In the discussion of religious or mystical subjects on this board, the "experiential vs. intellectual" issue often comes up. While mostly those on the "experiential side" of the debate are content to share their experience without imposing it on others, sometimes the appeal to "experience" sounds like a subtle way of disqualifying the comments of "intellectuals" who cannot know what they are speaking about as long as they haven't got the "right experience".
I remember once discussing that with a Welsh Evangelical lady: she complained that Pentecostals and Charismatics in her neighbourhood dismissed her views because she was not "baptised in the Spirit" according to their definition of the term. I pointed to her that her fellow churchgoers were doing exactly the same thing when they dismissed the views of "unbelievers," or traditional believers who didn't claim to be "born again" in the Evangelical style.
Here the issue of qualitative or quantitative appraisal of religious/spiritual experience steps in. I have met a few "spiritual junkies" who seemed to be always unsatisfied with their present experience and were defenseless before people who claimed a "higher one," and as a result were going from church to church in the seemingly unending quest of "it". Sometimes they ended up in very dangerous cults. In its own (poor) way, the WT uses the same trigger by claiming "accurate knowledge" which is supposedly absent from other churches.
Did you sometimes feel pressured by a similar "experiential blackmail," either from others or from yourself? Did you give in or resist? If you did resist, how did you justify it to yourself?
And to the religious experientialists (?), I'd ask: shouldn't you count the absence in others of an experience similar to yours as an equally valid "religious experience"? Did that lead you to question your own experience?