and spark spirituality into others, they in turn inspire others, and there’s this immense multi-dimensional volume into which your essence is suspended.