We hear a lot of people using the phrase "more spiritual than religious" these days, causing us to ponder what they really mean when they label themselves this way. It has been our experience that there really is a soul deepening distinction among spiritual and religious -- an impact we have termed spiritual emergence versus religious emergency.

Spiritual emergence is a gradual unfoldment of spiritual expression that causes a minimal 'disturbance' in our everyday functioning because we have been somewhat prepared for it, given our disposition for the mystical. On the flip side, there are those who experience what we call religious emergencies, that can cause significant disruptions in their day to day living, as these folks are often unprepared for mystical experiences since they consider themselves to be more religious than spiritual.

Emergent spiritual experiences like visions, deeply felt meditations, out-of-body experiences, apparitions and precognitive dreams are often exhilarating and life altering and can be very transformative -- for all those that have moved to a place of being more spiritual than religious. These same experiences, conversely, also can be deeply unsettling for many who fall in the category of being more religious than spiritual.

People who tend to be more spiritual purpose than religious seem to have less difficulty with one of these types of transcendental experiences. Why? Spiritually-inclined people tend to be more open to mystical experiences. They feel more connected to the transcendentalness of life. They have a spiritual, not religious, mindset! Their openness to the non-material and ethereal dimensions of reality make them the perfect recipients for these life-affirming experiences.

Involved in the challenge highly religious people face in transformative experiences is staying grounded after they experience these 'higher octaves' of reality. These 'altered states of being' are typically foreign, and even taboo, when it comes to handling their ingrained religiosity.

Due to their denominational inhibitions, mainstream religious people have a tendency to be quite reluctant to integrate highly spiritual experiences into their religious practices. They can even feel they would be bedeviled by these experiences.

Great spiritual teachers and mystics alike assure us that these transcendent experiences are natural and healthy. They see these experiences as evidence of our evolving spirituality and enlightenment. They encourage us to willingly allow highly spiritual/mystical experiences to touch our lives as well as to use the memories of those experiences -- and as a consequence the transformative value of those experiences -- to flow into our everyday lives.

Living our lives determined by embedded religious theology makes it tough to allow spiritual and metaphysical teachings into our world view. What usually happens is the cognitive dissonance caused by the new mind-stretching 'experiential information' causes people to tighten their dogmatic reins to ensure that any progress -- and openness -- to potentially transformative truths is shut down completely.

As a matter of fact, that is the troublesome dynamic we see occurring in spiritual communities/New Thought churches/liberal churches today. Should the leadership in those communities is stuck in embedded religious theology, it causes it to be quite hard for the membership that considers themselves to be more spiritual than religious to get a spiritual, not religious, message. It also makes it quite challenging for the minister and music director to determine eye-to-eye if the music director is hesitant to -- or outright refuses to -- change the song lyrics to complement the minister's spiritually-oriented message. It's an old story -- you know, the one about pouring new wine into old wineskins!

Conversely, in the event the leadership happens to be more spiritual than religious in a church setting (holding services in a church building characterized by stained glass windows and pews), the members who consider themselves to be more religious than spiritual demand a message and music that will be more dogmatically religious than universally open and spiritual. The 2 factions behave like oil and water. As well as the ministers who serve those divided communities operate between a rock as well as a hard place because making both factions happy is impossible!

If you have ever been involved in, or are currently involved with, a spiritual/religious community comprised of a culture of religious-oriented and spiritually-oriented folks in the same sanctuary at the exact same time, you know it's a recipe for conflict and division. Congregations often blame their difficulties on going from a family size to a pastoral size to a program size, etc. While there's some truth to that perspective, nearly all of the difficulty lies within the philosophical and religious differences between the spiritual and religious cultures who are at odds.