The Supreme Experience

 

I recently reflected on what (if anything) could make me *truly* believe in God and/or follow a certain religion. Philosophical arguments? Probably not. Can you *really* prove anything by philosophy? Existential longing? Perhaps, but my longing doesn´t prove in and of itself that the object of the longing is true. Would I change worldview if my longing would  change? Bayseian equations? LOL. No, only an experience would do it. An "empirical" experience in the broad sense of the term. Perhaps "phenomenological" is the right term. 

As C S Lewis pointed out, however, seeing isn´t believing. 

Let´s say I have an experience of Krishna and Radha dancing in the forest. It would have to be *very good* to cancel all my background knowledge and contextual knowledge, which points very much away from Krishnaism. And even such an experience wouldn´t be able to cancel out *all* my background knowledge. For instance, I know that other people have seen other gods dancing in the forest (Shiva comes to mind). How do I know which of these gods is the highest one? Krishna and his devotees say Krishna, Shiva and his sadhus say Shiva. There doesn´t seem to be any way to adjudicate their respective claims. Or let´s say I meet Christ on the road to another town, and Christ tells me that actually both Krishna and Shiva are demons! But I know that other people have experienced blessings from these deities. Indeed, I see that there are both blessed and cursed people on all paths. So pluralism seems to be the bottom line, even if I personally only see one god. 

Is there any experience so strong that it could cancel out even pluralism? From the top of my head, the only one I can think of would be an experience of some kind of Divine Unity, either a blinding Light or a dazzling Darkness, which would turn all other experiences into fleeting dreams. But note that even such an experience wouldn´t "disprove" the phenomenal deities I´ve seen in the forest or on the road, it would simply relegate them to a "lower" level (if that´s even the word for it). 

Somebody might respond that there is another kind of experience that is self-evidently higher than the one just described: the experience of ecstatic love towards a personal deity. If you have such an experience, you will know for sure. Compare Krishna or Christ. But why would this be self-evident? Let´s say I have an experience of complete freedom and power instead, like in some Shaiva traditions. Maybe I will consider *that* to be self-evidently true and self-evidently higher than ecstatic love. Then, I would appear in Varanasi and scare the hell out of the Aghori, who will know that I am the Lord! Or maybe I will have an experience of complete serene stillness, consider that self-evidently supreme and become a Buddhist...

End of meditation session. It seems at our present level of hominoid evolution (or is it dhyan-chohanic emanation), we really can´t know what form of the Divine (if any) is the highest. More positively put: maybe we don´t have to. No matter how long the road, the Dharmakaya will ultimately lure us towards It through countless upon countless of skilfull means...