Some food for thought from Watt’s (Beyond Theology):
“Spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp, just as sensuality needs a bed on the hard ground, a rough blanket, and a long look at the utterly improbable stars.” (p. 162)
“Material pleasure, even of the most refined order, is never enough, if “enough” is what you are seeking. If there is that strange, deep longing in the heart for something that is “the answer”–the gorgeous, golden glory you have always wanted but have never been able to find or define, the thing that is finally for real and for keeps, the eternal home–then anything in the physical or intellectual universe that is asked to be that will collapse. […] The answer, the eternal home, will never, never be found so long as you are seeking it, for the simple reason that it is yourself–not the self that you are aware of and that you can love or hate, but the one that always vanishes when you look for it. As soon as you realize that you are the Center, you have no further need to see it, to try to make it an object or an experience. This is why the mystics call the highest knowledge unknowing.” (p. 162)
“[A] superior religion goes beyond theology. It turns toward the center; it investigates and feels out the inmost depths of man himself, since it is here that we are in most intimate contact, or rather, in identity with existence itself. Dependence on theological ideas and symbols is replaced by direct, non-conceptual touch with a level of being which is simultaneously one’s own and the being of all others. For at the point where I am most myself I am most beyond myself. At root I am one with all the other branches. Yet this level of being is not something to be grasped and categorized, to be inspected, analyzed or made an object of knowledge–not because it is taboo or sacrosanct, but because it is the point from which one radiates, the light not before but within the eyes.” (p.225)
“[T]he way in which we interpret mystical experience must be plausible. That is to say, it must fit in with and/or throw light upon the best available knowledge about life and the universe.” (p. 225)
[Pages 226-229 kick ass and should be re-read. They discuss the connection of modern scientific understanding with the feeling of mystical experience.]
“[U]ltimate faith is not in or upon anything at all. It is complete letting go. Not only is it beyond theology; it is also beyond atheism and nihilism. Such letting go cannot be attained. It cannot be acquired or developed through perseverance and exercises, except insofar as such efforts prove the impossibility of acquiring it. Letting go comes only through desperation. When you know that it is beyond you–beyond your powers of action as beyond your powers of relaxation. When you give up every last trick and device for getting it, including this “giving up” as something that one might do, say, at ten o’clock tonight. That you cannot by any means do it–that IS it! That is the mighty self-abandonment which gives birth to the stars.” (p.229)