When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann 2012; ch 5:

But not everybody prayed easily, and not everyone enjoyed prayer. And then I noticed that hearing God seemed to fall along a continuum, with people who were frustrated in prayer at one end and people who loved to pray at the other. People who didn't enjoy prayer did not pray much, did not think that God talked to them much, and did not have wonderful imaginative experiences with God. They sometimes worried that God did not love them very much. On the other hand, those who loved to pray were likely to talk about becoming so absorbed in their prayer that the ordinary world could fade for them, and their sense of time and place and self would alter. They talked about how vivid their internal world became. Indeed, they talked as if the very architecture of that internal world-their mental images and their sensations-became sharper and richer and more powerful, and they spoke as if their sensory perceptions of the materially external world became heightened. They imagined God vividly, and they had rich, deeply emotional, often playful relationships with God. They felt his love intensely, and they mourned his absence deeply. They said that sometimes they saw or heard or felt the presence of something that was not there in a material way. Most of the sensing was interior, akin to what we think of as the imagination. But every so often, they heard or felt God as if he were a body among bodies. Such occasions were rare, and some people had those experiences, while others did not.
Moreover, people repeatedly told me that prayer requires training and discipline; that learning to pray is hard; that some people are naturally good at prayer; and that some people, who are naturally good at it and who practice, become experts. This suggested to me that there might be a real psychological skill to responding to prayer, and that these reported changes were not just pious assertions that people learned to say so that they could appear to be devout. It suggested that as people develop the skill, something changes about the way they use their minds. It also suggested that some people develop the skill more readily than others.

But Sarah also made comments that suggested that the quality of those mental events had changed. She was quite clear that prayer practice had altered the way her mind worked: "Everything looked different to me." She told me, for example, that her mental images actually got sharper: "Depending on the prayers and depending on what's going on, the images that I see [in prayer] are very real and lucid. Different than just daydreaming. I mean, sometimes it's almost like a PowerPoint presentation." She told me that over time the images got richer and more complicated. They seemed to have sharper borders. They continued to get more complex and more distinct. She felt that as she became more expert, words would just come to her when she shut her eyes to pray for people, and in her mind they began to crystallize into the forms imprinted by a printer on a page. Sometimes, as she listened to people talk, their words would appear to her almost as if they were being transcribed on paper.

Sarah thought that prayer was an experience of flow, at least when it was working well, when it was good: "Sometimes [when I pray,] I'm amazed at how much time has gone by, how long I've been praying. It is like time is spent a bit differently." She also felt that what happened in the flow of prayer was, in some real sense, not just in her mind-and not under her personal control: "Like my mind is just a screen that they're flashed on. So it's more like watching for the images rather than generating images, I think. Somebody else is controlling that clicker."

What was striking to an observer was that as she lovingly attended to these internal sensations, the sensations seemed to take on a life of their own and become more and more vivid until she occasionally experienced some of them as if they were located in the external material world, so that she saw and heard and smelled and felt sensations not caused by material things.
If this were just Sarah's story, one might wonder about her stability. After all, we worry about people who see and hear things that are not materially present. But it wasn't. David's report of the way he had changed after he became a serious prayer person was very much like Sarah's, except that he was unsure how to interpret theologically the psychological changes that he clearly recognized were taking place...He described praying with intense, driven, focused yearning. Time vanished in that field. At first, he said, nothing happened. "I remember there for while I was kind of disappointed because I didn't feel any different." He clearly thought, at the time, that praying intensely should make him feel different. Soon it did. "After a few weeks, it was like God was waiting for me." He could really feel God's presence, he said, as if God were there. He also felt profound rest, and a kind of emotional openness and freedom. He cried a lot. He also told me that people seemed to respond to him differently, which he interpreted as a consequence of supernatural contact. "Things started happening around me." He went to the field every week for a year. These days when David prays, he gets a lot of imagery. The face of someone he hasn't thought of for a long time will come to him, or he will "have someone on my heart for no particular reason." When that happens, he will pray for them. He was praying one night, and much to his surprise, the image of a woman he knew from church popped into his mind, and she was dancing with grace and freedom. "I felt, praying about the image, 'God, what is this?' Because I wasn't thinking about her … So I told her about it, and she was struggling then, and she was so encouraged by that image, that God still sees her just dancing for him." God sees her, he said. It was an image in David's head-but both he and she took it as a message from God. He told me that those images had gotten clearer over time.

The Alpha course is possibly the most common vehicle through which new evangelicals learn about the faith they have embraced. In 2011 the Alpha website stated that more than two million people in the United States and more than sixteen million worldwide had taken the ten-week course. Every Vineyard church I visited ran Alpha at least once a year. The course was created in 1991 by an Englishman named of Nicky Gumbel who had been an avowed atheist until he read the New Testament during his first year at Cambridge and fell in love with it.
When you take the course, as I did in 2005, you attend ten weekly evening sessions, each with a home-cooked meal, and a weekend retreat informally dubbed the "Holy Spirit weekend." You watch a half-hour presentation by Gumbel, speaking in a pleasing, intellectual British accent, to a church full of young, attractive middle-class adults. The tapes are funny, intelligent, relaxed. Gumbel assumes that the listener has doubts. He assumes that it is hard to take this supernatural stuff seriously, although he also makes it clear that those events really occurred. After the tape ends, participants break up into small groups to talk. People are encouraged to talk about their doubt.

