Have we started to look at the world as a giant theme park? We go through life collecting experiences. We go about turning everything into roller coasters, or carousels. (I know. Nobody rides carousels anymore.) Sex is easily morphed into a ride, wherein we collect and store the experience in our bodies.

We are no longer human beings, but, rather, human feelings.

Where is the room to derive anything more than a feeling from anything? An experience. Life becomes a succession of experiences. A trip to an art museum is about experiencing how art makes us feel. Always feel, never think.  Thinking itself is debased into a means to access feeling.

What the experience-collecting paradigm leads us to is a very narrow and selfish focusing into what life is. We look at religion, or spirituality, through the filter of how a rite, like worship, makes us feel. Do we feel closer to God? People are fond of saying they feel closer to God in a garden than they do in a house of worship. I don’t wish to discount that attitude. We all feel that.  But is knowing God more than a feeling?

Feeling is not bad. Rather it is limiting. Can we imagine that there are things beyond feeling? That, say Heaven, goes beyond feeling and experience?