Spiritual Experience*

What if you don’t have a spiritual experience when you try to meditate?  If you are practicing the 12th step of the 12 step process of recovery from addiction, it says, “Having had a spiritual experience...”.  Are we all doomed if no spiritual experience?  Did we do the steps wrong?  Is there no god?  Well, as someone remarked, maybe what we need is “spiritual growth,” rather than a spriritual experience.  I may not be too certain what a spiritual experience is but I can tell when I am acting better and not in my old behavior.  Or moving from vice to virtue one might say.  If I am being more of service to others, selflessly, kinder, forgiving and accepting of others, less all about me as the center of the universe, then my higher power is at work.  I don’t need to have a spiritual experience to prove it.  I can be delusional about a spiritual experience, but cannot fool myself about behavior, and even if I try, others will somehow remind me.