Relign. Spirituality as felt experience

That’s a profound question 🌿

When you say “religion as felt experience”, you’re pointing to a current in philosophy, psychology, and mysticism that treats religion not primarily as belief, doctrine, or ritual—but as directly lived, inwardly felt experience.

1. 

In Western Thought

• William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902):
  Defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”
  → Here, religion is immediate, personal, experiential, not just institutional or doctrinal.
• Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy, 1917):
  Describes the numinous—the felt encounter with the “wholly other” (mysterium tremendum et fascinans), a sense of awe and trembling before the sacred.
• Phenomenology of Religion (Mircea Eliade, Gerardus van der Leeuw):
  Emphasizes the lived dimension of the sacred—how humans feel and experience the divine, not just how they define it.

2. 

In Eastern Traditions

• Hinduism (Rāja Yoga, Bhakti, Advaita Vedānta):
  Religion is anubhava (direct experience). For example:
  
• Bhakti = felt devotion and love.
• Yoga = direct realization of the Self (puruṣa/ātman).
• Advaita = “aparokṣānubhūti,” immediate realization of non-duality.
• Buddhism:
  Religion is not belief in a dogma, but direct insight into impermanence, suffering, and non-self. Yogic perception (yogaja-pratyakṣa) is a felt experience of truth.
• Mystical Traditions:
  Across Sufism, Zen, and Christian mysticism, religion is described as tasting, touching, seeing God or ultimate reality.

3. 

Core Insight

Religion-as-experience means:

• It is lived before it is explained.
• It is felt in the heart and body—a sense of awe, surrender, bliss, fear, silence, or unity.
• Doctrines, rituals, and institutions are secondary expressions, pointing back to a direct inner encounter with the sacred.

🔑 Summary:

Religion as felt experience emphasizes direct, embodied, inner knowing—a kind of knowledge-by-presence, not by reasoning or external authority. In this sense, religion is not about believing in God (or ultimate reality), but about experiencing God (or reality) directly.

Would you like me to sketch a kind of map of religious experience (e.g., awe, unity, devotion, silence, transformation) across different traditions—so you can see how this “felt dimension” manifests in various ways?