Experience, Speculation, and the Space Between

There’s a tension I’ve lived with for years: the gap between the mystical experience I actually have and the metaphysical systems I enjoy constructing. They coexist, but they don’t meet. One is lived; the other is intellectual play.

My spiritual experience is modest and quiet. What I actually feel is a unitive ground of being, a sense of nature as alive, occasional animistic intensities, and an implicit archetypal order that sometimes resembles a Platonic Nous. It has depth, but not dialogue. Presence, but not personality. It has never presented itself as a “Thou.”

I grew up in a world where God was personal — the Lord, the Saviour, the Comforter, the ever‑present help in times of trouble. Those archetypes still exert a pull. I understand their emotional power. I understand why people find them compelling. I understand why I once did.

But speculation about how such things might be true does not make them feel true. It does not produce the confidence, comfort, or rest that evangelical faith promises. Even a watertight rational argument for a personal deity — if such a thing existed — would not necessarily create the lived sense of being held, guided, or addressed. That sense has never come to me. There is, for me, no Balm in Gilead.

The only real “proof” of a personal deity would be a deity that relates: one that seeks, interacts, initiates, and makes itself known. Otherwise it is like having a friend or relative whom one “knows” exists but who never appears, never contacts anyone, never affects one’s life. At some point, the absence becomes the fact.

So how do I proceed? I see three directions emerging for this blog.

1. My actual spiritual experience — expressed indirectly

I doubt I can convey my real spiritual experience in straightforward prose. The sublime rarely survives narrative. What I experience is better expressed through photographs of numinous places, art, symbol, music, fragments of poetry, koans, lines from the Tao Te Ching or the Vedas, and the occasional “high‑sounding” phrase that gestures at the ineffable. If I write about my spirituality at all, it will be through these indirect forms. They fit the experience better than exposition ever could.

2. A metaphysical sandbox — not a creed

My speculative posts (currently under Logos Weave) will continue, but with a clearer framing. They are ideas only. A sandbox is the right metaphor: a place to build, test, dismantle, and rebuild conceptual structures without claiming they describe my lived spirituality.

In that sandbox I’ll continue to scratch the itch of high claims — especially the claims of Christianity, but also of other traditions. I’ll examine whether they work logically, without bias to disprove them, but also without special pleading or prior commitment. Neutral monism, panpsychism, nested holons, Platonic Nous — all of these can be explored freely as intellectual architecture rather than existential truth.

3. A psychological deep dive into belief

The third direction is a careful, non‑disparaging exploration of the psychology of belief, especially within the evangelical mindset I know so well.

What is “conversion”? What does it mean to have a “personal relationship with Jesus”? Why do people feel guilt, a need for forgiveness, and identify with “Amazing Grace” and “a wretch like me”? What is “being born again”? What are these experiences of the Holy Spirit? How do they arise psychologically? How are they shaped sociologically? How do they intersect with broader cultural and political values?

I don’t think people are lying when they claim divine encounter. They are experiencing something. The question is: what? And why does reason, logic, and the subjective experience of millions fail to match these claims?

This is not an attempt to debunk. It is an attempt to understand.