When God Talks Back by T.M. Luhrmann

Author:T.M. Luhrmann
Language: ru
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307957504
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-26T20:00:00+00:00

Are your thoughts sometimes as real as actual events in your life?

Does it often happen that nearly every thought immediately and automatically suggests an enormous number of ideas?

Are your thoughts sometimes so strong that you can almost hear them?

The people who were high in absorption said yes to more of these questions than those who were low, but the relationship was stronger and tighter if they did either the kataphatic or the apophatic practice. That is, just as with subjective mental imagery, both a subject’s proclivity for absorption and the discipline to which he or she was allotted randomly made a difference in the way that person answered those questions.

Of course, we had not so subtly invited people to remember and to report odd sensory experiences because Christina asked each person, in that first interview, whether he or she had heard a voice when alone, or seen something no one else could see. (We had chosen to ask people these questions in face-to-face interviews, because we felt that we could have a more accurate understanding of their experiences than if they just checked off a box on a form.)36 But she put those questions to all our subjects, including those who found themselves in the study condition. And indeed, some of the people who listened to the lectures on the Gospels came back and reported that they had walked into their living rooms and thought they’d seen the cat—but then the cat was not there. In general, though, when people in the study condition reported those experiences, they were less meaningful. Taking into account the frequency with which those experiences had happened to them in the past, they had fewer of them. Of the seven subjects who, on return, reported unusual sensory experiences that were religious, five had done the kataphatic training (one had centering prayer), and among subjects who said, in the beginning, that they had never had such experiences, or had them once a year or less often, seven of the eight people who reported unusual sensory experiences on return were in the kataphatic condition; one had centering prayer.37

In fact, the kataphatic practice seemed to give people more of what the scriptures promise those who turn to Christ: peace and the presence of God. In the kataphatic group, people were more likely to say in their follow-up interviews that they felt they had slipped into an intensely focused state during the month. They were more likely to say that the month was more intensely emotional but less stressful for them; in fact, for those people who had been praying for less than half an hour a day when they came in, their stress dropped significantly more over the course of the month than those who listened to the lectures. Those who did the kataphatic exercises were also significantly more likely to say that they had had a near-tangible experience of God’s presence during the month; that God had become more of a person in their life; that they

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