Have you noticed our world seems to be coming apart?

Hey ! Welcome to today’s message:

Have you noticed that our world seems to be coming apart?

Natural disasters like the LA fires… the looming threat of WW III… rampant crime… a hot war in Europe.  It’s a mess, isn’t it?  

And what kind of resources do you have to fall back on?  Who do you trust when the going gets tough?  Our politicians – they line their pockets while letting our cities burn and handcuffing the police.  We have a media that sensationalizes everything and omits the truth.  Social media?  A million different lines of nonsense.  The truth is, life is pretty shallow right now, and most of us don’t know where to turn.  

So maybe you turn to God for help.  But let’s be honest, what do you really know about God?  Everyone seems to have an opinion about God:  God is Jesus – God is Krishna – God is this – God is that – God doesn’t exist! – yes, She does!  It’s a hot mess, isn’t it?  

Everyone assumes their idea about God is the correct one.  But what if it isn’t?  How would you know?  Do you know the truth about God just because somebody says, “This is the Truth?”  We know that people lie all the time.  They have hidden agendas and axes to grind, and sometimes, they just lie for the heck of it.  And the wretched truth is, almost everything YOU know about God is something that someone else told you.  How do you know if you got the right stuff or were sold a bill of goods?  How can you sort through this mess to separate truth from somebody else’s fiction?  How can you get to something you can RELY on?

Our newsletter, Inside the Invisible, cuts through the fluff and nonsense that clutter our perceptions to bring you clarity that you can count on.  The clarity we have found comes from applying scientific research methods to the writings of the spiritual masters from all of the major world religions – mystics who have actually experienced the Divine and whose lives have been transformed by their experiences.  We want to bring these insights to your computer on a weekly basis.  And the best part – you get this valuable information for FREE.

So who am I that I would make you such an offer?  I have spent my life trying to discern fact from fiction.  I am an ordained Episcopal priest and a clinical psychologist.  At 76, I am now retired and can devote my remaining years to what I believe is our most important mission in this life – to learn about the Divine from our own personal experiences and to share the results with others.  After all, if the scriptures of the world’s great religions are correct, our efforts here on this earth will determine our outcome for eternity.

A bit about my own spiritual journey.  I attended seminary in the early 1970s, spending three years taking graduate courses in theology, church history, Old and New Testament studies (including learning New Testament Greek so that I could read our scriptures in their original language), liturgical worship, church music, and the like.  For these efforts, I was awarded a Master of Divinity degree.  To this day, I am not sure what that means.  I was no more divine upon graduation than I was before I entered seminary.

Mind you, I am not complaining about what I learned there – it was valuable and shaped my spiritual life in many ways.  But the one thing they did NOT teach was how to connect with the Divine.  Curious, isn’t it?  They taught everything they could about the Christian religion except how to forge a living connection with Christ.  

I then served parishes in the Episcopal Diocese of Utah for nine years.  My last parish, St. John’s in Logan, Utah, was comprised mostly of college professors, their families, and their students.  I once asked this very bright and articulate group what, for them, constituted a spiritual experience.  The resulting silence was deafening, and the obvious discomfort in the room quickly became intolerable.

After the initial awkward silence, there were a few tentative answers.  It was almost as if they were afraid of saying the wrong thing.  And when they finally responded, all of their answers had to do with church-related activities like ‘feeling something when I receive communion.’  I was greatly surprised.  

Nobody talked about their experiences in prayer and meditation.  Why not?  Didn’t they feel connected to God, then?  And even though my congregation was composed of avid outdoors types, nobody talked about their experiences in nature – a beautiful sunset, the glorious snow-covered mountains.  Just this awkward silence.

Later, when prompted, they began to describe the spiritual feelings that arose from their nature-based experiences.  They talked about great feelings of awe at the overpowering majesty of a glorious sunset.  They talked about feeling their hearts opening somehow in response to these experiences.  And then, with some prodding, they began to describe their experiences of loving – seeing their babies being born, their children so innocent in their sleep, their love for their partners, their friends.  It was as if a whole new world opened up as they considered these very personal experiences as spiritual ones.  But even as the discussion deepened, no one risked talking about God, and Jesus was nowhere near the conversation.  

