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?
Wheat & Tares 
Listen, there is indeed real value in discussing how much our sacred experiences are genuine impressions from the Holy Ghost and how much of it all is just mere confirmation bias and wishful thinking; but there is also real irony in critiquing the reliability of spiritual impressions by citing a hallucinating chatbot and frequently-disproven Malcolm Gladwell—two of the most wildly unreliable sources of the 21st century. Please bring the same level of skepticism and nuance to secular sources that you all bring to church ones.
I believe the LDS church is one of many religions.
Each religion has holy writings, spiritual doctrine, weekly classes and lists of their expected standards of behaviors by their members and their community. Each would like to apply and expand those standards to the greater society and culture. Each would like to gate-keep my personal spirituality. Each wants my money.
Each religion has chosen to enmesh with cultural and political power on some level. Each religion puts men in more powerful positions due to gender. Each religion has specific rules that apply to what women are allowed to do. Those gender rules never ever put women into higher positions of power. In every single religion, women are limited somehow in their societal roles and told that situation is what God wants.
My personal life is better if I do not allow any of these religions to define or interpret my personal life experiences, my societal roles, my spiritual experiences or my concept of God.
I have had several spiritual experiences that are something beyond just emotional or things that I conjure up because I want to.
One of them, I can only describe as feeling like I’d taken felix felicis (the lucky potion in Harry Potter). After Harry drinks it, he, Hermione, and Ron have devised a plan of what to do and he chucks it because he has a good feeling about what he should do. Not in great detail, but just where he should go. And then of course it all works out as it should. My feeling (before I saw that movie) felt the same way. When confronted with a choice, I kept thinking in the most positive way, Yes, of course I should do that, when in reality, it’s a choice I would never make. But the feeling was extremely peaceful and sure and it turned out really well.
Other experiences are like having my entire body on fire (in a good way!). That’s not an experience I can fake or make up.
A couple are like having the windows of Heaven open and the spirit pouring down. These happened in a group of members. Those feelings are weaker to remember, but I do not discount them as being real.
Then there are the smaller voices and promptings. Yes, those are easier to discount, but I still listen for, receive, and am grateful for them.
So, yes, even though I no longer go to church, I have a deep and abiding faith that God exists and that he knows me. I’m not antagonistic about the church but I pray about my stepping away frequently, and frankly, God seems okay with it. I suspect he realizes I would be a much less good person inside the church than out of it.
Could you please correct your spelling of “experiences” in the title of your post. It’s very distracting. Feel free to delete this comment after the correction.
As I started to not believe in many of the Mormon teachings, and started experiencing different parts of the world, the only way I could start to explain my belief in a new type of God is that God became so much bigger. Anything taught that made anyone or any religion or group of people and their rituals etc., special or chosen or anointed I came to discount that. I came to believe the whole human race was chosen by God. What we did with that was up to us. So anyone searching for knowledge or help or reassurance or miracles or spiritual experiences had about as much “right” if you may, as anyone else in the world. So when I met a friend (non Mormon) who had been praying for guidance, two jehovah witness missionaries rang her doorbell, and when I asked a Catholic nun why she had spent over 20 years working in orphanages in Haiti in the most deplorable conditions that I only lasted 2 weeks in, she replied because she loves Jesus and that’s what he did. So I started to feel embarrassed that I ever had believed that I was special and chosen. So for me, God just keeps getting so much bigger.
Julie said “Could you please correct your spelling of “experiences” in the title of your post. It’s very distracting. Feel free to delete this comment after the correction.”
I will not delete your comment. You get all the credit! Thanks!
+1 JB.
And, frankly, ditto other “worldly” explanations (even better, more sophisticated, non-Gladwell ones) that offer chemical or biomedical or psychological alternative explanations for all things supernatural.
I thought the recent book Believe (by Ross Douthat) was, to my mind, quite compelling. It’s largely about the case for religious belief and how it’s not simply ignorance or psychological bias. Also I think compellingly makes the case that a cursory view of science can be employed in the way the OP does here, but a deeper scientific view essentially requires just as much faith in the unexplained as religious belief does. Recent NIH director Francis Collins makes similar arguments with the same conclusion, but from “inside the house” of science (see his book The Language of God).
For an ethnographic approach, It’s interesting to read Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (by Lamorna Ash) for a variety of accounts of young people (in the UK) and how they think of their lived belief.
