Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

by Marcus J. Borg

Spirit persons are known cross-culturally. They are people who have vivid and frequent subjective experiences of another level or dimension of reality. These experiences involve momentary entry into nonordinary states of consciousness and take a number of different forms. Sometimes there is a vivid sense of momentarily seeing into another layer of reality; these are visionary experiences. Sometimes there is the experience of journeying into that other dimension of reality; this is the classic experience of the shaman. Sometimes there is a strong sense of another reality coming upon one, as in the ancient expression “The Spirit fell upon me.” Sometimes the experience is of nature or an object within nature momentarily transfigured by “the sacred” shining through it. Bushes burn without being consumed; the whole earth is seen as filled with the glory of God (where glory means “radiant presence”). The world is perceived in such a way that previous perceptions seem nothing more than blindness. What all persons who have these experiences share is a strong sense of there being more to reality than the tangible world of our ordinary experience. They share a compelling sense of having experienced something “real.” They feel strongly that they know something they didn’t know before. Their experiences are noetic, involving not simply a feeling of ecstasy, but a knowing. What such persons know is the sacred. Spirit persons are people who experience the sacred frequently and vividly.28