Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

by Marcus J. Borg

a Spirit person’s experience is one form of mystical experience, a union or communion with God, or even with “God beyond God,” that is, with Reality itself, that which lies behind all conceptualizations, including all conceptions of God. Those who have such experiences speak of them as ineffable, incapable of being described precisely, for the experience is beyond thought and beyond the subject-object distinction or classification that both thought and language presuppose. Yet those who have such experiences also insist that it is a knowing, and not just a feeling; it is a noetic and not simply a subjective emotional state. The knowing is direct, immediate, intuitive, quite unlike the modern Western understanding of knowledge as necessarily involving observer and observed and thus subject-object separation.2