Feb 20, 2023 05:06 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 20, 2023 05:11 PM by C C.)
https://bigthink.com/the-well/stanford-a...ce-of-god/
EXCERPTS: . . . Sometimes the sense of summoning is so clear, the commandment so visceral, that the one who is called feels beyond doubt that the voice is God [...] At times these moments can change history...
[...] Voices are strange and poorly understood by mainstream researchers, yet they are at the heart of the greatest moments of human transcendence and despair. Augustine converted to Christianity after he heard a voice that commanded him to take his scripture and read. Paul probably created Christianity when he heard a voice from the heavens asking him why he persecuted the followers of Jesus. God spoke to Moses; Allah dictated the Koran to Mohammed. Writers sometimes hear their characters speak to them as if they stood within the room.
Most of us at least feel, and sometimes hear, the voice of moral authority, and we feel the presence of invisible others, sometimes on the edge of sleep, sometimes in the sun-drenched afternoon...
[...] I am an anthropologist, and for years, I have spoken to people who have had these experiences, these moments of being called. Here is what I think: At the heart of these experiences is the paradoxical relationship humans have with their own thoughts. Voices, these exotic weird moments, take us into the enigma of thought as a human experience — not so much the fact that we think, but what it feels like to think, and how we come to understand the strangeness that we feel that we own our own thoughts, that they are ours, but we do not control them. These experiences teach us something about the nature of the mind — that it is not a vast interior immaterial universe, but something much more social, where thoughts have texture and carry complex echoes of our conversations with others, residues of our relationships. They also give us a capability that we can use.
The standard line on consciousness is that it evolved to help us to understand the minds of others, so that we can predict what they will do. I have come to wonder whether the true adaptive advantage of consciousness is whether inner voices have evolved to help us to manage ourselves, and every so often, they pop out into the world and speak... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Sometimes the sense of summoning is so clear, the commandment so visceral, that the one who is called feels beyond doubt that the voice is God [...] At times these moments can change history...
[...] Voices are strange and poorly understood by mainstream researchers, yet they are at the heart of the greatest moments of human transcendence and despair. Augustine converted to Christianity after he heard a voice that commanded him to take his scripture and read. Paul probably created Christianity when he heard a voice from the heavens asking him why he persecuted the followers of Jesus. God spoke to Moses; Allah dictated the Koran to Mohammed. Writers sometimes hear their characters speak to them as if they stood within the room.
Most of us at least feel, and sometimes hear, the voice of moral authority, and we feel the presence of invisible others, sometimes on the edge of sleep, sometimes in the sun-drenched afternoon...
[...] I am an anthropologist, and for years, I have spoken to people who have had these experiences, these moments of being called. Here is what I think: At the heart of these experiences is the paradoxical relationship humans have with their own thoughts. Voices, these exotic weird moments, take us into the enigma of thought as a human experience — not so much the fact that we think, but what it feels like to think, and how we come to understand the strangeness that we feel that we own our own thoughts, that they are ours, but we do not control them. These experiences teach us something about the nature of the mind — that it is not a vast interior immaterial universe, but something much more social, where thoughts have texture and carry complex echoes of our conversations with others, residues of our relationships. They also give us a capability that we can use.
The standard line on consciousness is that it evolved to help us to understand the minds of others, so that we can predict what they will do. I have come to wonder whether the true adaptive advantage of consciousness is whether inner voices have evolved to help us to manage ourselves, and every so often, they pop out into the world and speak... (MORE - missing details)
