Experiencing God is hard work

Surveys show that Americans are into the supernatural. Some would say obsessed. According to a 2011 Associated Press poll, 80 percent of Americans believed in angels—even 40 percent of those who never went to church. A 2009 poll from the Pew Research Center reported that 20 percent of Americans experienced ghosts, and 1 in 7 had consulted a psychic. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans believed in something paranormal and that 40 percent said that houses could be haunted.

In an article published on Oct.14, 2013, in the New York Times, T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, surveys some studies of this phenomenon.

Some scholars, she writes, believe these date show that belief in the supernatural is hard-wired. She refers to anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Thought, and psychologist Justin L. Barrett, author of Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, who argue that the fear that one would be eaten by a lion or killed by a man who wanted your stuff shaped the way our minds evolved. 

“Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were more likely to survive if they interpreted ambiguous noise as the sound of a predator,” Luhrmann writes. “Most of the time it was the wind, of course, but if there really was danger, the people who worried about it were more likely to live.”

The thinking here is that the search for an agent evolved into an intuition that an invisible agent, or god, may be there. Luhrmann notes that this theory can be argued from different theological positions. Boyer is an atheist and treats religion as a mistake. Barrett is an evangelical Christian who thinks God’s hand steered evolution.

Luhrmann argues, however, that intuition and sober faith are two different things. She asks us to consider how some people attempt to make what can only be imagined feel real. “They do this by trying to create thought-forms, or imagined creatures, called tulpas,” she writes. “Their human creators are trying to imagine so vividly that the tulpas start to seem as if they can speak and act on their own.”

That term, she explains, comes from the explorer Alexandra David-Néel, who wrote that Tibetan monks created tulpas as a spiritual discipline during intense meditation. Tulpa practice has now become popular, with dozens of sites on the Internet with instructions on creating one.

Luhrmann describes how these work. She interviewed a young man who set aside an hour and a half each day for this. “He’d spend the first 40 minutes or so relaxing and clearing his mind. Then he visualized a fox (he liked foxes). After four weeks, he started to feel the fox’s presence and to have feelings he thought were the fox’s.”

Later, he stopped spending all that time meditating, and the fox went away. Luhrmann concludes that “experiencing an invisible companion as truly present—especially as an adult—takes work: constant concentration, a state that resembles prayer.”

“This very difficulty may be why evangelical churches emphasize a personal, intimate God,” she writes, and why “churches that rely on a relatively impersonal God (like mainstream Protestant denominations) have seen their congregations dwindle over the last 50 years.”

This will not surprise those familiar the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism, which delves into the work of contemplation, paradoxical as that sounds.

Luhrmann ends her essay thus: “Secular liberals sometimes take evolutionary psychology to mean that believing in God is the lazy option. But many churchgoers will tell you that keeping God real is what’s hard.”