We hear a lot of men and women using the phrase "more spiritual than religious" right now, causing us to ponder what they really mean when they label themselves this way. It's been our experience that there really is a soul deepening distinction among spiritual and religious -- a difference 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. Having said that, there are actually people who experience what we call religious emergencies, which can cause significant disruptions within their day to day living, because these folks are usually 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 tend paths to enlightenment (Additional Info) be exhilarating and life-changing as well as can be very transformative -- for all those who have moved to a place of being more spiritual than religious. These same experiences, in contrast, may also be deeply unsettling for many who fall within the category of being more religious than spiritual.

People who tend to be more spiritual than religious appear to have less difficulty with one of these kinds of transcendental experiences. Why? Spiritually-inclined people tend to be more open to mystical experiences. They feel more linked 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 of such life-affirming experiences.

A component of the challenge highly religious people face in transformative experiences is staying grounded once they experience these 'higher octaves' of reality. These 'altered states of being' are generally foreign, and also taboo, with regards to handling their ingrained religiosity.

As a result of their denominational inhibitions, mainstream religious people tend 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 proof 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 thus the transformative value of those experiences -- to flow into our everyday lives.

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

In 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 makes it quite hard for the membership that considers themselves to be more spiritual than religious to get a spiritual, not religious, message. It also causes it to be very hard 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!

Then again, should the leadership is actually 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 and also a hard place because making both factions happy is impossible!

If you have ever been associated with, 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 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, the majority of the difficulty lies in the philosophical and religious differences between the spiritual and religious cultures who are at odds.