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In the beginning...

I'm going to make a sweeping comment about religion.

I think it is fair to say that at the heart of many religions, maybe even all, is a keystone story of a person who claims to have had a personal experience with the Divine, God, Ultimate Truth or go ahead, pick a name that suits you.

Here's a short list of characters with such experience:

Krishna

Buddha

Abraham

Jesus

Mohamed

George Bush (?)

...and the list goes on and on, into infinity it seems, and into our own lives as we know them. So what about this? We tend to be skeptical about any mention of this type of thing today, and are especially suspicious of this phenomena happening to a person of power or our most marginalized people - that wandering schizophrenic claiming to be god. We drug them and put them away or leave them walking barefoot in their delusions. I guess powerful people have been using the claim of divine inspiration to manipulate their constituencies for as longs as the real beginning of history where also, people have been screaming about the end of the world, wandering barefoot, eating nothing but locusts.

So, what is it about this phenomena that is so compelling and believable and also so outrageous and scary?

Maybe it's in the construction of the stories themselves, or the times they were told, or maybe there is something really real and true about them that we all sort of know somehow. Maybe we just love the mystery of it.

That is what I am going to explore in my action research project.

I am going to use the technique of digital story telling to make links to the classic and/or more obscure religious experience narratives in our scriptures and the everyday awe and wonder that many of us experience in or own lives. We might find that we all have some surprising things in common with people across the millennia and globe today, the powerful, the crazy, the devout and even the atheist, in how these experiences shape our individual and collective histories.

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb This feature about Philip Dick's "Valis" experience was published in Weirdo The comic is public domain

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