Experiential Paradigm Record Type: Review   ID: 793
Song of the Skylark I: Foundations of Experiential Religion Gomes, Gabriel
Gomes distinguishes between personal and transpersonal religion. The former is primarily concerned with the separate self, and the latter with "expansion, unification, and integration beyond the personal . . . Each addresses different levels of the individual and different stages of consciousness and reality" (p. 1). This volume concentrates on experiential religion, which he writes "aims to help the individual transcend the personal, progress through the transpersonal stages, and arrive at a direct realization of God or Reality as Such. To reach this ultimate goal, you may begin with faith but the final standpoint is not one of faith. Rather, it is a direct experience of what is initially believed. From first to last, therefore, experiential religion is concerned not with faith, doctrine, worship or organization, but with direct experience, to which faith acts as a presupposition in much the same way as a hypothesis acts in a scientific inquiry. And, although experiential religion may start with ideas or images, in the final stages it leaves them behind and arrives at a direct experience not of any idea or image, but of God or Unconditioned Reality itself" (p. 3). Gomes summarizes the book as follows: "The starting point of experiential religion . . . is awakening to your actual condition and seeing how you truly are. Accordingly, a four-step process as well as the context in which you realize this awakening, form the heart of experiential religion: First, you must awaken to the actual condition of your life, which is also the actual condition of all human life. Second, you must awaken to the cause of this condition and directly experience how you cause, confirm, maintain, and reinforce your condition. Third, you must directly experience the possibility of freeing awareness, and thus yourself, and see in what it consists. Fourth, you must take the actual steps to bring it about; and fifth, you must find or create the appropriate context in which this realization will occur" (p. 6). A review of volume two may be found under Techniques.
Publisher Information:	Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991. 416p. Bibl: 391-401; Index: 403-416

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