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@Paul
I'm a bit disappointed because you appear to be dismissing me
Nah, I'd be more concerned about you dismissing me. The way you phrased your sentence sounded a bit sarcastic. But if you are being serious we can discuss whatever you like.
What I want out of my spiritual awakening is to simply experience it and understand what it is.
That's all you need is genuine curiosity, and if you're flexible and open-minded you've won half the battle... Understanding it is easy (because it's just a matter of collecting data and knowledge) but you also have to apply logic and commonsense, in other words even within spirituality it should make sense even if it seems dynamic.
To experience it is something else entirely of course. This is more than collecting data....now instead you take that data and apply it and work with it, examine it and observe it. Experience is different because you have to be willing to reach beyond the mind and what you think you understand, believe or know to apply things outside your paradigms which might or might not include religious knowledge. Since your conscious being is what illuminates the mind (which is mechanical), you have to look outside the conditioning of it to explore what could be there.
Spirituality will stretch you this way because the Reality of the Creator is very vast so you have to be ready for that. This is why spirituality is more a cultivation, the more insight and experience that you have that God exists the more it changes your whole way of thinking and how you view life. The more you come to realize that God does exist and you are a part of that it changes everything you thought you were!
This is not just a mental or psychological game, because again remember that spirituality opposes the mind and even the emotions so you have to be willing to move beyond those factors. I've been broken so many times it's stupid lol, but I'm always trying to be aware of my own limits and emotional baggage.
You can't experience something outside of what you think you know which is the downfall of materialism and atheism, that's how the mind works it doesn't automatically receive information or frequencies outside its channel, it's more a memory bank and storage, a mechanical
compartment.....you've been fed everything you've perceived through this physical body and that's all you may be currently aware of. Luckily Theism is an objective Reality so truth and knowledge exist outside your created bodies and forms.
since the mind is mechanical and its perceptions influenced you have to get outside it's conditioning, be willing to explore numerous sources of knowledge, and then actually apply/interact.
