At 11 minutes into the program, the topic of communicating with God came up. One researcher, Tanya Luhrmann, currently postulates that the human imagination can be trained to both hear God and believe the God is literally real, but just not in this world.
The research faces a conundrum because in essence it tries to get inside the mind of other people and what they are experiencing. One researcher commented (15:50 - 16:20) that in order to try to understand what is happening and to understand the mind of another, a person needs to ‘let go’ of who they are to try to open their own minds to the mind of the other person. The idea is to just listen without judging the other mind you are trying to understand.
One religious sect the researcher worked with included imaginary people they called ‘contacts’ because they could guide people spiritually. Over a period of months in attending meetings with this groups of people, the researcher found her own mind sharpening various images. She believed her mind was changing somehow as he practiced the group exercises in imagining various things and, on one occasion, she had an experience of personal power and extreme alertness (19:00 - 22:20). The upshot was that the researcher came to believe that imagination can be practiced and sharper perceptions of reality can arise from the practice.
The researcher realized that the modern view of imagination and earlier versions are quite different. Later, in 2002, the researcher started doing research on Evangelical Christians who practice what she calls ‘inner sense cultivation’, which is a way to develop an intense personal relationship with God. The practice can be simply just sitting down and having a cup of coffee with God or doing other mundane things with God (24:25 - 25:33).
The point is this: As people exercise their imagination, the experience begins to feel more real than imaginary. This is how Evangelicals develop a personal connection to God.
The researcher wrote in a 2013 paper in the Journal of Cognition and Culture:
“A secular observer might assume that prayer practice affects those who pray by making the cognitive concepts about God more salient to their lives. Those who pray, however, often talk as if prayer practice – and in particular, kataphatic (imagination-based) prayer – changes something about their experience of their own minds. This study examined the effect of kataphatic prayer on mental imagery vividness, mental imagery use, visual attention and unusual sensory experience. Christians were randomly assigned to two groups: kataphatic prayer or Bible study. Both groups completed computerized mental imagery tasks and an interview before and after a one month period of practice. The results indicate that the prayer group experienced increased mental imagery vividness, increased use of mental imagery, increased attention to objects that were the focus of attention, and more unusual sensory experience, including unusual religious experience, although there were substantial individual differences. These findings suggest that prayer practice may be associated with changes in cognitive processing.
Those who prayed avidly reported more intense, unusual spiritual experiences. They sometimes reported that they had heard God speak audibly, or seen the wing of an angel. These unusual experiences differed in several respects from hallucinations reported by persons with psychosis: they were brief (rarely more than a few words), rare (congregants who reported them rarely reported more than one or two), and not distressing, although sometimes described as odd (Luhrmann, 2011). The congregants identified these unusual experiences as having sensory content, and as different in kind from ordinary thoughts, intuitions and mental images. These observations raise the possibility that there are significant cognitive consequences to prayer practice and that those changes may be relevant to what people report as the experience of God.”
This research is by Dr. Luhrmann, an anthropologist. It isn't clear how well accepted by experts her hypothesis that practicing imagination makes it more real is. If what Luhrmann reports is accurate, it helps explain the basis on which some religious people hear God and truly believe the experience is literally God. The experience of God is real in the brain of the person experiencing it, regardless of actual external reality.
What is of personal interest in this research is that it again points to a human need for some form of spiritual experience. At the least, some or maybe most people appear to be hard wired for experiencing hallucination as real. Some appear to be driven to spirituality, usually in the form of organized religion, to satisfy some deep-seated need(s). If that is true, then maybe a political ideology that does not include some overtly spiritual aspect or content is doomed to remain just an academic curiosity.
Footnote:
1. A prior discussion here discussed a brain structure, the paracingulate sulcus, that was associated with people hearing voices they believe are real, but without any source outside the person’s head. That structure is associated with reality monitoring and when it is smaller than average size, people tend to experience more auditory hallucinations. Otherwise healthy people often or usually know that the voices they hear are not made by other people, but are hallucinations.
Another prior discussion discussed a recent hypothesis that humans perceive reality by a controlled hallucination process where the brain guesses about what the senses are detecting, e.g., hearing, sight, touch. Over time with repeated experience, the brain (mind?) gets better and better at being correct about what is perceived for many things, but not necessarily all things. This could be where the messiness of dark politics gets unleashed.
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