It is easy to confuse study about religious practice with sacred study — study that is itself religious practice.

This is especially true if one’s primary source of spiritual experience is other than sacred study.

One can pray or meditate or take drugs or just spontaneously enter an altered consciousness, and have extraordinary ecstatic experiences. But just as ordinary natural experiences can be interpreted in a multiple ways, each with its own validity and tradeoffs, these extraordinary supernatural experiences can be interpreted multiple ways. And all interpretations, whether natural or supernatural, belong to some specific faith, some specific subjectivity manifesting as its own form of objectivity.

Study as religious practice is an indirect conditioning of the subject of faith through the activity of interpretation, which is not only literal acceptance of the material, but literary “sense-making” construction (and deconstruction) experimentation, hermeneutic crystallization (and dissolution) and mystical influx.

The material studied can be texts or they can be firsthand experiences, ordinary or extraordinary. But in such study focus transcends the factual material, and concerns the subject manifested in the changing objectivities. The medium is the faith, and it is the message behind and beyond religious study. The material matters, too, but as substantiation and as a principle of acceptance and rejection of understandings.

If we approach our experiential materials this way, even our most ordinary experiences can be sacralized, infused with meaning. The significance of extraordinary experiences is that they can challenge our faiths, and invite change.

The danger of psychology, materialism and similarly literal faiths is that they equip us to explain away phenomena that invite transformation of faith.