When God talks back | Tanya Luhrmann | TEDxStanford

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s research on the Evangelical relationship with God has lead to astonishing discoveries about those who say they hear God speak to them, literally. For some, this intimate relationship with God includes putting out an extra cup of coffee for Him. Luhrmann explores how rational, sensible people of faith experience the presence of an invisible being and sustain that belief in an environment of skepticism.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Luhrmann's work focuses on the way that objects without material presence come to seem real to people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. When God Talks Back was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. It also was awarded the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for the best book in religion, from the University of Louisville and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

What I want to talk about this morning
is a 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 in what you may call
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 an 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 and 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

and another two years
in one in the Bay Area.

I went to Sunday morning services.

I was a member of house group.
I was in a 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?

Well, God is God, God is big,
God is mighty and holy and beyond,

but God is also a person among people.

The pastors 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 not do with anyone
who you wanted to know as a person.

And 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 learned to interact with God,
how they felt that God was speaking back.

And I knew that they learned

because newcomers
would come to these churches,

and they would say things like
"God doesn't talk to me,"

and then six to nine months later,

they would say,

"I recognize God's voice

the way I recognize
my mom's voice on the phone."

What 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 God,

and that some of those thoughts
that you might have thought 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
that suggested that they would have -

as if they had experiences
that weren't their own.

A woman said to me,
"As I've started to pray in this church,

it feels like my mind is a screen
that images are projected on.

Somebody else is controlling
that clicker."

And of course, not all thoughts
were thought to be good candidates

for the kinds of things God would say.

People would look for thoughts
that stood out,

that were more spontaneous
than other thoughts,

thoughts that were louder,
that captured your attention.

One woman explaining to me
how she learned to discern God speaking

said 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.

(Laughter)

I did 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 church,

"You know, if you think God is telling you
to relax and calm down -

totally fine, take it as God.

If you think that God
is telling you to quit your job,

pack your bags and move to Los Angeles,

I want you to be praying
with every member of your 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 your own stuff

that's getting in the way
of your relationship.

(Laughter)

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,
if you're going to think about God,

you've got to use imagination

because God is invisible.

It's a very 21st-century thing

to draw the inference
that if you're using your imagination,

you are doing something false.

It turns out that using the inner senses,
using the imagination

has been part of the tradition
of Christian spirituality

for many, many years.

The medieval monastics
cultivated their inner senses

to make God more alive
and present to them.

That's what these Christians are doing.

They are not only
talking to God in their mind -

using their mind's ear to talk

and then to 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 arm
around their shoulders,

or they're in the throne room
and their cheek feels warm

because of the heat
of the 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 the smoke as it wafts up to heaven.

My work demonstrates
that this cultivation of the inner senses,

it's a skill.

You get better at it over time,
and it changes you.

The people who do this, they say
that their mental imagery gets sharper,

they say that things they have to imagine
become more real to them,

and they are more likely to report

that God's voice would
sort of pop out into the world

and they'll hear it with their ears.

So just to give you a sense of the way
people talk about their own change:

This is a woman who said to me

that as she began to pray,
her images would get so vivid,

"Sometimes," she said, "it's almost
like a PowerPoint presentation."

And then she spontaneously
gave this example

of God's voice popping out into the world
so she could hear it with her ears.

So one morning,
she had wonderful devotions,

she felt great about
her prayer time with God,

she came out on to the street -
it was Chicago, it was freezing -

she was very grateful that God
brought the bus along really quickly,

she gets onto the bus,
she's reading a book,

she's getting all caught up in the book,

and she is missing her stop
to get off the bus.

And God says to her
in a way she can hear with her ears,

"Get off the bus!"

So she stops the bus driver, she gets off,

and she feels wonderful all day

that God has been
so intimately involved with her

as to enable her to make her stop.

What do we make
of those kinds of experiences?

It turns out that
these funny voices and visions,

they are less unusual than you'd imagine.

So depending on the way
that you ask the questions,

somewhere between 10%
of the general population

and 70% of the general population

will say they've had
one of these odd experiences,

like maybe even drifting off to sleep
and you hear your mom calling your name,

or maybe you walk into the living room

and you look at the cat,
the cat's on the couch,

you look again, you realize
the cat was never there.

