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)