And of course: none of this is definitive. Nothing is provable (even the science). But count me in the camp of believers.
That being said … the traditional Mormon model of “your emotions are the Spirit” is, in fact, problematic all for the reasons the OP points out. But I’m also in the camp that the emotion you feel watching the Freddy Mercury performance? Totally the spirit. 🙂
(nevertheless the larger point is, we could definitely do a better job in the church of recognizing that sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference and we shouldn’t teach people at any time they get teary-eyed. It’s the Holy Ghost…)
A BYU roommate came home from a religion class to tell us she had learned that the Holy Ghost is a fluid residing in a gland, I think maybe in or near the neck. From this gland, the Spirit was able to flood our entire bodies with its fluid. She was very upset when I didn’t believe her.
The older I get, the less sure I am of anything. I don’t know how this all works. I am personally very comfortable with not knowing. I believe in God. I believe they can interact directly with me. At the same time, I don’t think that happens often. However, I have had two experiences that I don’t know how to understand in any way other than a direct, explicit message to me personally. I recognize that I could be wrong about all of this, but I still believe.
I still believe in a higher power. I had what feels like promptings that I can’t reconcile. I had a metaphysical experience that is more than just The Spirit and /or subconscious at one point in my life during an ordinance.
The idea of Jesus being Deity is just not something I can get on board with. Praying in the name of Jesus makes me uncomfortable now. But I do feel there is a God or Gods or Higher Power that has helped me.
How is it obvious that the Spirit isn’t testifying of the greatness of Freddie Mercury? Listening to Under Pressure, feels more prophetic to me than anything I expect to hear at church in the next few weeks.
I think the Mormon model of “good feelings” are the spirit and “bad feelings” are the other guy is spiritual bypassing and needs to be thrown out. It is literally reinforcing confirmation bias, which makes it impossible to experience and be changed by the world around you. That being said, I’ve genuinely had two spiritual experiences that cannot be explained by the secular—that came from something outside of me. They were special in the context they were experienced and very meaningful. I’m not interested in disproving or secularizing them either as that would take away from their meaning. And I think that meaning is important to retain even as my beliefs concerning the church have changed. I do believe there is a God, I just don’t believe a lot of what the church says about him.
I do think you are being a bit too generous about what your brain did. Brains are amazing and can do amazing things, but from my personal observation, they get stuck a lot. Your brain could have randomly just made those connections to predict the future—or it wasn’t and you let mystery in bit. I don’t know—I say that a lot now.
I want to say that emotions that Mormons are taught are the spirit are 90% coming from inside. Just emotions that your own brain congers up. That is not bad though and it is not less than “feeling the spirit”. It just comes from inside rather than an outside spirit. Doesn’t mean it is not from the god within you.
But then I think we are “of god” or part of god in some way, so it’s kind of the same thing in a way. The spirit dwells in us, or we are gods in embryo, or the pantheistic idea that everything is tied together, alive, and part of God. Different religions describe this idea in different ways and even some scientific ideas say this same thing of “the universe shares a consciousness.”
So, we being part of God, we get emotional and it is godly even if it is not from outside of us. I know I am not explaining this very well, because I don’t understand the”how it works” myself. But sort of there is god in us and there is god from outside of us and god from the human next to you and god from the rock you sit on and the river going past. It is all part of God, yet separate. So, then if there are emotions that come from inside you, they are still part of God because you are part of God, but they do not come from a “spirit” or god or anything from outside you.
Then there are feelings, thoughts or even words or full understandings that come from outside of you. So they come from a god source outside of you, whether you call it the Holy Spirit or whatever. I think it can come from many different sources, not always the one being we call our Heavenly Father. Dead ancestors, the universe, your identical twin, your child or spouse, Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother, that river flowing past or the rock you are sitting on. Not that I have any idea what the rock might have to tell you or how intelligent it might be. 🤔 just that it shares this spirit that is part of everything, as in “we and the universe share consciousness”
So, I have no spiritual experiences that I had to explain another way because I never got any hint from anything that the church was true, BoM, anything having to do with the church. When I kind of yelled at this “god” thing outside of me about if Joseph Smith was a prophet or con man, I get this very strong voice in my head saying, “It doesn’t matter.” Well, the whole religion that I have based my life off of is based on this one idea, so please, explain how it possibly doesn’t matter. Silence. So a few years later, I had a good bishop. I think I was in for a temple recommend with no someone else waiting time pressure and so I opened up about some of my issues, including this “It doesn’t matter.” So, Bishop looks all confused, but doesn’t just to “that has to be from Satan” and he puzzles over how it could be that something as important as the religion I have based my life on just doesn’t matter. After a few minutes staring off into space, but in the direction of the big picture of the Savior on his office wall, he finally says, “that is right. If bad feelings about Joseph Smith are keeping you from believing in the Savior, then Joseph Smith doesn’t matter. This church doesn’t matter. One thing matters and that is Jesus Christ.”
