The Fact of Experience
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It is no more of a mystery for you to know the mind of God than for you to be sure of the consciousness of knowing any other mind, human or superhuman. Religion and social consciousness have this in common: They are predicated on the consciousness of other-mindness. The technique whereby you can accept another’s idea as yours is the same whereby you may “let the mind which was in Christ be also in you.”
What is human experience? It is simply any interplay between an active and questioning self and any other active and external reality. The mass of experience is determined by depth of concept plus totality of recognition of the reality of the external. The motion of experience equals the force of expectant imagination plus the keenness of the sensory discovery of the external qualities of contacted reality. The fact of experience is found in self-consciousness plus other-existences other-thingness, other-mindness, and other-spiritness.
Man, very early becomes conscious that he is not alone in the world or the universe. There develops a natural spontaneous self-consciousness, of other-mindness in the environment of self-hood. Faith translates this natural experience into religion, the recognition of God as the reality — source, nature, and destiny — of other-mindness. But such a knowledge of God is ever and always a reality of personal experience.
The element of error present in human religious experience is directly proportional to the content of materialism which contaminates the spiritual concept of God. Man’s pre-spirit progression in the universe consists in the experience of divesting himself of these erroneous ideas of the nature of God and of the reality of pure and true spirit. The Deity of God is far more than spirit, but the spiritual approach is the only possible one for us human beings.
Prayer is indeed a part of religious experience, but it has been wrongly emphasized by modern religions, much to the neglect of the more essential communion of worship. Prayer may enrich the life, but worship illuminates destiny. The reflective powers of the mind are deepened and broadened by worship.
Revealed religion is the unifying element of human existence. Revelation unifies history, co-ordinates geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychology. Spiritual experience is the real soul of man’s cosmos.
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