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Chapter 101
Religious Experience
Religious experience means revelation, intuition or other spiritual experience that connects us with some aspect of life beyond the physical world. The experiences of prophets are binding on their followers but the experiences of other persons are mainly for personal illumination.
The first three lectures halls in the University of Barkhia offer a rational foundation for handling such experience. Do they match the corresponding stages of your journey?
Excerpt from Lecture I
In its deeper movement… thought is capable of reaching an immanent Infinite in whose self-unfolding movement the various finite concepts are merely moments. In its essential nature, then, thought is not static; it is dynamic and unfolds its internal infinitude in time like the seed which, from the very beginning, carries within itself the organic unity of the tree as a present fact.
Excerpt from Lecture II
Life is, then, a unique phenomenon and the concept of mechanism is inadequate for its analysis. Its ‘factual wholeness’, to use an expression of Driesch – another notable biologist – is a kind of unity which, looked at from another point of view, is also a plurality.
Excerpt from Lecture III
Finite minds regard nature as a confronting ‘other’ existing per se, which the mind knows but does not make. We are thus apt to regard the act of creation as a specific past event, and the universe appears to us as a manufactured article which has no organic relation to the life of its maker, and of which the maker is nothing more than a mere spectator. All the meaningless theological controversies about the idea of creation arise from this narrow vision of the finite mind.
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Rationale of the first three stages of your journey explained through excerpts from the first three lectures of the Reconstructio.