What is “Experiential Holiness?”

SHORT ANSWER: IT’S PART OF the tagline for this blog. Longer answer: it’s a way of seeing and living that recognizes and hopefully honors the interconnectedness of all things, and That which makes them (it?) all possible.

“Holiness” is a tricky word. My trusty go-to 1972 Funk and Wagnalls defines “holy” as “regarded with or characterized by reverence because associated with God; having a divine origin; sacred” as well as “having spiritual and moral worth.” “Holiness” is “the state or quality of being holy.”

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the term “G?d” represents the fusion of consciousness and the interconnection of all things, and “holiness” is the sensed quality of that fusion — of the candlesticks on my mantelpiece, cats, you-the-reader, songs, teachers, the cosmic web — all of it partaking of this all-is-oneness. (The piece of paper on which I first scribbled this article is connected to the tree it came from, which came from a forest, which came from the ground, which came from the planet, which came from the stars, which came from the Big Bang. All is related to all.) It’s like seeing a “Learn Here” sticker — or G?d’s fingerprints? — on everything. Grasping in your kishkes (guts) that simply elegant model of the Universe is what I call “experiential holiness.”

(Of course, since these matters are so all-encompassing and immediate, they are notoriously difficult to speak of, so as my late friend Sputnik would say, “Sounds about as good as any other damn thing.” Words to the would-be wise.)

4 comments for “What is “Experiential Holiness?”

  1. Bill Ernoehazy
    2018.08.15 at 0757

    Neal, are you pointing to a nondualist sort of experience-of–Is? It sounds like a description I might fumblingly offer of something I have glimpsed…

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