3 · Direct Experience / Living Doctrine

“Being more awake and aware than we have ever been — always.”

Direct Experience is the knowing of reality firsthand, without intermediary — the difference between an idea about the sacred and an encounter with it. We have called this Living Doctrine: a religious life that is direct rather than inherited, lived rather than believed at second hand. A doctrine merely received can be argued; a doctrine directly experienced can only be lived. The more we fashion our lives to receive direct experience, the more we discover that the direct and the divine are one and the same — that reality, met without intermediary, is already shot through with what we had been taught to seek elsewhere.