These are not crazy;

they have a different
structure and pattern

than the kinds
of experiences people have

when, for example, they meet
the criteria for schizophrenia.

They tend to be rare, they're common,
and many people have them.

But when you ask people

whether they've ever had
such an experience,

they'll remember one, maybe two,
maybe a handful of these experiences.

They're really brief.

You see the wingtip of an angel
and then it's gone.

You hear a voice, four to six words,
and then it stops.

And they are positive.

I remember a woman who was in distress,
and she was driving down the street,

and 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.

But then she wept with joy
because, I mean, why would you not?

So these experiences can be powerful.

My work demonstrates
that they respond to training.

The more people practice
inner sense cultivation,

the more likely it is

that they'll say that they've had
one or more of these experiences,

and the more likely they are
to say that the experience was powerful.

While doing this work,
I ran an experiment.

I got a hundred people into my office.

We randomize them

into lectures on the Gospels
or this inner-sense-rich prayer.

And the rule was 30 minutes a day,
six days a week, for four weeks.

We brought them back;

we gave them a bunch
of computers experiments

and standardized questionnaires.

And turned out it was the folks
in the prayer condition

who, on average, reported
sharper mental images -

they reported more sense
of God's presence,

and they said that God was more present
as a person to them,

and they were more likely to say that
they had unusual spiritual experiences -

among them these voices and visions.

We were also able to demonstrate

that some people
are better at this kind of stuff,

independent of the amount of time
they spend praying.

We give people a standardized
questionnaire that asks them, in effect,

whether they feel comfortable
being adsorbed in their imagination.

Turns out that the more items
you say true to on that scale,

the more likely you are to say
that you experience God as a person,

the more likely you are to say

that you have a back-and-forth
relationship to God,

the more likely you are to say

that you've had one or more
of these odd voices and visions.

So what do we learn from this?

Well, the skeptic could say
that we learned that, you know,

Christians are just making it up
out of their imagination,

and that's what I have
always thought - end of story.

I actually don't think

that we learned 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, If God is always speaking,
how come not everybody hears?

I think what we learn
is that change is real,

that as people enter churches like these

and they begin to pay attention
to their mind in new ways,

they begin to pay attention
to their inner senses,

they really do have different experiences

that they associate
with the presence of God.

I came to think of churches

as offering a social invitation
to pay attention in particular ways,

and I thought of individuals
as having a psychological response

to the way that they trained
that attention.

I also think that we learned
that belief is not a thing.

Sometimes if you are a secular person

and you kind of look at somebody
who is a believer,

it is tempting to think that they have
this extra thing in their life -

it's like they've got
a piece of furniture in their house

that you don't have.

(Laughter)

I think these observations
suggest that in many ways,

the experience of God is made slowly,

through the way that you pay
attention to your world,

to the way that you pay
attention to your mind,

to your history of hearing God
and talking with God

and feeling more confident
that God is there.

I think these practices make
God more real to people,

and that has a palpable 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 the 1960s, there is
Christian mainstream liberal churches -

their membership has been plummeting.

Churches like these, they've exploded;
the congregations are huge.

I think it's because
of these kinds of practices.

I think that they make God more relevant.

You know, you're trying
to hear God speak -

God shifts from a 45-minute
engagement on Sunday Morning

to something you're doing
throughout the week.

These practices
make God more real to people,

they make God more alive.

And I think these churches,

by putting the emphasis
on these practices,

emphasize the experience of God
and emphasize God's mystery.

And that helps somebody
to hang on to a sense of God

in what they perceive
to be a skeptical, secular society.

And finally, I think we learned
something about our minds.

I think that we learned that the way
we pay attention to our minds

changes our mental experience.

It's so tempting to think

that the inner landscape
of your experience

is somehow set as the way that it is.

I think that we learned from this

that whether or not
you are a religious person,

whether or not you believe in God,

you are making choices

in the way that you use
your imagination and your inner senses,

and the choices you make will change you.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)