So, a few more years struggling with Mormonism and I decided that the church was just the wrong way for me to try to worship God. If the organization Joseph Smith started makes me hate God because that organization is sexist and loves and values child rapists more than it values innocent children being abused, then it is absolutely the wrong religion for me. It is not that something is inherently bad about me that the church values my rapist more than me. It is something badly broken in that organization and that organization really doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if it is the only place with the so called priesthood or if it has *the truth* or if it has real prophets. None of that matters if the faulty broken organization makes me hate the god it pretends to represent. I am so out.
I had several “spiritual experiences” that had nothing to do with the church. Only the one where it was about the church in anyway and that was that it didn’t matter. All the rest ever had to do with was my life. I had several time a voice in my head told me things that no human could know yet that turned out to happen. So, I do believe that there is an intelligence outside of us that can communicate with us, because that is the only explanation that fits. This knowledge did not come from intuition or guessing or hopeful wishes. Too much just doesn’t fit with any atheist explanation. So, there is an intelligence outside of ourselves that can communicate with us. Doesn’t happen often or upon our command.
And I believe that sometimes this intelligence tells people to join the Mormon church. It really is good for some people. But it wasn’t good for me so I never got any “confirmation” that it was true. Because for me it isn’t. It insists on the patriarchy and while that might not hurt everyone, it does hurt me.
I watched the Queen “Live Aid” video, and it reminded me of my “spiritual” experiences listening and playing music. How I felt when my band played at the 2002 Olympic Medal Plaza two different nights before Bare Naked Ladies and Sheryl Crow in front of 15-20,000 people. Then there was singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a packed bar and having an out-of-body experience in the process as the crowd was dancing and singing with me. The time I felt like Brandi Carlile was only to me while I was sitting at the back of the Seattle Symphony Hall singing “The Story.” There was the time listening to Peter Gynt in a classical concert, and I just started to spontaneously cry during Aase’s Death. Or, the feeling I had when my 4-year-old grandnephew sang “Anyway the Wind Blows” at the end of a family version karaoke version of Bohemian Rhapsody, where we traded off lead vocals between generations, and all joined in the choruses while the rest of the family cheered as they listened.
I’ve often wondered what “Spiritual” means. Many times, my spiritual experiences or insights have centered around music. Again playing in a band in a bar on a Saturday night, after someone who sang with us on Friday night had been killed in a house fire just hours before. I could see there was very little difference between what you experience with people in a bar and at church. There was community, fellowship, support, shared experiences, and love, along with a weekly meeting schedule.
I believe when we tap into the great human experience, we tap into “the spirit.” It can happen with music, movies, books, or maybe nature, or in solitude.
Maybe it’s God in feeling what we don’t see, but I think it’s very likely to see the connection with what we feel with all of our shared experiences.
Great post. I have to echo the thoughts about music. Freddie was astonishing in his ability to channel music from beyond and hold an audience in the palm of his hand. I’ve seen Springsteen live many times (including once in the tenth row), and it was a similar experience, though they employ different techniques. And when I watch video of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing, it really does seem like he’s simply channeling something from somewhere else, particularly the Austin City Limits and MTV Unplugged performances. It’s no wonder that Plato said in the Phaedrus that poets possess a kind of divine madness; that’s the inspiration that I believe musicians receive and share with us when they are truly inspired (check out Jerry Lee Lewis’s album Live at the Star Club for another example of this).