The Holy Spirit weekend is supposed to change your life. It is meant to be a retreat where the group leaders encourage participants to feel the indwelling presence of God, often for the first time. This does not happen to everyone. But it happened to Sam.
    It was the first time that I really felt God's power. So on Holy Spirit Day, my girlfriend and I both went. They were talking about the Holy Spirit and stuff, and then the leader was like, "We're gonna start praying for everybody shortly." She said, "Some of you might be feeling the spirit on you now," and I noticed about myself that my breathing was getting like really deep, and like I was starting to shake a little bit. I just felt like my body had so much energy, and it's like I'm gonna just leap out of my seat and just go running like fifty miles or something. She's like, "Some of you may be sweating," and I'm like, "Yeah, I'm sweating." She's like, "Some of you might have oily palms," and I'm like, "Yeah, I got oily palms." And she's like, "Some of you might be shaking and heavy breathing, and some of you might just be like jittery." And I'm like, "Check, check, check, check, I've got all that." I'm like, "She must have put something in my food or something." She's just like, "I feel the presence of the Holy Spirit right here," and she points at me, but I'm like, "I'm not going up there." You know, I feel really uncomfortable, like nervous and stuff. I don't want to go up in front of all these people. There had to be fifty or sixty people there.
    So she's like, "There's also the presence of him over here too," and there's this other girl across the way that's shaking and has the same things going on with her. She stands up and they pray over her. And it was just amazing. They keep praying over her, these two helpers, and the leader is explaining that the Holy Spirit administers to your heart and all this stuff. They have their hands on her, and she just collapses backwards and they catch her. She's just laughing on the floor like you can't wipe the smile off her face.
...Note the progression: The group leader suggested, and he experienced. He was one of the few who experienced so dramatically. Yet he does not seem to have faked his response. Sam felt the Holy Spirit with his senses and in his body, and it transformed his life because now, for the first time, he was really sure that God was real. "I would always ask my girlfriend, 'Why do you believe? How do you know that God really exists?' I mean, I know that I accepted Christ my Savior, I mean, I kind of know he's there. But like I'm not a hundred percent sure. And she's like, 'You just know, you'll just know, he'll show you.' After that day, I knew."

Soon after he began praying, Sam began to feel sensorily aware of God, as if God were a person who was physically present. He reported that he experienced God as more present than an imaginary friend, and when I probed him skeptically, he pushed back. God was there. He felt him. "It is like having an imaginary friend, in a sense, because I talk to him all the time like he's always next to me, but [it's not imaginary because] you know that he's there." He said he would walk down the street with God by his side, talking to him and singing to him: "It's kind of weird, but walking down the street randomly, making up songs no one's ever heard of, and just singing to him-it makes me feel so wonderful to know that he's listening and walking right beside me." I asked him whether it really felt as if there were a person walking right beside him. "Definitely. Definitely. You know beyond a shadow of a doubt that somebody is there with you."

I learned about Jeremiah at the Vineyard, however, not because of his pain but because of a scene in which God explicitly teaches Jeremiah to prophesy by asking him to treat images in his mind's eye as a divine message. God comes to Jeremiah and tells him that he has been appointed a prophet; Jeremiah demurs. He "does not know how to speak." And perhaps he is aware of the risks of the job. God touches him on the lips, and then asks him what he sees. Jeremiah responds that he sees (in his mind's eye) the branch of an almond tree. God is pleased. "You have seen well." Then he asks Jeremiah again what he sees. This time Jeremiah explains that he sees a boiling pot, tipping over from the north. God again is pleased and now delivers the first of the hard prophecies that he wants Jeremiah to share.6 When we read this section in house group, Elaine, our leader, practically shook her finger at us when she made her main point. Listen. Watch. Pay attention. God will teach you how to hear him.

Does the soul really leave the body? Social science cannot answer that question. But the discrete, identifiable experience has been reported in many cultures. Scientists have found that if people have had one out-of-body experience, they can be trained to experience another, and that while in that state, their brains look predictably different in the scanner.7

By the time I met him, he had made his peace with his sense that he was just not someone who experienced God that way. He experiences God as close, but he does not have the chatty relationship with God that others seem to have. He doesn't find himself talking to God routinely throughout the day: "I mean there'll be sporadic prayers, quick prayers. Mostly not deep long prayers." He doesn't have many images when he prays, and whatever images he does have do not seem important to him. "I don't picture anything when I pray," he told me. "I know some people picture things when they pray, or praise an image of God or something. I don't."
Nor is Jacob so unusual. Nearly a quarter of the people I interviewed systematically at the church-six out of twenty-eight-told me, sometimes with discouraged voices, that they just didn't hear God the way other people did. "Please pray that I will hear God speak in a booming voice," one of them pleaded in Bible study. Like most people in the church, Fred, an earnest young economist, wanted concrete encounters with God, and he felt bad that he did not have them. When I sat down with him in an interview, he was glum: "I don't have these superpowerful experiences that make me fall to my knees."