I borrowed a book from the library. It is an engaging thriller, provided that you can skim over such implausibilities as a police crisis team turning over negotiations to a defense lawyer, an American police officer changing his family name twice while on a 2-day assignment in the Bahamas, and hostages being threatened with electrocution by a battery-powered generator.
"Write about what you know," they say, and I'm almost positive that the book's author has never known a battery-powered generator. Not that it is impossible of course, but surely improbable since such a device could only generate some fraction of the power in the battery.
In matters of religion, however, many people try to function with the spiritual equivalent of battery-powered generators. Many or, I would venture to think, all of us will at times try to generate spiritual electricity based on our internal store of spirituality.
The actual reality is much the same in both the physical and spiritual realms. We drain the battery and end up with less than what we had to begin with.
There must be something intrinsically appealing to us humans in the idea of being self-contained. We live our lives and write our books knowing that mind, spirit, and power can only continue when in relationship. And yet we live and write and dream about people and generators which are somehow self-contained.
We seem to think that reality would be more clean, more understandable, or perhaps more managable if only there were discrete boxes which functioned on their own. And perhaps this is the key: Our minds can give attention to only a few items at a time, but the number of relationships grows polynomially. (Tom, alone, has no relationships. Tom and Sarah have one relationship. Tom, Sarah, and Jordan have three. Tom, Sarah, Jordan, and Sydney have six. And after that it gets complicated.)
Deep down, we know the limitations we have in actual reality and do we not then try to compensate by inventing a new, simpler reality? Simpler, that is, for our brains to comprehend. But our goal is not to invent alternative realities. We play the actual reality game.