With all that said, I’ve felt what I believe to be the Holy Ghost testify to me of certain things, so it did feel as if that was a more “Mormon approved” kind of inspiration. However, as I get older, I’m more and more in Instereo’s camp, that music offers something to me that feels more universally connecting and spiritual than does the Holy Ghost. Maybe that’s blasphemous; I don’t mean to offend folks, I’m just trying to narrate my own experiences. I do feel that, ironically, the orthodox mind is often so narrow that it can’t allow the possibility of the kind of musical spirituality that Instereo talks about. Longinus talks about the sublime as a kind of transport, as if the soul is agitated inside the body when it hears something deeply moving, and I think that’s right. My favorite line in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is when Benedick hears a lute player begin playing (400 years ago, lute strings were made of sheep intestines) and says, “Is it not strange that sheep guts should hale souls from men’s bodies?”. That line sticks with me and I do feel that there is something about music that for me feels more connecting, community creating, soulful, and revelatory than anything I’ve felt at a Mormon church. And as someone who no longer believes, I’m fine with the fact that Elvis connects me more to others than Mormonism. Still to this day, “That’s All Right” sounds so extraordinary to me that I feel like it came from another world.
PS: Note to PWS: Rene Descartes believed that the soul resided in the pineal gland, and Galen laid out humoral theory several millenia ago. I wonder if that’s where a BYU religion instructor got the idea.
Thank you, Bishop Bill, for putting this out there for us to reflect on and consider. Anna: thank you for relating the interview you had with your bishop, how he heard you, took time to process and seek truth rather than have knee-jerk reaction to your statement/position. I could see it in my mind’s eye as you described it, and I felt the validation you were given. Instereo and Brother Sky: Yes! Music! Is it the medium/energy of the universe that connects us, a resonant frequency we tap into? I don’t know, but I, too, have had many experiences when I have been swallowed up in music and felt boundless, connected to a cosmic energy and others. I have trouble finding words to adequately describe it. But if you know it, you know it.
Like Anna, I’ve always assumed that “spiritual” promptings and feelings are something that comes from within us. Even if you believe that they originate with an external “the spirit,” they are certainly felt within in as something vibes between us and a situation.
The experiences I mostly think about are me being prescient about something that’s about to happen or something I should do. That literally just happened to me today. Despite the high temperature, I thought my 20 mile bike route was something I could do. I’ve done it before without eating anything, but this was the highest temperature day I’ve done it this year. I actually had the thought at the 6 mile mark that I should turn around and not finish the route, but instead I forged ahead. Eventually, my vision was getting blurry, and I was having a hard time cooling down, so I had to ask for a pick up and not finish the ride. I don’t really think of that as “the spirit” so much as me being aware of signals in my environment and in my body, and then ignoring those signals in this case.
Stuff like that happens all the time. I usually follow these ideas, these nudges. Today I just got greedy and ignored it. When these nudges involve other people, I tend to think I’m noticing microexpressions or other clues, and at the subconscious level am keyed into a shifting dynamic with them.
There is the ontological question of what the Spirit is, and then there is the epistemological question of how we recognize it. In traditional LDS settings, most discussions tend to focus heavily on the latter, on recognizing the Spirit in ways that reinforce a set of truth claims and help individuals commit their lives to those claims. This likely serves a necessary institutional and devotional function, but for many people, it ultimately is not enough. It can begin to feel somewhat circular, defining the Spirit in terms of the confirmations it is then expected to provide. In the process, the deeper ontological question often gets sidelined: what is the Spirit, independent of these frameworks, and how might it be encountered in ways that are not pre-scripted or tied to predetermined outcomes?
A more expansive approach would allow for the possibility that experiences of the Spirit are not limited to affirming specific propositions, but instead open us to transformation, relationship, and a broader awareness of God’s presence. From this perspective, recognizing the Spirit becomes less about securing confirmation and more about discerning its fruits, growth in compassion, clarity, humility, and connection.
Adam S. Miller might approach the question by taking seriously the scriptural claim that spirit is matter and following its implications. If spirit is matter, then it is not something vague, abstract, or merely emotional. It is real, concrete, and active, something that does not just signify truth but participates in it.
From that perspective, the focus shifts away from treating the Spirit primarily as a tool for confirming propositions.
Reducing it to a kind of internal signal that validates predetermined conclusions risks domesticating it, turning something dynamic into something merely instrumental. Instead, the Spirit would be understood as something that actually encounters people, acts upon them, and reorients their lives in tangible ways.
In this view, the question is less about how one identifies or verifies the Spirit in a narrow epistemological sense and more about how one responds to it. The presence of the Spirit would be evident not primarily in certainty, but in transformation, in the way it draws a person into practices of love, repentance, forgiveness, and deeper attention to God and others.
