Religion as felt experience

 Perfect 🌿 Let’s sketch a map of religious experience as felt across traditions. Think of it as a spectrum of inner modes of encountering the sacred.

🌍 A Map of Religious Felt Experiences

1. 

Awe & Trembling (Numinous Encounter)

• Feeling-tone: Overwhelming sense of the sacred, simultaneously terrifying and fascinating (mysterium tremendum et fascinans – Rudolf Otto).
• Traditions:
  
• Moses at the burning bush (“take off your sandals, this is holy ground”).
• Sufi poetry describing trembling before God’s majesty.
• Shinto reverence before kami (sacred spirits in nature).
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2. 

Unity & Non-Dual Awareness

• Feeling-tone: Dissolution of subject-object duality; sense of oneness with all that is.
• Traditions:
  
• Advaita Vedānta: Realization of aham brahmāsmi (“I am Brahman”).
• Buddhism: Direct perception of emptiness (śūnyatā).
• Christian mysticism: Meister Eckhart’s “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
• Zen satori: Sudden experience of “thusness” (tathatā).
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3. 

Devotion & Love (Bhakti)

• Feeling-tone: Intense longing, love, surrender toward the divine.
• Traditions:
  
• Hindu bhakti: Mirabai’s ecstatic songs of love for Krishna.
• Christian mysticism: St. Teresa of Ávila’s “spiritual marriage” with Christ.
• Sufism: Rumi’s poetry of divine love.
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4. 

Silence & Stillness

• Feeling-tone: Inner quiet, dissolution of thought, “cloud of unknowing.”
• Traditions:
  
• Rāja Yoga & Buddhist meditation: Samādhi, nirvāṇa.
• Christian mystics: The apophatic way (“God is found in silence, beyond words”).
• Daoism: Wu wei (effortless harmony with the Dao).
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5. 

Transformation & Healing

• Feeling-tone: A felt sense of renewal, forgiveness, or liberation from past burdens.
• Traditions:
  
• Christian conversion (“born again” experience).
• Buddhist insight into non-self leading to release from suffering.
• Indigenous shamanic rites of passage—death-and-rebirth symbolism.
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6. 

Everyday Sacredness

• Feeling-tone: Sacred shining through the ordinary; wonder in daily life.
• Traditions:
  
• Zen tea ceremony—mindful presence as sacred.
• Hasidic Judaism—finding God in joy, song, and community.
• Native American spirituality—seeing spirit in land, animals, ancestors.
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✨ Key Insight

Across traditions, religion as felt experience moves through different modes:

• Awe (confronting the holy),
• Union (merging with ultimate reality),
• Love (surrender to the divine),
• Silence (transcending words),
• Transformation (new birth, liberation),
• Everyday sacredness (finding holiness in ordinary life).

Would you like me to turn this into a visual map/diagram—showing these modes of experience as a circle or spectrum, so you can see how they relate to each other?