There’s an old joke: When you talk to God, we call it prayer, but when God talks to you, we call it schizophrenia. Except that usually it’s not... Hearing a voice when alone, or seeing something no one else can see, is pretty common. At least 1 in 10 people will say they’ve had such an experience if you ask them bluntly. About 4 in 10 say they have unusual perceptual experiences between sleep and awareness if you interview them about their sleeping habits... And if you ask them in a way that allows them to admit they made a mistake, the rate climbs even higher. By contrast, schizophrenia is pretty rare. Only about 1 in 100 people can be diagnosed with the disorder. Moreover, the patterns are quite distinct. People with schizophrenia who hear voices hear them frequently. They often hear them throughout the day, sometimes like a rain of sound, or a relentless hammer. They hear not only sentences, but paragraphs: words upon words upon words. What the voices say is horrid—insults, sneers and contemptuous jibes. “Dirty. You’re dirty.” “Stupid slut.” “You should’ve gone under the bus, not into it.”... That was not what Abraham, Moses and Job experienced, even when God was at his most fierce. For the last 10 years, I have been doing anthropological and psychological research among experientially oriented evangelicals, the sort of people who seek a personal relationship with God and who expect that God will talk back. For most of them, most of the time, God talks back in a quiet voice they hear inside their minds, or through images that come to mind during prayer. But many of them also reported sensory experiences of God... About a third of the people I interviewed carefully at the church where I did research reported an unusual sensory experience they associated with God. While they found these experiences startling, they also found them deeply reassuring... They say God touched their shoulder, or that he spoke up from the back seat and said, in a way they heard with their ears, that he loved them... In 1999, Gallup reported that 23% of all Americans had heard a voice or seen a vision in response to prayer... These experiences often made people feel more intimate with God, and more deeply loved... These unusual sensory experiences are more common among those who pray in a way that uses the imagination—for example, when prayer involves talking to God in your mind. The unusual sensory experiences were not, in general, associated with mental illness (we checked). They were more common among those who felt comfortable getting caught up in their imaginations. They were also more common among those who prayed for longer periods... There’s a distinction between voices associated with psychiatric illness (often bad) and those (often good) that are found in the so-called normal population... When people hear a voice that gives them good advice, the experience can transform them.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/29/my-take-if-you-hear-god-speak-audibly-you-usually-arent-crazy/comment-page-15/
This is so interesting.
I wish they’d studied more people aside from Christians. It’d be so interesting to see pagans’ experiences with it... (Someone should do a survey!)
