OK…here is what Reitan says. First he says that we have two contrasting feelings of dependence and freedom.

Dependence is when you have a sense that something outside of you is affecting you.

Freedom is when you have a sense that you are doing something of your own volition.

In ordinary experience everything feels like something is either happening to you or you feel as if you are doing something. Reitan says that in Schleiermacher’s terms it is a contrast between “receptivity” and “activity.”

As an example of this Reitan uses the sky. It doesn’t feel as if I am inventing the blueness of the sky, but rather it feels as if something external is producing the experience in me. The “looking” (at the sky) feels as if it is you who is doing it but the blueness is something that comes from something external to one’s self. Reitan goes on to say that if we were to imagine a grassy hill, we wouldn’t for a minute believe its real because the feeling that accompanies such imagining is one of freedom and not dependence. And so the reason why we believe there ARE real hills out there is because so much of our experience is accompanied by dependence rather than feeling.

Reitan says that the reason he believes in freewill is because of the feeling of freedom. He says for example when he drags himself out of bed it doesn’t feel like anything is happening to him (the mechanistic result of physical laws regulating neural firings in his brain) but something he has freely chosen to do.

Even still Reitan says that Schleiermacher goes even further and says that there is an even more basic feeling of ABSOLUTE DEPENDENCE that BOTH freedom and dependence SHARE. (I’m personally thinking here something along the lines that of Greg’s freedom to live “compatibilistically tied/anchored to God.”)

Now, if everything is flavoured by both freedom and dependence, and both of those are flavoured by absolute dependence (with nothing to contrast it with) how would we get at this feeling that underlies every experience? Good question.

Well, Schleiermacher, believed that “underlying both is something analogous to what underlies those experiences that we think of as receptive. That is, all of our experience is accompanied by something like the feeling of dependence--except that it is a feeling of dependence UNACCOMPANIED BY ANY RECIPROCAL FREEDOM.

We are both receptive and active to everything in the empirical world right? However, “in relation to the world encountered with our senses, we NEVER have a feeling of ABSOLUTE freedom. What we experience and what we do is never wholly in our control because we are acting on a world that comes to us a given….In short, anything we can see or hear or feel is something over which we exert SOME control, and so will not be something upon which we depend absolutely. If there is such a thing, its not to be found in the empirical world.

This is the POINTER toward transcendence and what we call God. And that’s the thing. Schleiermacher thinks we do have a feeling of absolute dependence. Why he thinks this is because by pointing out our inability to have absolute freedom even when we are engaged in entirely inward activity such as the use of the imagination, we are not dependent on the PHYSICAL world but rather we are dependent on our own existence as a being that can act. That is, “we do not call ourselves and our power to choose into existence by our choices (absolute freedom). Instead, our existence is a precondition for any free activity at all. Likewise, it is a precondition for our capacity to be receptive."

And this is where the mystics start coming in the picture. Because when we start to focus on this FACT and turn our attention inward to the experience of it (which the mystics do) what we encounter is a feeling of dependence unaccompanied by any feeling of freedom. And it is this that points us beyond ourselves. I have to quote this next part in totality.

“It is ‘the consciousness that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside of us’ (Schleiermacher) When we become truly conscious of it, it is an self-consciousness that Schleiermacher can only describe as the sense of being PURELY receptive, not even REMOTELY active in relation to SOMETHING.”

If one were to ask why we should trust this feeling, Reitan responds by saying that he believes in the external world because his sensory experience feels receptive. Freewill because his experience feels active. Why shouldn’t we believe in a transcendent reality beyond the empirical world, given that my experience, at bottom FEELS utterly dependent on such reality?

And this is why the mystics shouldn’t be overlooked. This flowering bud resides in all of us, and “our efforts to expand this “God-consciousness” can benefit from the teaching of those mystics who dwell in it more often and more completely than we--much as all of us can benefit from scientists who have honed their observational skills in the empirical realm.”

It is this “feeling of absolute dependence” which I thought that coincided nicely with what you were saying. If God is right here right now he is also right here right now in such a way that we are TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY DEPENDENT on him…right here and right now.

By the way, Reitan points out how Harris has delved into Buddhist mystical experience but comes away contradicting himself by pointing to his attempt of trying to show how his experience basically proved his already held assumptions about God existence.  I'd have to look that up again, but I thought this was so important to what you were saying.