William James wrote a pathbreaking work, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which is one of the reasons I named my Stages course The Various Stages of the Spiritual Experience when I was first developing its nearly 1000 pages of content. Some of the important points James made on this topic are exactly what I’ve been saying all along:

"Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius." 

In other words, cultivation is what matters. Gong-fu is what matters. Religion is all about teaching you how to cultivate and preserving the means of cultivation so that you can EXPERIENCE gong-fu and spiritual states. If you think it’s about ceremonies, rituals, belief or just study, frankly you’re cheating yourself. That’s just not enough.

"The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things."

Just as in science, it is the anomalies that bring forth new principles. It’s the people who actually achieve something ont he spiritual trail whom you should study. You cannot nor should not dismiss them just because they don’t "fit your picture" or notions of how things should be. They are as things are, it’s just you don’t understand yet.

Because so few people cultivate, so few reach stages of gong-fu. But gong-fu is the true state of affairs. It is the gong-fu of advanced practitioners we should study, especially the same gong-fu that appears across religions. This is something I always emphasize. Lift weights in China, Africa, Israel, Russia or anywhere else and your muscles will get bigger. It’s a law or principlethat holds regardless of your sex, race, country, religion. The result is non-denominational. Cultivate correctly and you’ll get the first dhyana samadhi and experience similar gong-fu. It’s the same common principle regardless of your religion. This is what spiritual striving is all about.