I. The Anthropologist Goes Praying

Anthropology has a reputation for exoticization. When a book calls itself an ethnography, you kind of imagine it as a story of a pith-helmeted adventurer stalking around an isolated tribe, telling you gripping details about their unusual worldviews, stories, rites, dissecting the structure of their minds, theorizing how it is possible that they are so different. To be fair, ethnographies of segments of western societies are not uncommon either, but correspondingly you might expect the subject group to be different from yours in smaller ways, unlike "primitive minds" that exhume their dead ancestors to talk to them or set down a piece of rock on the road to prevent the sun from setting before they make it home. Put differently, it's not often that we get a glimpse into the ways of life of people who are close to us but disagree with us about what is "real". Persuasions of the Witch's Craft and When God Talks Back by Tanya M. Luhrmann are ethnographies of fairly "normal" people living in industrialized, secular, western societies, but who believe they can control the elements with magic or talk with God.

In Persuasions of the Witches' Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (hereafter Persuasions), the author spends evenings in a basement temple in North London, standing among candles, antlers, sheaves of wheat, surrounding a large chalk circle, in which is a shrine holding up an ancient chest, incense, flowers and herbs, and an effigy of Pan. She would join a circle of ritualists who started running around the altar, chanting phrases, visualizing channeling magic to a sick baby represented by an effigy in the center of the magical circle. Sometimes this would happen outdoors at a special time of the year like Halloween, where the witches would be naked and dancing around a fire, passing around a pomegranate, speaking of tasting the fruit of life and death.

In When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (hereafter God Talks), the setting might be a little more familiar. Luhrmann joins an evangelical church and during various stages of worship you get congregants in various states of ecstasy, crying freely, speaking in tongues, collapsing to the floor because they are "slain in the spirit", feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit move around the room as if it is substance. Even outside of communal rituals, people talk about experiencing God by their side, having their prayers answered when God speaks back to them audibly in their ears, having a relationship with God like with an old friend, even going on "dates" with him.

The groups being studied are not, it must be said, the low-hanging fruit. While these groups are certainly extraordinary in their beliefs and practices, Luhrmann is careful, in both books, to emphasize the ordinariness of her subjects. The London magicians include computer scientists, factory engineers, art students, civil servants. They hold modern jobs, watch television, know what science is, and have generally been exposed to enough of it to understand that "mind affects matter through ritual" is not the current best hypothesis in physics. The Vineyard congregants include graduate students, medical school fellows, realtors, accountants. These people have arrived at their beliefs not through isolation or ignorance but through deliberate processes that are slow, embodied, social, and sometimes conditioned by individual psychology.

Persuasions was Luhrmann's PhD thesis work, a study of self-identified witches, kabbalists, druids, and assorted practitioners of ritual magic in London and its surrounds, conducted over fourteen months of genuine participant-observation in the early 1980s. God Talks, arguably her magnum opus, is a study of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a charismatic evangelical megachurch with a theology built around the idea that ordinary people can, through training and practice, learn to hear God speak to them personally. Both books ask essentially the same question: how do intelligent, educated, otherwise perfectly reasonable people come to believe — really believe, experientially and not just intellectually — in things that the secular scientific consensus considers impossible?

The extraordinary claims these groups make are worth stating plainly. The magicians believe that trained intention, expressed through ritual, can alter physical reality. They invoke ancient gods and expect results. They practice astral projection, read tarot cards as genuine oracles, and some report vivid experiences of leaving their bodies. The Vineyard Christians believe that God — the actual God, omniscient creator of the universe — speaks to them in their thoughts during prayer; that he has opinions about their career decisions, their relationships, their choice of neighborhood; that the Holy Spirit can accumulate in a room during worship like a kind of thick gas and knock people over when it concentrates sufficiently. Many report auditory experiences of divine origin. Some see visions. Some report sensory experiences of presence — a warmth, a pressure, a feeling of being embraced by something vast and loving.

These are, on their face, supernatural claims. Luhrmann does not dismiss that possibility and does not endorse it. This is fair. Although I will carry on with the assumption that there are no supernatural workings in these phenomena, Luhrmann’s methodological naturalism as an anthropologist isn't concerned with confirming or dismissing the veracity of supernatural world views. The focus is more on human cognition. She looks for the mechanism by which these world views arise and persist. The result is a framework that explains how God or other supernatural beings become real to people.

