Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Opening the Stephen Box

Long and wide eternity from side to side
Lead me through the rapids, guide me to the shore
There's a place that's far beyond this time and space
When each of us comes face to face with something more
If I open up the channel will you send me information
If you tune me to your station I'll receive
If I navigate the river would you take me to your island
Sing a siren song so I could never leave
Alan Parsons, Siren Song

It's been about two years now since I read The Stephen Experience, and in that time I've collected a whole bunch of similar documents in the after-life communication, near-death-experience and 'inspired writing' spectrum. I think it's time to try to somehow put the pieces together, such as they are.

I grew up in a non-denominational fundamentalist Pentecostal church which had withdrawn largely from society and had a fairly standard-for-the-milieu view of an approaching End Times, though we were vague on the details. (That's an oversimplification, because there were a lot of interesting spiritual influences on my life which I keep rediscovering, but it will do for now.)

The Pentecostal faith cluster is not at all the same thing as 'fundamentalism', which is usually narrowly defined by a baffled and uncomprehending secular world as a sort of rigid rejection of modernity. There's that in the mix, certainly, but it's not the main point; and the Pentecostals were deeply at odds with the Fundamentalists in the early 20th century even as their theologies later came to overlap. No, the defining characteristic of Pentecostalism is not what it rejects but what it stands for: the belief in the present power of the Holy Spirit in the world. It was not a rejection of modernity but a faith founded on the direct experience of the mystical and the miraculous in the midst of modernity, and in direct contradiction of the established teachings of early 20th-century science and theology. This conflict did create a darker side, of isolation and psychological coercion, but that was not the primary point of the movement; the direct experience of spiritual power was.

Because theirs was an experience-driven faith, often with working-class origins, and there was not a language for what they were doing, the early Pentecostals tended to create their own jargon or argot drawn from semi-random Bible quotations which persists today, and to outsiders often sounds like meaningless babble: phrases like 'the Annointing', 'slain in the Spirit', 'speaking in tongues', 'open heaven', 'word of knowledge' refer to real phenomena, but are frustratingly difficult to correlate with the terminology of science. And the Pentecostal hostility toward both science, psychic research, and organised religion did not help.

Growing up with the terminology of Pentecostalism, but not its power, it was not actually until I left that particular church and joined other groups that I actually discovered what some of those words were referring to. In Pentecostal and Charismatic services in the early 1990s, I witnessed what is called 'the baptism of the Holy Spirit', which is something that is very difficult to describe clearly but was extremely real.

When dealing with Pentecostal spiritual phenomena, a couple of metaphors come to mind. The experience is partly tangible and partly mental; it feels like a flowing liquid, light, or a magnetic field. It can be either intensely calm or vibrant; in its 'calm' mode it can cause something like an instantaneous light trance state; such a state can cause rapid loss of muscle coordination, which is what lies behind the (in)famous 'slaying in the Spirit' experience where a 'fired up' Pentecostal preacher touches someone lightly on the head and they fall to the floor. There is a space/time component to the experience; on the long term it manifests in global 'waves' or 'flaps' which can last for months at a time, but tends to fade over longer periods; on the short term, it can manifest either in a single person or in groups and can have very strongly varying intensies, which is why Pentecostals talk about 'the Spirit moving' or not and 'breaking through to the Glory'; it can be 'transferred' or 'caught' from one person to another; it can be carried by text or even thought.

There's also the experience of glossalalia, or 'speaking in tongues', which is deeply linked to the whole Pentecostal phenomena cluster, and feels similar to a light trance state but one that allows full conscious functioning (if not conscious parsing of the 'language' that is being spoken; in my experience, it has the feel of a mantra or liturgy, with sets of specific repeated phrases).

The 'word of knowledge' is a kind of psychic reading function where symbols or words or physical sensations are sensed internally (asking practitioners how they do this gets very frustrating answers like 'it's just there' or 'I feel them') describing a person's psychological state or physical symptoms that require miraculous healing. Some practitioners describe the purpose of the 'word of knowledge' as to create faith in the listener who can then access the healing power themselves. When this 'gift of the Spirit' is operating, it can be a very startling experience, and can rapidly break down psychological barriers in people who see this happening. 'How did they read my mind?'

