Talk to God

Transcript

I was just thinking about talking to god.

I was thinking about that episode, interview I did a few months back with my friend Ana Gaeta and she talked a lot in the interview about prayer and talking to god and perhaps it’d seem unusual to most of you when she said that God spoke back.

It wasn’t this booming voice, not necessarily with long flowing hair and robe. Not necessarily present in her room physically but she had these feeling and deep intuitions that she knew were coming from a good place.

Some of you might be familiar with this quote coming from Thomas Szasz as the unconventional psychologist.

He said when someone talks to god that’s called prayer, its Called being a good Christian. When God talks back, that’s called being crazy.

The point is Szasz’s quote is to show that sometimes we have these cultural standards about things that don’t really reveal the deeper truth about it. So we might judge people for certain behaviors or certain aspects of ourselves. We might even shut ourselves off from them.

Some people have this hypothesis for example about people from the United States or many English speaking western culture.

What happens is they start to hear voices and they think “no, that’s bad, that’s cultural taboo. If that’s happening to me maybe that means Im bad, crazy or something else negative about oneself.

But if you look at other countries for example India people have a positive interpretation, positive assumption about hearing voices.

They won’t call you a schizophrenic or something like that.

They say that person is special, gift or that person is different. There’s something interesting going on there so perhaps as a result what happens in the United States is people have a really negative experience with these voices.

In India people have a very positive experience. People will even be uplifted and encouraged by the voices that they hear.

Perhaps a lot is to do with our interpretation and cultural assumptions. When we make our cultural assumptions concious we can begin to discard them.

Terrance McKenna told us that “Culture is not your friend”. Not that’s not strictly true, because there are a lot of cultural assumptions that are good for us.

Like, things we learn from social conditioning.

Owen Cook points this out, he asks “Anybody here every jump out of a 20 story building? No? You know its not good to do that because of social conditioning.

There are positive things about social conditioning and culture but there are things that don’t serve us. We can question them in an open free-ish society we have the freedom to explore these ideas and wonder if there isn’t a positive interpretation.

I know I have had many many unusual experiences, visitations in the night. Perhaps even voices, not quite like that but a lot of different experiences which are quite strange if I mention them to certain people, they will probably tell me to see a psychologist.

Because I know how to interpret these experiences with practice of philosophy and contemplation, they are not something that makes my insane or dysfunctional in a society.

So the point is sometimes we might hear God. Maybe you don’t want to think about it like that. We might hear the deepest intuition within ourselves.

Sometimes we have this deep knowledge and wisdom of our bodies, subconscious mind and in our conscious mind.

Things that are sometimes hidden and they bubble to the surface.

We know, we listen carefully, we know that they speak the truth.

We know, that’s why we have these quotes, I can’t remember who said it but it goes “Listen closely to that still small voice that never leads us into failure, never leads us into folly. That still small voice, we can hear it if we listen.”

Thank you for listening, thank you for listening to me and thank you for listening to yourself, what’s inside. That deepest part of your intuition that some of you might call God.