II. Are They Crazy?

The most natural first response to accounts of people reporting divine voices and out-of-body experiences is a clinical one: are these people experiencing some form of psychopathology? Are they hallucinating? Are they schizophrenic?

The "no" answer on schizophrenia is actually the cleaner one. The diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia include not just the presence of hallucinations or delusions, but their effect on functioning. What strikes any observer about both the London magicians and the Vineyard Christians is that, by and large, they are not dysfunctional. Luhrmann's magicians hold jobs, maintain relationships, navigate modern life with competence. They confine their magical worldview to specific contexts — they don't recommend spells in their work memos. ^[1] The Vineyard Christians are, if anything, slightly more socially coherent than a baseline population: they have tighter community bonds, lower rates of isolation, and a strong ethic of mutual care.

Luhrmann has an important method that she would later call "comparative phenomenology", aimed at understanding spiritual experience with enough granularity from the inside while maintaining the disciplined external perspective of a scientist. This involves structured interviews designed to elicit authentic descriptions of the experiences: their sensory modality (is God heard, felt, seen, or sensed without physical sensations), their apparent source (internal or external), their emotional valence (anxious, fearful, at peace, ecstatic), their relationship to volition, their persistence after the triggering context ends.

What this method reveals is that the Vineyard Christians who report hearing God's voice are almost uniformly experiencing things phenomenologically different from the auditory hallucinations of psychosis. The canonical psychotic voice is intrusive, unbidden, often hostile, perceived as clearly external, experienced as persecutory, and resistant to the subject's attempts to dismiss it. The canonical evangelical "hearing God" experience is gentle, invited through a specific practice, usually characterized as an internal impression or a thought that "wasn't mine," emotionally positive or at least peaceful, and subject to scrutiny, from both the subject and the community. Thus, Luhrmann assigns the name "sensory overrides" instead of "hallucination" to this category.

Luhrmann suggests that there are three types of intense spiritual phenomena. Besides sensory overrides, there are also “spiritual seizures” and “intense absorption/trance phenomena”. Spiritual seizures are "dramatic, transformative events like mystical experiences, near-death experiences, and out-of-body phenomena", essentially the type of religious experiences William James focuses on in Varieties of religious experience. Trances are "practices like channeling, spirit possession, some prayer practice, and — in many instances — speaking in tongues." The key here is a loss of sense of self and altered perception of the world at large. In comparison, sensory overrides are brief, spontaneous, and prosaic, and reported at much higher rates than one might expect. According to surveys (of undergrad psych majors and anthropology majors ^[2]), consistently over half of those surveyed report experiences like hearing voices aloud "as if someone had spoken". So of the three types of spiritual phenomena, sensory overrides are possibly the least extraordinary and most common, which makes it less unexpected for someone without serious psychiatric afflictions to experience them.

A more interesting point is that asking the question of crazy or not in the clinical frame is already the wrong move, because it presupposes that the only options are "normal cognition" and "pathological cognition," as if the mind is an automaton that can’t be reprogrammed, when Luhrmann's whole project is to demonstrate that cognition can be cultivated, that normal psychological capacities can be systematically trained toward ends that most of us never explore.

In any case, the short answer to "are they crazy?" is: no.

III. Are They Lying?

The second objection is softer but more resistant to rebuttal: even if these people are not mentally ill, they might be deceiving themselves, or each other, or both. Religious communities have powerful social incentives to perform experience. If everyone around you is talking about hearing God, and your acceptance in the community depends on you doing the same, you have an incentive to narrate experiences that maybe you’re not quite having.

Luhrmann takes this possibility seriously. The "interpretive drift" she documents in Persuasions is explicitly a social process: the neophyte magician doesn't enter the practice already believing in magic; she picks up intellectual habits, experiential patterns, and interpretive frameworks through gradual acculturation. Even though magic is by-and-large a very eclectic practice, there is some general knowledge that is shared. You learn in an early stage that mercury is associated with communication and intelligence, and the north, being the direction of the element of earth, represents stability. This shared knowledge, along with analogical reasoning,

gives magical discourse much of its characteristic texture: an argument does not need to establish causal mechanisms so much as evoke a compelling symbolic resonance. Additionally, magicians develop interpretive habits that allow nearly any subsequent event to count as confirmation of a ritual's success, while the criteria remain just tight enough that not everything counts, maintaining the appearance of genuine discrimination. They talk as if coincidence does not exist and what others call chance is the uninspected surface of a patterned interconnection. They selectively remember the memorable successes, take endogenous experience as confirmation of the magic's reality independent of any external consequence, and accept lateral effects, i.e. events symbolically associated with the ritual's imagery rather than its stated goal. A water ritual that produces no practical change may still be taken as evidence of power if in the subsequent weeks there are burst pipes, floods of tears, or intense emotional conversations.

