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Some people experience God speaking directly to them in an easy relationship. Others do not.

As a result of my involvement with the Templeton group, I decided to carry out some quantitative and experimental work to see whether we could figure out the differences between those who found it easy to do this work, and those for whom it was difficult. That work suggests that there is a psychological capacity that makes the process of knowing this kind of God easier, though its absence does not prevent religious experience, and its presence does not predict it. It is the capacity for absorption, which is at the heart of imagination. Absorption is the capacity to focus one’s attention on a non-instrumental (and often internal) object while disattending to everyday exterior surrounds. Absorption is related to hypnosis and dissociation, but not identical to either. All of us go into light absorption states when we settle into a book and let the story carry us away. There are no known physiological markers of an absorption state, but as the absorption grows deeper, the person becomes more difficult to distract, and his sense of time and agency begins to shift. He lives within his imagination more, whether that be simple mindfulness or elaborate fantasy, and he feels that the experience happens to him, that he is a bystander to his own awareness, more himself than ever before, or perhaps absent, but in any case different. And as the absorption grows deeper, people often experience more imagery and more sensory phenomena, sometimes with hallucinatory vividness. Scholars do not discuss training in absorption, although researchers of hypnosis and dissociation are clear that some kind of practice effects can be seen. 3

Conclusion

Prayer is basically training in absorption, at least the kind of prayer in which the person praying focuses inwardly and disattends to the everyday world in order to engage with God. It would be hard to over-estimate the importance placed on prayer and prayer experience in a church like this and indeed, in Christian America today. Many of the best-selling Christian books are books on prayer technique, and they sell in the millions. Such books often begin by presenting the concrete sensory experience of God described in the Hebrew Bible as the everyday relationship for which the ordinary believer should strive. In these manuals, the act of praying is understood as a skill that has to be deliberately learned. I discovered that evangelical congregants assumed that prayer was a skill which had to be taught, that it was hard, that not everyone was good at it, and that those who were naturally good and well trained would experience changes associated with a more richly developed inner world. Their mental images would seem sharper; they would be more likely to report unusual sensory experiences. They would be more able, in short, to experience God. The more quantitative work—done in collaboration with Howard Nusbaum and Ron Thisted--suggests that those who have a proclivity for absorption and who trained that proclivity through prayer are indeed more able to accomplish the demanding learning that this concept of God sets out. 4 They are more able to identify God’s presence in their mind. They are more likely to experience God as an invisible

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