Points of View

Dear Grapevine: I was particularly pleased with Philip Wylie's article because I found therein a well-phrased statement of my own view of the "spiritual experience," arrived at by honest thought and effort for the past sixteen months. . . . Last Wednesday noon the subject of religious experience was brought up. I answered this in my stumbling way by saying that each of us could have such experience only when we "got on center with ourselves"; if that were not clear we could express it thus: "When we fully realized for the first time in our lives the essential dignity of ourselves as human beings." I further stated that this realization could be achieved through return to a formal religion we once practised but never knew, or by honest thought along our rough-hewn way. Now comes Mr. Wylie with his excellent phrasing of this thought: "there are thoroughly abstract, non-religious routes to this same, universal, human contact with the inner integrity, truth and the 'nature of nature itself'."