The great news here was a kind of group heart-opening, as people looked outside of what is conventionally called ‘spiritual’ and realized they were actually having spiritual experiences frequently in their daily lives.  Not only that, these experiences were enormous for them; they weren’t something trivial or inconsequential.  The other side of the coin, however, also revealed itself.  These good Christian people had no idea how to cultivate their lives so they could have more of these experiences.  And the Church was not doing a very good job showing them how they could open to more of them!

While I pastored at St. John’s, I pursued graduate degrees in clinical psychology.  I thought I was going to school to learn psychotherapy, and I did indeed learn those skills.  Ironically, the courses I hated – statistics and research methods – turned out to be some of the most important ones for my spiritual formation.  I realized later in life that these research skills could be applied to religion and spirituality. As I pursued this, I found amazing truths about the spiritual dimension of our being.

Perhaps the single most important concept of my graduate studies at Utah State was the idea that if your theory does not account for every single bit of data, then your theory is wrong.  When I applied this concept to religion, I was appalled.  Buddhism is a religion, and while it recognizes that gods exist, it doesn’t ascribe any significance to this.  Hinduism, on the other hand, has a multiplicity of gods.  Christianity has only one God but in three persons.  Are these three religions talking about the same thing?  How could they all possibly be true?  Are other understandings of the spiritual life false because they don’t believe like I do?  This was an important turning point for me:  how do you distinguish between spiritual truth and falsehoods?  How do you learn to see Reality?

God then moved me to Southern California, ostensibly to do my clinical internship at Patton State Hospital.  On reflection, I think the real purpose was to connect me with Dr. Ron Jue, president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology.  I apprenticed under Ron, and through him, met many wonderful spiritual teachers from other traditions.  I began to see, with my own eyes, that the followers of other spiritual traditions had access to the same spiritual experiences that were available in my own tradition.  

In 1988, I chaired a panel discussion at an ATP conference that included a Hindu nun, Srimata Gayatri Devi, the Buddhist teacher, Jack Engler, and Father Tom Keating, who were instrumental in my deeper spiritual formation.  The next year, Ron, I, and many others put on the Contemplative Congress, where we invited contemplative teachers from most of the major religions.  It was here that I met Joseph Goldstein, Susan Saltzburg, Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, Maezumi Roshi, Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man, and Nur al-Jerrahi, among others.  We were fortunate that the Dalai Lama was our keynote speaker, but unfortunate in that he was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize that Saturday morning and was whisked away by the press.

These experiences moved me to create a weekly group that taught the Christian forms of meditation and contemplative prayer.  At our peak, we had twelve chapters throughout Southern California and we put on three international conferences that taught Christian meditative disciplines.  I was also introduced to Bishop Kallistos Ware, a great soul from Orthodox Christianity who took my practice of the Jesus Prayer much deeper.

Each of these teachers showed me the validity of their tradition, both by means of their teachings and by their personal presence, as transformed souls.  The richness that I have experienced with them is what I plan to share with you in these newsletters.

*  *  *

Here is what you can expect in future newsletters.  First, we will describe the goals of spiritual practice because if you don’t have the clarity of a defined target, you are unlikely to make real progress.  Second, we will describe the inner attitudes necessary to make quick progress.  Third, we will introduce you to spiritual practices, taken from all the great religions, that will facilitate your inner transformation.  To this, unlike many others, we will add the insights that can be gained from science, in particular, the discipline of psychology.  Psychology is, after all, the science of behavior change, and we will apply the information developed here to the spiritual quest.

*  *  *

Tune in next week as we describe the ultimate goal of the spiritual journey and explore the differences between the established religions and the inner spiritual work that you must do if you wish to deepen your spiritual life.

I hope you will share this free weekly newsletter with your family and friends.  Thank you for joining in this transformative journey!

P.S. If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence. 👇

To access the other newsletter editions of the “Inside The Invisible Newsletter,” — or if you’d like to read ahead or go back.

Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.