Does God Speak To You?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

Following is a quote from William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. Spellings and grammar are Blake’s.
"The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekial dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood & so be the cause of impostion.
" Isaiah answered: ‘I saw no God nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discovered the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.’
" Then I asked: ‘Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so make it so?’
"He replied: ‘All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of anything,’ "

I have, what I consider to be, a justifiable fear of anyone who claims God speaks to them. In my experience those who make such claims, who seem to know what God had for breakfast and behind which star He takes a crap, are judmental, bigoted and closed-minded.
Blake, in his seething satire, is coming from a different point of view, which he puts into the mouth of Isaiah. This view is that “truth” based on physical experience is thinking inside the box, that higher “truths” are available to poets who are able to think into the “infinite”, thus opening doors of creative imagination.
As a physicalist, I find Blake’s Isaiah to be both compelling and restrictive. I’m well aware of persons who believe God has spoken to them through Nature or through prayers answered. Before I bring up Julian Jaynes’ take on this idea of transcendental truth, what say you?

2

There is in all of us a voice that is not ours. Who’s voice is it? Mostly we call it our concience. Is that the real God? Some may say it is. Others may speak to another voice one beyond what they know in normal times. when our mind is at its peak who knows what may communicate with it. Could those that claim to hear gods be in the right place at the right time to recieve a message? Possibly. If they had not been where they stood they may not have heard it. Or perhaps their brain was at a certain receptive mode. Most though just want to bully others and only hear their own ego. I won’t name specific names but , they fit the evangelical descritpion or fanatical descriptions. The voice with in me is a friend wether it is a sentient superior being or not i have no way to verify it. It seems to help me and be a companion of sorts and so I listen and chat with it. If something occurs that I asked for help with then I thank it and wish it happiness forever etcetc.
Sometimes questioning what is can undo any good.

3

Thanks, Lady K.,
But how can you prove that the voice within you is not you? As Paul notes, I often do what I would not; and yet some inner voice seems to set me straight. How much of that voice is a subconscious reservior of social indoctrination or parental guidance.
Is Blake right in suggesting some “higher order of truth”?

4

I used to think god was speaking to me when I would take large amounts of LSD as a teenager. Then I found out that it was just my friend who had this little speaker and a microphone hidden in my room. That son of a bitch almost got me to slay my son issac. Thank goodness I realized what was up. I probably would have ended up doing time.

5

LOL! But can you see some sort of split beween reason and creative imagination as Blake did?

6

I’ve always thought that the basis of reason was creativity. Like, I do something, and people get all pissed off, so I have to give them reasons why I did it, so they don’t stay pissed, which entails, at times, a good bit of creativity.

7

Is not social indoctrination and parental guidance what God is about when you cut past the facade of religion?
We know it is not us, we know that something else is lurking in there, does it matter what instrument was used to put it there? Does it matter that the hand that used the instrument that put it there is experience hope or faith? We ask questions that can lead to our undoing as easily as we ask queistions to grow. I enjoy putting puzzles together, learning and growing, my curiosity has gotten me into trouble as much as it has helped. Sometimes I think it is better just to accept certain little voices that are just being helpful and let it call itself what ever it wants to :smiley:

Oh and,Why on earth would I want to try to prove it? If the voice is just my training, what do I gain? :confused:

8

One of the reasons I placed this thread is out of respect for William Blake, whom, I believe, has not gotten his due respect as a first class thinker. He expressed Nietzschean ideas a century before N. wrote anything. He read widely Christian mystics such as Boehme and Swedenborg, along with the Jewish Kabbala. He admired Jesus while eschewing Christianity.
My problem with his ideas, which are well-expressed in the snippet above, is that reason is an obstacle for creativity; and, for how he appears to join Kierkegaard in assuming two different orders of reality.
Now, for Julian Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.–Jaynes presents considerable scholarship about oldest manuscripts to show how the human mind lost its vocal contact with the gods as possibly a consequence of evolution. He compares gods speaking to humans in “The Iliad” as corresponding to voices heard by schizophrenics. This idea would place a major evolutionary change of the human mind/brain at about 1,200 BCE.

9

It’s what Blake thinks. If you wade through his homemade mythology in the prophetic books, you will find reason, expressed as Urizen (your reason), to be the villain.

10

Lots of evil beings pretend to be God or gods, when they take control of a body’s mind and manipulate the future of species, for their own dishonest purposes. If they don’t have full control, implants and psionic links, microwaves or anything else possible can use subliminal messages and TPS.

