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The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?
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p 85

 

Carl Jung

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Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".
We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behaviour.
The other person's behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other's behaviour to the other's experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience.

 

Ronald David Laing

 

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God. Only exceptionally gifted individuals or especially noble communities rise essentially above this level; in these there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints. Viewed from this angle, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are near to one another.

 

Albert Einstein

 

Religious faith often finds itself at odds with story-telling. Puritans ban acting companies. Islam is uneasy about all forms of representation. And why? Because the experience of walking out of the theater after a performance is a paradigm of disillusionment, and religious people are officially supposed to believe, first and foremost, in their own literal faith, from which there are no exits. They've taken the big leap, and live, ever after, in free fall.

 

Thomas M. Disch

 

It was religion, which, by teaching men their near relation to God, awakened in them the consciousness of their importance as individuals. It was the struggle for religious rights, which opened their eyes to all their rights. It was resistance to religious usurpation, which led men to withstand political oppression. It was religious discussion, which roused the minds of all classes to free and vigorous thought.

 

William Ellery (preacher) Channing

 

The shaman is not a priest, the shaman has no secret knowledge, he is equivalent to the hunter. He has a specific skill that is subjugated to the needs of the group. He is prepared to take drugs, go loopy, visit the underworld, bring back knowledge and tell everybody. He’s not keeping a secret knowledge. Originally priests were instructors, they passed out the mysteries and revelations to the masses. Increasingly, they say ‘you don’t need to have a religious experience, we are having that for you. That’s what we are here for.” Eventually, they start saying ‘you don’t need to have a religious experience, and neither do we. We’ve got this book about some people who – a thousand years ago – had a religious experience. And if you come in on Sunday, we’ll read you a bit of that and you’ll be sorted, don’t you worry.” Effectively a portcullis has slammed down between the individual and their godhead. ‘You can’t approach your godhead except through us now. We are the only path. Our church is the only path.’ But that is every human being’s birthright, to have ingress to their godhead.

 

Alan Moore