Collecting Spiritual Experiences
Often times, folks will have what they will call a spiritual experience: a huge heart opening, a vision, an experience of Jesus or an angel speaking to them. Then, instead of that causing a fundamental change in their life, instead of them working with it like we do in the Deity Practice, it just seems to be another story they tell. There’s a piety that comes out when people talk about their collected spiritual experiences, when they reminisce about their teacher, or when they tell stories about some other teacher. There’s always a good in these things: the good is that you had an experience. That’s righteous. The not-so-good part is that we can actually end up collecting these experiences, kind of like books. Then we have shelves of collected spiritual experiences inside of ourselves, and you know what happens to books when they sit on shelves year in and year out: they get dusty.
It begins with taking one book or experience down, showing it to a friend, and then putting it back up on the shelf. But then you get a whole bunch of experiences, and it can become more of a thing where you kind of motion towards or allude to the book shelfthe spiritual experience shelfin your conversation, and that’s about it.
The piety is a very interesting thing. This shouldn’t just be something that was really far out that happened to me with my teacher. It’s not just an incident of my life. Rather, I want to take it and reform the way in which I act, so that the experience really is resonating in my life.
The collection of spiritual experiences is actually a form of spiritual materialism. It’s like taking a spiritual survey course. I’m sure you took survey courses in college where, during the semester or the quarter, you ran through everything that was ever written about physics.
Just think about that, about everything that was ever written about physics. There’s been so much written that you had to go through it so quickly, and all you did was memorize names, dates, and maybe a couple of key words. That’s kind of what happens as we collect spiritual experiences, too; we develop a survey course of spirituality. In survey courses, as you know, you may have the ability to memorize the names, dates, and the key words, so that you can regurgitate them properly on the final exam. But just days after that final exam, you’re out of it. You don’t remember any of it.
Yogi Sean is the student of Swami Ramananda and the author of Dancing in the Fire of Transformation, The Everyday Sanyasin, and Experiments in Awareness, a workbook for yogis.