If you are not on hollucigens and are not mentally ill, but recieve voices claiming to be God/gods, you’re probably in danger, as are many others.

11

Dan,
Hey, admired thinker, please tell me what you are on so I can get some. I often suffer from mental constpation. :smiley:

12

Does God speak to me? i’d like to think that someone is giving me orders to act like an asshole other than myself.

13

I’m on a chair.

14

Chairs won’t help him get some.

15

So, has the human race evolved beyond schizophrenia?
Dan, Chair of a committee on the blessings of irrationality? ( See Barrett, “Irrational Man”.)
Yep, I love Dali, Escher, et.al. I think Smears gets it right.
“Creativity is our image of God”-- Nicholas Berdyaev. Sounds good, but do we need an image? Isn’t our evolving from chaos to order sufficient?

16

I somehow feel that God can speak to us – at least indirectly. For those to whom the existence of God is a reality, we have come from the Mind of God, everything comes from the Mind of God.

I believe that there is this great interconnectedness between every human being, whether they be living or dead. There is what Carl Jung called the “subconscious mind” and the “collective subconconcious”. I believe that it is basically through this collective subconconcious where our thoughts mesh, where we are able to “hear” or to gain information that otherwise might not come to us. I don’t speak of schizophrenia here, but perhaps going out on a limb, I can venture to say that maybe a schizophrenic mind can be more open to these thoughts.

Perhaps through our “emerging” from the Mind of God, and this interconnectedness with one another, we are able to “pick” up on and benefit from every loving, creative thought and every prayer uttered down through the ages, holding within them the Mind of God. I do personally feel that there are people in the world with whom God speaks directly, very few of them – I AM NOT ONE OF THEM.

Also, there are ways in which one can speak without the use of words: For instance, the words “I love you” can be spoken —

With the eyes without saying a word;
Through our arms which can hold;
Through the ears and the entire body listening intently;
Through a gift given so unexpectedly;
Through our tears that convey empathy;
Ad infinitum…

and God uses these same things to speak to us.

I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun . . .

I am the mist of morning, the breath of evening . . . .
I am the spark in the stone, the gleam of gold in the metal . . . .
The rose and the nightingale drunk with its fragrance.

I am the chain of being, the circle of the spheres,
The scale of creation, the rise and the fall.
I am what is and is not . . .

I am the soul in all.

  • Rumi

We

17

Dali scares me.

18

Once on display at The Wilderness Center at Wilmot, Ohio, was a collection of carved rocks. In their state of forced change they assumed appearances of humans and other animals. The artist who changed them claimed he did little to them in the way of carving and filing. He claimed he had only to walk though the woods or the streams in order to find, on close observation, a rock that could reasonably assume the face of Richard Nixon.
Most animals appear to think like the stone artist. A twig becomes part of the structure of a nest or a dipstick for catching termites. Seeing an object as having practical use requires an accurate assessment of what the object is and does plus a creative projection of what it can be made to do. Humans are better than most animals at this type of thinking–with beautific and horrific results.
Art, even that which is “surreal” or “abstract” is not a depiction of what is not. it is a creative reconstruction of what is. Dali’s and Escher’s art shows things that neither were nor could be. On closer observation of these works, one can see how all Impossible objects are comprised of the lines, arcs and spaces that are the structures of reason.

19

Once upon a time, long, long ago, talk show host Dick Cavett attempted an interview with Salvidore Dali. " Attempted" is the key word here. In response to any Cavett query Dali gave garbled nonsense. Finally, Cavett stuck his thumbs into his ears, waved his fingers and uttered some good glossolallia. I think that probably pleased Dali. He was able to challenge cerebral formats with outside the box absurdity, evoking surrealism from his interrogator. Likewise, M.C. Esher produced, via graphs that still wow mathematicians, illusions that can be seen as realities.
So, the question that arises from this is the old philosophical quandry of seeing structure as somehow restricting creativity and imagination. What does this have to do with religion? If religious structures (orthodoxies) prohibit creative progression, they appear to be little more than the latest I know and you don’t; so you need to be told, paradigm.

20

I hear shitloads of different voices. Most are OK, some give me the shits. But the voice of God? I guess in the healthy individual that would have to be the spectre of Nietzsche’s spirit.

However, by ‘inner voice’ I think you mean your Self.