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 in which they want to experience God
intimately, personally and interactively;
they want to reach out and touch the Divine here on earth
I wanted to find out how they did that.
I am anthropologist,
my job is to immerse myself in the world that I've come to study,
and to keep observing
so that to some degree, I get a sense of what it would take to
become a Native in that world.
Unlike Margret Mead & Gregory Bateson
who are pictured here in 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 circle.
I hung out with people.
I prayed with people.
I really wanted to know how their God became real to them.
So let me begin by asking:
Who is God in a 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 early disciples experienced 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'd get to do with anyone who you wanted 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 learnt to interact with God
and how they felt God speaking back.
I knew they have learnt because the newcomers would come to these churches,
and they would say things like:
"God doesn't 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 saw the church teach was
that you should think about your mind
not as a fortress full of your own self-generated
thoughts and feelings and images;
but you should think of your mind as a place where you were going to meet the God;
and that some of those thoughts that you might have though of as yours,
they were really God's thoughts being given to you
and your job was to figure out who was God.
And in fact, people did talk in ways suggested that they would have
as if they had experiences that weren't their own.
A woman said to me as I started to pray in this church:
"I feels like my mind is a screen that images are projected on.
Somebody else is controlling that clicker."
And of course, not all the thoughts would be good candidate
for the kinds of things God would say.
People would look for thoughts that stood out,
that was more spontaneous than other thoughts,
thoughts were louder and captured your attention.
One women was explaining to me how she has learnt to discern God's speaking:
so that people were praying over her one day,
and the phrase "Go To Kansas" flashed into her mind.
So her parents live in Kansas,
she was kind of idly thinking about visiting them.
but when this thought just captured her attention,
it made her say, you know, makes me want to say,
where did that come from.
So you could imagine there would be risks from this style of discerning God's voice.
I didn't really think people were reasonably thoughtful about the process.
I also thought that the church took care to minimize those 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 it as God.
If you think that God is telling you to
quit your job, pack your bag and move to Los Angeles,
I want you to be praying with every member of the house group;
I want you to be praying with your prayer circle;
I want you to be praying with me.
So that together, this community can help you to discern
whether that's actually God,
or just some of 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're going to think about God,
you've got to use imagination.
Because God is invisible.
It is very twenty-first-century thing to draw the inference
that if you're using your imagination,
you are doing something false.
It turns out that using the inter-senses - using the imagination
has been part of tradition of Christian Spirituality
for many many years.
The Medieval Monastics cultivated their inter-senses to make God
more a live and present to them.
That's what these Christians're doing.
They are not only talking to God in their mind,
using their minds' ear to talk and then listen to something that God might say,
they are imagining that they are sitting on God's lap while they're doing that;
or they're on a park bench and they're trying to feel
God's arms around their shoulders;
or they're in a throne room, their cheek feel warm
because of the heat of blazing light from the throne;
or they're lighting a candle to God in their mind and they're trying to smell
the scent of smoke as it wafts up to Heaven.
My work demonstrates that
this cultivation of the 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 you 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,
As people entered the church like this,
they began to pay attention to their minds in new ways,
they began to pay attention to their their inter-senses;
they really do have different experiences, that associate with the presence of God.
I came to think churches as offering a social invitation to pay attention
in particular ways,
and I thought individuals are having a psychological response to
the way of they trained that attention.
I also think we learnt that belief is not a thing.
Sometimes if you are a secular person,
as you looked at somebody who is a believer,
it is tempting to think they have this extra thing in their life,
it's like they got a piece of furniture in the house but you don't have.
I think these kinds of observations suggest that in many ways,
the experience of God was made slowly to the way you pay attention to you world,
to the way you pay attention to your mind,
to your history of hearing God, talking with God,
and feeling more confident that God is there.
I think these practices make God more real to people
and that has probable effect on their life.
I also think this helps to explain why these kinds of practices
are so much more appealing in this kind of society
Since 1960s, there were Christian mainstream liberal churches,
their membership has been plummeting.
churches like this, they exploded, the congregations are huge.
I think it's because of these kinds of practices.
I think they made God more relevant.
you know, you're trying to hear God speak,
God shifts from 45minutes engagement on Sunday Morning,
to something you're doing throughout the week
These practices made God more real to people,
they made God more alive,
And I think these churches, by putting the emphasis on these practices,
emphasize the experiences of God,
and emphasize God's mystery.
And that help somebody to hang on to a sense of God in
what they perceived to be skeptical secular society.
And finally, I think we learn something about our minds.
I think we learn the way we are to pay attention to our minds
changes our mental experience.
It is so tempting to think the inter-mindscaping
you are experiencing, somehow it is set the way it is.
I think we learnt from this whether or not you are religious person
whether or not you're believing the God,
You are making choices in the way
you're using your imagination and your inter-senses.
And the choices you make will change you.
Thank you very much.
(applauds)