What I want to talk about this morning is remarkable phenomenon
that people not only talk to God
but they learn to experience God is talking back
Many many Americans are involved, and many other people
are involved, as you may call, in a renewalist spirituality -
a kind of spirituality which they want to experience God
intimately, personally and interactively;
they want to reach out, touch the Divine here on earth
I want to find out how they did that.
I am anthropologist,
my job is to immerse myself in the world I come to study,
and to keep observing
so that at some degree, I got a sense of what it take to
become a Native in that world.
Unlike Margret Mead & Rev. Gregory Bateson
were pictured here in Papua New Guinea.
I did this work in America.
I spent two years in the renewalist church in Chicago,
another two years in one of the Bay area.
I went to Sunday Morning services.
I was a member of House Group. I was in the prayer's circle.
I hang out with people.
I prayed with people.
I really want to know how their God became real to them.
So let me begin by asking,
who is the God in the church like this?
God is God, God is big, God is mighty, and holy and beyond,
but God is also a person among people,
The Pastor in this kind of church want you to experience God
the way the earliest cycle of experience Jesus,
They walked with Jesus.
They ate with Jesus.
They talked with Jesus,
He was their friend,
And these pastors will tell you that
You should put out a cup of coffee for God,
You should have a beer with God
Go for a walk with God, hang out.
Do the kind of thing with God
that you get do with anyone who you want to know as a person.
He cares about all the stuff in your life.
the little stuff, where you want to go in your summer vacation;
what shirt you want to wear tomorrow morning;
you can talk to him about that.
So I wanted to know how people learn to interact with God
and how they felt God speaking back.
I knew they have learnt because the newcomers came to this church,
and they would say things like:
"God does talk to me."
and then six or eight months later they would say :
"I recognize God's voice the way I recognize my mum's voice on the phone . "
But I thought the church teach
what you should think about your mind
is not a fortress full of your own self-generated
thoughts, feelings and images;
you should think your mind is the place where you will be going to meet the God.
and then some of thoughts you might think that was yours,
They were really God's thoughts being given to you
and your job is to figure out who is God.
And in fact, people did talk in the way suggested they would have
as they had experiences that weren't their own.
A woman said to me as I start to pray in this church:
"I feels like my mind is a screen that images were projected on.
Somebody else is controlling that clicker."
And of course, not all the thoughts would be good candidate
for the kind of things God would say.
People would look for thoughts that stood out,
that was more spontaneous than another thoughts;
thoughts were louder and captured your attention.
One women was explaining to me how she learnt to discern God's speaking:
so the people were praying over her one day,
and the phrase "go to Kansas" flashed into her mind.
So her parents was living in Kansas,
she was kind of idly thinking about visiting them.
but when this thought captured her attention,
it made her say, you know, made her want to say,
where that come from.
So you could imagine there will be risks for this style of discerning God's voice.
I didn't really think people were reasonably thoughtful about the process.
I also thought the good church took care to minimize these risks.
One morning, the pastor said in the church:
"you know, if you think God are telling you to relax, calm down,
it's totally fine. Take this from God.
If you think God are telling you to
quit your job, pack your bag and move to Los Angeles,
I want you to pray with every member of the house group;
I want you to pray with your prayer circle;
I want you to pray with me.
So together, this community could help you to discern
whether that's actually God,
or it's just some own stuff that's getting in the way of your relationship.
So what are people doing when they're praying like this?
They're using their imagination to do something
that they do not regard as imaginary.
If you're going to represent God, you got to think about God,
you got to use imagination.
Because God isn't visible.
It is very twenty-first-century thing to draw the inference
that you're using your imagination,
you are doing something false.
It turns out using the inter-senses and using the imagination
has been part of traditional Christian Spirituality
for many many years.
The Medieval Manassity cultivated their inter-senses to make God
more a live presence to them.
That's what these Christians're doing.
