Indeed, but where do they get us?
Also – and I don’t want to be a quibbler here – but just what is “the Bible”? What the Jews say it is? What the Christians say it is? And, if it’s the latter, which Christians are we talking about? The Roman Catholic Bible, for example, contains 7 more books and additional sections in retained books that were included in the generally used Protestant Bible (which goes back to what Luther decided was in or out). Oddly enough, all of the excluded books do not appear in the Jewish Tanakh (what Christians call the OT, even if the books are in a different order).
Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not rejecting or negating anything you have said, I am merely looking for qualification and clarification. The Bible isn’t simply the Bible.
I’m also going to assume that you’re reading it in translation. (If I’m wrong in that assumption, please just say so and skip over the rest of this paragraph.) The stories that are related there (and I’m just going to stay with the Tanakh for the moment) are, indeed, inspiring, thought-provoking, and even capable of inducing other types of experiences. Still, the text you are reading in translation has little to do with the text that was preserved. I am finding out that it is in many regards a completely different book.
What is more, as our CCafé sessions on the Meru Foundation work and its follow-up, there may be a whole lot more going on with these texts that we would even suspect reading them either in translation or in their generally accepted parsed forms.
There is nothing there, to my mind, that should induce fear, other than that feeling of numinosity that should accompany the reading of something profound. It is good that you gain so much from your reading, and I can (and do) only encourage you to continue. But as with some many things, there may be much more here than meets the eye.