Since you are reading Wheat&Tares, I can assume most of you dear readers are more nuanced in your Mormon beliefs. Some may have even stepped completely away from the Church and don’t believe in a God. If so, how do you reconcile previous spiritual experiences you had as an active believing Mormon with your current beliefs?

I myself have had what I thought were spiritual experiences, or promptings from the sprit about something that was going to happen, and then it did.

Once on my mission to Chile I was bearing my testimony of what had just been taught in a lesson when I had this intense sense of wellbeing. To this day I can still remember the feeling, 49 years later. I have no explanation for it. At the time I took it as the Holy Ghost testifying to the truthfulness of what I had said. ChatGTP told me that: “The brain can generate feelings of profound awe, connection, and peace, which are often interpreted as “the Spirit,” even when they stem from emotional, physical, or social trigger.”

All my other promptings and feeling have easy explanations. I get emotional easy, and tear up at the drop of a hat. As I get older, it happens more than it used to. One explanation for this is that as my testosterone drops, the small amount of estrogen in my body is a larger percentage of my T vs E2, and thus makes me more emotional (I’m just reporting what I read, not trying to say that women are more emotional!).

My first recollection of getting emotional and crying was watching a movie called “The Little Match Girl”. I was four or five at the time, and I remember crying (spoiler alert) when the little girl froze to death at the end. As Mormons we are taught that these feelings are the “Spirit”, and that God it telling us something. As I get older, I wonder why God is causing me to tear up when somebody on a fictional movie I’m watching dies. I also get teary eyed watching Freddie Mercury perform at the Live Aid concert in 1985. Probably the single greatest live rock performance ever. (You youngsters can watch it here, let me know in the comments what you thought. Did it bring a tear to you eye?)

It is obvious not the “Spirit” testifying to the greatness or Freddie Mercury, yet it is exactly the same feeling I got in testimony meeting when somebody would tell a faith promoting story, and start crying. I would join them. People in the audience thought “Oh, Bishop Bill is so spiritual” Maybe I was just humming the tune to Bohemian Rhapsody!

As far as my spiritual prompting go, and can chart them up to subconscious processing and selection bias. My brain might notice subtle cues, sounds, or smells and assemble them into a prediction without me realizing it. This creates a “gut feeling” or sense of knowing. This was well documented in the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell that explores the power of rapid, intuitive decision making where the unconscious mind makes an accurate judgment.

I was once sitting in a Stake Conference when a particular your man was presented for receiving the Melchizedek priesthood. Immediately it came to my mind that he was going to ask me to ordain him. After the meeting this young man came looking for me, and indeed did ask my to perform the ordination. This was the spirit! I did not stop to think at the time why God would take his time to send me this message, unless the only reason was to show that He could. I now look back and see that my brain put together that I was in the bishopric of this young mans YSA ward, that we were friends, and I had counseled with him through some difficult times.

The other part that explains the above is selection bias. I remember (select) this event because it came true. But what about all the times when I had a prompting that something was going to happen, and it didn’t happen. I don’t remember any of those, because nothing special happened. They are all forgotten. I think about this every time I hear a story about a person being prompted to visit somebody, and that visited person was in need of something that was fulfilled by the visit. Of course this will be cemented in their mind, and be remembered and retold many times in testimony meeting, sacrament meeting and General Conference (Pres Monson visiting the widows).

If you no longer believe, how do you reconcile all your spiritual experience with your current beliefs? Do you use the ideas that I explained above, or do you have other ways of explaining it. Do any of you still believe in a “higher power”, just not the LDS concept of God that could explain it?