They are not only talking to God in their mind,
using their mind and ear to talk, to listen to something that God might say,
they are imagining they are sitting on God's lap when they're doing that;
or they're on a park bench, they are trying to feel
God's arms around their shoulders;
or they're in a throw room, their cheek feel warm
because the heat is blazing like a throw;
or they're lighting a candle to God, their minds are trying to smell
the scent of smoke walks up to Heaven.
My work demonstrates that this cultivation of inter-senses is a skill,
you get better at it over time and it changes you.
The people who do this - they say : their mental imagery gets sharper.
They say that things they had to imagine become more real to them.
and there are more like reports that
God's voice is sort of pop out to the world and they hear with their ears.
So just give you a sense of the way people talk about their own change.
This is a women who said to me after she began to pray,
her image gets so vivid,
sometimes she said it's almost like a PowerPoint presentation.
And then she spontaneously gave us an example of
God's voice popping out into the world, so she could hear with her ears.
So one morning, she had wonderful devotions
she felt great about her prior time with God.
She came out to the street, It was Chicago, it was freezing,
she was very grateful that God brought this bus along really quickly.
She gets on the bus, she's reading a book, she got all caught up on the book.
She was near missing her stop to get off the bus
and God senses to her in the way she hears with her ears
"GET OFF THE BUS".
So she stops the bus driver and she get off the bus.
She felt wonderful all day that God's been so intimately involved with her
to enable her to make her stop.
What do we make from those kinds of experiences?
It turns out that these funny voices and visions
are less unusual than you'd imagine.
So depending on the way you ask the questions somewhere
between 10% of general population and 70% of general population
would say that they had one of these audio experiences,
like maybe even drifting off to a sleep, you hear your mum calling your name;
or maybe walk to the living room,
you look at the cat, the cat is on the couch,
but look at it again, you realize the cat was never there.
These are not crazy, they have different structure and pattern
in the kind of experiences people have had,
when, for example, they meet the category for schizophrenia.
They tend to be rare, they're common and
A lot and many people have them.
But you ask people whether they had such experiences?
They remember one or may be two, maybe a handful of these experiences,
They're really brief.
You see the wingtip of the Angle and then it's gone,
You hear the voice or its words and then it stops.
And they are positive.
and I remember a woman who was in distress,
she was driving down a street;
She felt she really heard God speak out of the seat behind her in the car and say:
"I will always be with you."
It was a little freaky. She pulled over to the side of the road.
And then she was wept with joy, because why would you not?
So these experiences can be powerful.
My work demonstrates they respond to training.
The more people practice inter-sense cultivation,
the more likely they will say it,
the more likely they say that they had one or more these experiences.
and more likely they're to say these experiences were powerful .
while doing this work, I ran an experiment.
I got hundred people into my office,
we randomize them into lectures on the Gospels, or
this inter-sense rich prayer.
The rule was 30 minutes a day, six days a week for four weeks.
We brought them back and gave them a bunch of computers experiments and
standardized questionnaires.
It turns out that these folks in the prayer condition
who on average, reported sharper mental images,
they reported more senses of God's presence
and they said God was more present as a person to them
and they were more likely to say that they had unusual spiritual experiences of,
among them, these voices and visions.
We are also able to demonstrate that
some people are better at this kind of stuff,
independent of the amount of time they spent praying.
We gave people standardized questionnaire that asks them:
in fact, will they feel comfortable being adsorbed in their imagination?
It turns out there're more items you say true to on that scale,
the more likely you're to say you are experiencing God as a person;
the more likely you're to say you have a back-and-forth relationship to God;
the more likely you're to say you had one or more
these odd voices and visions.
So what do we learn from this?
Well, the skeptics could say that we learnt that
you know that Christians're just making about their imagination,
and that's what I have always thought. End of story.
I actually don't think we learnt anything about
the real nature of God from these observations.
I don't think that social science can answer that question.
There's also a Christian way to ask this question which is
God is always speaking, how can not anybody hear his?
I think what we learnt that change is real,
After people entered the church like this,