Rather than cleanly separating ontology and epistemology, this approach would tend to bring them together. If spirit is matter, then knowing it is inseparable from engaging it. To encounter the Spirit is already to be involved with it, and that involvement is what makes it recognizable.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think that these spiritual experiences are nothing more than the human brain being the human brain. They aren’t an outside force causing a feeling, sensation, or experience that the human brain couldn’t produce in its own. It’s all confirmation bias, selection bias, and other cognitive biases that is at the root of these spiritual experiences. Hallucination, apophenia, and schizophrenia may be the cause of more extraordinary spiritual experiences. That said I believe in spirituality and the transcendence of mind. But I’m a sense of these being a self-realization of powers from within to overcome challenges, not as a form of communication with external spirits roaming the earth.
What I find interesting is that never once have I heard Mormons validate the spiritual experiences talked of in other religious traditions. I’ve never heard a Mormon validate any claim to a Marian apparition or a vision of Ganesh, the elephant god in Hinduism. And yet Mormon believers insist, just insist that they had some extraordinary experience too sacred to share that proved Mormonism was true. No. No you didn’t. It was nothing more than your mind playing tricks on you. Have you ever prayed to know if Warren Jeffs is the true prophet? No you haven’t. Will you? No you won’t, because you know he’s a farce and a fraud.
I had an amazing amount of profound spiritual experiences when I was an active, believing TBM. Several were testimony-affirming. I had revelations in the temple, guidance from my patriarchal blessing, inspiration while reading the scriptures. The Holy Ghost and I talked all the time.
Then … well, I started to notice that those spiritual experiences came packaged with some really awful experiences. And once I started paying attention, it seemed that the good and the bad were really closely linked. And then one day I went to a psychologist and was 95% honest and found out that my spiritual experiences could be treated and I could stop having them if I went to the right therapy and used the right mindfulness techniques and took the right medication. Which I chose to do.
I haven’t had a spiritual experience in years and I am so very very grateful for modern medicine.
That said, I still believe that some of those experiences connected with something outside myself. I don’t call it God anymore. But there’s something out there. I like how Anna described it: “the universe shares a consciousness.” There’s something. And human minds aren’t meant to spend a lot of time in communion with it. If you get too many revelations, eventually they decay into things like polygamy, or revelations about killing your children (Lori Daybell, Abraham). Mine decayed into internalized things like suicidal tendencies. Sometimes I suspect that Nephi, Joseph Smith, and myself all have something similar going on and I wonder what Joseph Smith would have been like if he’d had access to therapy and medication.
In the last couple of years, I’ve grown so wary of associating The Spirit almost exclusively with feelings, as so many members do. My greatest experiences, few as they may be, were more like a software upload directly to the mind, or as if “intelligence” was a substance to be exchanged between beakers. Feelings may have accompanied some of those events, but they weren’t the main event. In one of those times, it was almost like my feelings were momentarily pushed aside to make room for what I had to experience.
I understand the psychological explanations, the evolutionary explanations, the physics explanations, and any number of others. But honestly, logic and reason tell me the simplest explanation is that a divine being is letting me take part in a divine experience, for a divine purpose. I understand how others wouldn’t think that way. I honestly don’t believe thinking that way has made me any less of a valuable member to society, and I would hope it’s quite the opposite. I look at most people and believe they are just trying to do their best to live the best life they can with the best understanding of reality that they have. It’s no different with me.
Physics, nature, and experience generally tell me people and things will take the path of least resistance. And yet, it’s difficult to watch someone whose life is in shambles pick up a Book of Mormon, so to speak, and find themselves a new person a few months later, without acknowledging that they likely experienced something similar or better than my own experiences.
I was slow to discount the spiritual experiences of other religious groups before my mission. I’ve grown even slower since beginning the mission and the twenty five years I’ve been home. If you really take the time to listen to them, especially the conversion stories in other denominations, there really is very little that directly contradicts our own experiences and beliefs (or maybe I should speak for myself). I’m a firm believer that our Heavenly Father and Savior have a church they call Their own, but it’s absolutely ludicrous to believe They aren’t actively working through other religious groups as well. As a culture, I think we could to better to acknowledge that.
