It's a little dense, but these paragraphs near the end as nearly articulate my own experience of the Divine as any words I've ever read:
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What is the nature of divinity, directly experienced? By all reports, there is affirmation of the Oneness of things; there is a sense of a Self that transcends personality; there is an appreciation of that higher Self's forever taking part in every conscious thing, as if the universe were eternally exploring itself, playing symbolic games with itself through us; there is a perception of a benevolent, intermediary intelligence, which is both our own underlying consciousness and something outside us at once, a nurturing mind that reaches out to us, but is too often prevented from reaching us -- prevented by us, by ourselves. We are in the way of ourselves.
And there is a recognition that it is not necessary for this "God" to have "created" the universe in any humanly comprehendable sense; it is not necessary for this God to have ordained that your Mother died when you were twelve, or that you have chronic arthritis, or that you are prone to drug addiction, or that the Holocaust must take place. It is not necessary for this God to have ordained the course of history, as Will and Ariel Durant expected, to have guided it as human beings think of a "God" that "guides" in the anthropomorphic sense. It is not necessary for this God to be all-powerful and thus all-responsible, at least not as human beings imagine all- powerful intelligence to be.
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Nothing so subjective and personal should ever be translated into dogma and require orthodoxy of belief or compliance of action.
Not ever. Article VI, clause 3 of the US Constitution is perhaps the greatest contribution the Framers made to the evolution of human social theory and practice.
appreciatively,
Bright
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