Pentecostals speak of the sort of 'energy field' that seems to 'power' these abilities (when present; as confusingly, it's not always there) as 'the Annointing', but beyond a fairly immediate practical working knowledge of how to summon and work with this energy (ascribed to Jesus Christ) there is not much in the way of deeper understanding. Most Pentecostal and Charismatic training in 'moving in the Spirit' is on an apprenticeship system and there is little encouragement (in fact much active discouragement) of investigating how these 'powers' work and comparing with other psychic experiences. What knowledge exists is mostly scattered and in the form of in-house 'folklore' and rules-of-thumb, encoded in various churches' oral histories, the structure of their services, lyrics to hymns, and the personal patter and mannerisms of individual preachers. The Pentecostal tradition and habit of taking a 'showbiz' approach and being fascinated by strong (small-c) charismatic leaders has tended to hurt the movement badly; these are skills that desperately need to be taught and studied, but as even the practitioners often don't understand how they're doing these things, it can be difficult to penetrate the sense of confusion and 'insider talk' that surrounds them.

The interesting thing is that while being strongly open to this particular set of spiritual experiences, most mainstream Pentecostals and Charismatics today maintain a strong guard against other aspects of psychic functioning, such as channelling, generalised clairvoyance, and any form of communication with the dead (other than Jesus). Being Protestant in their outlook, communication with Christian saints, including Mary, is also forbidden.

It is against this backdrop that I discovered the Stephen book and found myself confronting the existence of another aspect of what appeared to be authentic Christian spirituality that lay next to but outside the Pentecostal framework: the literal existence of the Communion of the Saints - in other words, speaking with the dead.

And what I have found so far as the the experiences reported by generalised clairvoyants, mediums, and channellers, and the Pentecostal equivalents, seem to be very similar; in that they seem to share the same mental or spiritual mechanisms. And not only that, but as ESP and paranormal researchers are discovering, these experiences can be mapped out to some degree (though they are notoriously difficult to replicate in a laboratory setting with no emotional connection).

The question in my mind then is where do these phenomena connect, and are there two kinds of spiritual force or power that both acknowledge Jesus Christ as the source, that are indistinguishable in their effects, or is there as the Apostle Paul said, 'many manifestations but one Spirit'? And if the latter - then it seems to me that Christian Spiritualism and Pentecostalism, for example, are not two completely separate religious movements as has been believed, but two branches of one movement which need to find each other to be complete. Add a third stream of Christian Science / New Thought into the mix, and the picture seems to get even clearer.

The first step, though, for me, is to come to terms with the role of saints in my Christian cosmology, and what opening up such a huge channel of communication might mean for personal prayer and meditation practices.

It's kind of an overwhelming thought if you accept the idea that we may all be literally in communication with real people who are 'in Spirit' and have assignments to guard, advise and protect us. It's not something that you can come to terms with all at once; and even rationally believing that it is true doesn't make it emotionally any easier. If the mental universe is so huge and so closely-connected, what happens to privacy? How do we learn to differentiate the 'good' voices from distracting or 'bad' ones? What rights and duties do we have when dealing with non-physical friends and strangers? More importantly, if we accept that telepathic communication can be literally real, what does that then do to the modern idea of madness as being the belief in internal voices? Have we as a society mislabelled people as having 'brain chemical imbalances' who literally are, as older and simpler cultures would have said, troubled by spirits? Is the ancient idea of a 'muse' perhaps literally true? Are many of the great artistic and technical works of 'genius' actually partnerships between a living person and one or more spirit mentors - and if so, what does that do to the idea of intellectual property?

These are the sorts of valid questions that lie inside the Stephen box (and of course it's not just Stephen, there's been a steady stream of after-life communication material for the last century). Once we open that box, for real, it's going to be increasingly difficult to put all the pieces back together the same way the world was.

(Edit: updated to be a little more descriptive of about our church's theology)