My baseline assumption is that what we tend to label as the spirit is usually elevation emotion, a phenomenon within the human brain. Some people I love believe some of their experiences can’t be explained entirely by things within them. It’s possible I’ve not had the same experiences they have, because I don’t find it difficult to explain it all coming from within. I remain open to the possibility of a higher power being involved in this, but with the caveat that we should be extremely careful about over-interpreting what is being communicated by that power. Maybe the best interpretation of our spiritual experiences is that we have experienced divine love and we should leave it at that. To interpret those experiences as being verifiable proof of any claims made by any religion is to set ourselves up for disappointment when eventually those claims collide with more concrete forms of evidence.
Eli: Fair point about discounting the spiritual experiences of other religious groups, but wow, some of these really look like a psychosexual psychosis, particularly medieval descriptions of things that various saints described–swords piercing them in specific places. It’s full of pathos and sounds a lot like mental illness. A lot of medieval documents are filled with people treating things that sound psychotic as totally normal.
Hawkgrrrl,
Also a fair point. There are many reasons, in my mind, why it was called the Dark Ages. Not every proclaimed spiritual experience can necessarily be such. I do think a Restoration would have been impossible, however, without a guided Reformation.
Originally, I was actually thinking more in terms of the average Jane or Joe on the street, someone you might talk to on an internet forum, or somebody a missionary might meet. When I hear these conversion stories, I see a person who has gone from point A to point B. With few exceptions (like the kind that might make a Dateline story or Netflix documentary), point B is almost always an improvement from point A. When I reference my own spiritual experiences and the conclusion I’ve come to that a loving God is involved, it’s difficult not to conclude (again, with few exceptions) that He is involved in those experiences as well. Again, when I take the time to listen closely, very little contradicts directly with the restored Gospel and, if anything, is usually a step closer to it. Whether that person takes another step toward the restored Gospel in this life or next remains to be seen. But as I get older, I do find that reading conversion stories in other denominations often fascinate me as much as conversion stories to my own denomination.
Please, just give me $20.00 for every time a member has spoken about having an experience that was too spiritual to share. Probably like the First Vision, it would change with time and retelling…and like the BOM it would have to be taken to Heaven to “preserve” its holiness. yeah. right.
Bill (or rather ChatGPT) says, “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.”
But who’s to say that’s not precisely how (or part of how) the Spirit, Cosmic Mind, Divine Consciousness, or whatever you wanna call it, operates on us? I’m not quite sure how such events would be triggered or felt *without* some sort emotional, physical, social, or other involvement.
Sometimes ChatGPT is brilliant. And sometimes, after you peel a layer, it’s not.
I want to hear more about Instereo’s band playing at the 2002 winter Olympics!
Chadwick:
There was a tryout at Alta High School during the Summer. There were a lot of bands that tried out. Another band that made it was Ryan Shoop and the Rubber Band. Anyway, we were basically a cover band that played in bars, but we had all four members of the band that sang, so we could do a lot of different kinds of music. We also didn’t cover songs exactly, but made them our own. The tryout was a five-minute tryout with 15 minutes to set up your equipment, a total of 20 minutes. You just played for the judges. I can’t remember if it was 3 or 5 or even 7, but the auditorium was empty except for them. While you were playing, the next band was loading in their equipment in the back. We decided to do a medley of 4 songs, with each of us singing lead on one of them and then having different harmony configurations. So we did a verse/chorus of 4 different songs and mashed them together with no break. We threw everything we had into it, and those 5 minutes felt like an entire night of playing afterwards. I was exhausted. We felt good about what we did, but didn’t know for a few weeks what their decision was. When we found out, we had two nights at the medals plaza and got to play at the Women’s Arial Finals as well. We then had a couple of weeks to send them a set list and demo of what we were going to play and the order we were going to play them in. We also had to go through a long process of getting credentials and security checks. All of that came together over the few months between audition and playing. A little before the Olympics, we had a walk-through where we played, and they set levels and asked us what backline equipment we wanted to use, amps/drums/etc. On the day of playing, they had a big, full-size bus come and pick us up and take us to the medals plaza. We could take our instruments, but nothing else. Security was really tight, so we were only allowed to walk down certain paths, go through a TSA-like detector, and then be in our own green room. Every artist had their own place that was completely separate, yet all within a large tent. You could hear people talk, but you couldn’t see them. The Bare Naked Ladies were extremely funny in their pre-gig waiting. When it was time to play, they came and got us, and we had a few minutes to watch the act before us from backstage, and then we had a minute or so to get our instruments, plug in, and play while an MC introduced us. We then played the set we had already preapproved and practiced countless times so we would not have any lags or dead air. We played 8 songs in 30 minutes and went crazy. Each of us sang two songs and sang harmony on the rest. We danced, ran around, and had a lot of fun. When we finished each song, I couldn’t believe how loud it was from the cheering, and we weren’t even the headliners. After we finished, we were “allowed” to go into an area of the crowd and watch the rest of the show. I might mention that the crowd was divided into sections and you weren’t allowed to go from one section to another. I went one other night with my daughter to see the GoGo Dolls. We didn’t have tickets but just trusted fate and got some from ‘scalpers’ walking up the Medals Plaza. Those tickets weren’t free, but it was fun just trusting fate and going for it. For our “volunteering,” we got a hoodie, all kinds of certificates, 2002 Olympic swag, and a great once-in-a-lifetime experience. The Women’s Arial Finals were different. We were allowed to drive close to the venue but had to have our equipment and instruments trucked in the last 1/2 mile or so. We then waited in a tent close to the stage while everything was going on, and finally, after the event, we played for about 1/2 hour. It was fun but not like the Medals Plaza. After the Olympics, we opened for a few other bands at various places in Salt Lake and in Evanston, WY; Little River Band, Quiet Riot, Bad Company, and Joan Jett, which was an awesome gig, but that’s another story. Let me just say she’s a really down-to-earth and nice person who talked with my daughter and really gave her some female affirmation.
