Close enough... I've tried downhill myself, but I suck at it. And as near as I can figure, I suck at it because I can't turn off my brain and just do it. I think to be a good downhill skier, you need to be able to step outside yourself and just let go. You can't think your way down the side of a mountain - you've just got to do it.
I think it's the same thing with spirituality... if you think about it, you're going to consign yourself to failure. You've just got to have faith enough to let yourself go and surrender to it. To paraphrase one dimension of the Godhead, you need to be a sheep in the Lord's flock. Well, that's what I struggle with in spirituality as well... I don't consider myself - by intellect or temperament - a sheep. And yet that is exactly what I must become to fulfill my spiritual quest. It's my brain that's stopping me from taking that step out of my comfort zone. Like walking off a cliff into the darkness.
I don't consider the Garden of Eden as a literal truth... but it does make a pretty effective parable. The snake tempted us to eat of the tree of wisdom... and eat we did. I think if we have an "original sin" that keeps us apart from the Godhead, it's our sentience.
Going back to CS Lewis again, he speaks at length in the book "Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer" on the nature of language, prayer, religiosity and faith. For Lewis he saw prayer much the same way you have described, or somewhat anyway. He argued that real, perfect prayer is prayer without words. He argued that words are an imprecise tool that we use to categorize experience, but they shouldn't be mistaken for experience itself. While he was, at one point, opposed to rehearsed prayer, he eventually found that reciting prayers that he knew eventually drowned out the words all together and allowed him to pray without words at all.
To Lewis, the true faith, or the true spirit, moved in the space between our dual nature, not quite words, and not purely primal.. a nature of being that defies both extremes.
I think, in the secular world, athletes come close to that. Whether they reach that spot through training prayer or meditation or otherwise, all the great athletes get to that point. I think Bruce Lee described that state best when he said that, when fully trained and properly focused, you no longer throw a punch, the punch throws itself.
I find much the same hurdle exists in spirituality and, in my case, Christianity. Becoming a good Christian is like becoming a good martial artist, tennis player, baseball player, etc. but you learn different reflexive skills that, when properly trained and under proper mindset, trigger themselves without thinking, like CS Lewis' wordless prayer.