I probably wrote too much, but remembering this has also brought back the feelings and how surreal/spiritual it was to just let go and try something that, from the onset, looked crazy and was crazy after it started to roll out.
What a great story and experience Instereo. Thanks for sharing.
I was at BYU during the 2002 olympics and so was able to attend a few things and the bands you mentioned are core parts of my teenage/twenties years. So it was fun to reminisce as I read your comment.
Eli: You might enjoy a post I did years ago about my mother’s deconversion from Lutheranism which occurred as she converted to Mormonism. I thought it was a fascinating description of the process, including various psychological components as her beliefs and feelings changed: perceptions of belonging, salvation related fears, resonating (or not) with various missionaries and things they said, finding some doctrines off-putting then fully justifying them after the conversion. Here’s the post: https://bycommonconsent.com/2013/06/02/the-testimony-puzzle/
JB, if you think ChatGPt and Malcom Gladwell are “two of the most wildly unreliable sources of the 21st century,” you’re sort of putting yourself on that list. It’s very easy to name a bunch more unreliable sources than those two. Mistakes are made by both, but that’s quite the hyperbole. Hurting your own argument there. Which is, of course, highly ironic.
In other notes. I had a bunch of highly moving, insightful, miraculous spiritual experiences. At the time, I found these all to be faith confirming. Now I see them all as miraculous. In the way that our brains and biological responses are. Very cool all that.
Brian, Malcolm Gladwell has openly said in interviews that he cares more about being interesting than in being right. He has been repeatedly debunked and disproven on the so-called 10,000 hour rule, the broken glass theory of crime, the idea that parents have little effect on their children’s development, and his thoughts on the Joe Paterno scandal at Penn State, and that’s just off the top of my head. He has indeed also been proven correct on other things, but that still means he has to be read critically and carefully, not cited Willy-nilly as an inherently reliable source.
Meanwhile, the tendency of LLM chatbots to hallucinate fake sources, invent and spread disinformation, tell you only what you want to hear, impair the cognitive abilities of frequent users, and botch basic math, is so widely documented as to be beyond dispute at this point. Seriously, a chatbot screwing up simple information is a meme at this point. If you are not strenuously double- and triple-checking every single thing a chatbot tells you, then you are not actually doing any real research, and seriously undermining your own credibility.
Simply put, one cannot be critical of church members for mindlessly parroting the church’s official taking points and letting someone else do their thinking for them, and then casually quote ChatGPT in the next breath. Tell me what your own personal experiences have been and I’ll hear you out; but don’t let a machine do your thinking for you.
Hawkgrrrl,
Thanks for the link. That was indeed interesting.
JB, I hear your concerns. Your hyperbole is still unwarranted. Right wing news and Trump are way more widely unreliable, for instance. If you want to argue that Malcom Gladwell is somehow worse than them, well . . . I guess you can. Or social media in general.
LLMs are vastly improving everyday, but that is beside the point. And I think far more people are letting religion and politicians do their thinking for them than they are letting Gladwell and LLMs. Is there some concern you have with the OPs ChatGPt quote in particular, or simply in practice?