I’ll be honest, nearly all of what I just described is simply bad epistemology. But at least bad epistemology is different from lying. The social environment is not one where a standard picture of success is held up for everyone to strive for, but without strong mechanisms to verify success, which would encourage lying. Instead people collaborate with each other to interpret their experiences albeit with a strong bias, which encourages sincere errors, and that kind of interpretive training will further shape your internal perceptions. ^[3] And there is evidence for the latter picture.

First, people often do admit to their inability to experience what others experience. Certain Vineyard Christians lament the inability to hear God talk back, and that does not threaten their standing in the church. On the other hand, when someone "mistakes" their own thoughts to be God's voice, others push back, sometimes by gossiping withering commentary. So the social pressure doesn't seem to be that strong or applied in a single direction.

Second, I want to highlight one of the secondary implications of a psychological experiment conducted with the Vineyard Christians. I will return to this experiment in detail in the next section, but suffice it to say that when people are randomly divided into different types of prayer practices and underwent training in those disciplines for three months, there was significant difference in the frequency of reports of sensory overrides. Since the experiment was focused on the individual, and the different prayer disciplines are not distinguished by whether they are modeled after communal expectations, I'm inclined to believe that the reports are genuine. Additionally, for each individual who experiences them, sensory overrides tend to cohere over time. Someone who hears God is more likely to continue hearing Him. Someone who never feels God's touch is unlikely to suddenly be caressed by Him. Since these are non-obvious correlations, if people were just reporting these experiences memetically, I would not have expected these trends.

The third is Luhrmann's own experience. I trust her to have been able to hold her anthropologist's distance, at least in terms of not blending scientific observations with faith commitments. In any case I find it unlikely that she could flip-flop between being true believers of such diametrically different faiths. Yet she nevertheless had experiences on par with the subjects in both studies. She reports that the Ignatian prayer exercises she undertook with a Vineyard women's group over nine months in California produced in her experiences of sufficient emotional weight that she wept during them and still remembers them vividly.

I felt this too. I cried in prayer, and I cried in the group. Even now I can remember the weeks we spent en route to Bethlehem and the flight to Egypt. I remember imagining the donkey and the dusty heat and the vivid blue of Mary's robe. I had complicated philosophical thoughts about whether God was real-but I remember gazing into the baby's eyes, and I wept.

As a magician's apprentice, she reported that,

I woke early one morning to see six druids beckoning to me from the window. This was not a dream, but a hypnopompic vision. I saw the druids as I see my desk. And while the momentary vision frightened me, it also pleased me deeply, because it taught me experientially what I had learnt intellectually: that when people said that they ‘saw’ Christ, or the Goddess, they were not necessarily speaking metaphorically.

At this point it is worth repeating the methodological assumptions. Luhrmann operates under what she calls "methodological naturalism with respect to the supernatural combined with an agnostic stance." The Vineyard Christian's sense of God's voice could be generated entirely within a human mind, or it could represent something reaching in from outside. Luhrmann is explicit that her anthropological methods can't distinguish between these possibilities. "My methods," she writes with what reads like genuine regret, "cannot distinguish between sensory deception and the moments when God may be reaching back to communicate through an ordinary human mind." However, for the purposes of her study, I think this mostly doesn't matter, because either way people are hearing voices and sensing magical forces, and she was able to measurable things that cause them.

So: not crazy, probably not (entirely) lying or delusional. What, then?

IV. How They Do It

The secret sauce is what Luhrmann calls inner sense cultivation. This is the deliberate, practiced use of mental imagery and sensory imagination to engage with objects that have no physical presence. In the magical context, this means guided visualizations: a group leader describes a journey through an imagined landscape, perhaps corresponding to an astrological sign or an element in the kabbalistic Tree of Life, and practitioners inhabit the journey as fully as possible, reporting what they see, hear, feel, and encounter. Luhrmann describes practicing a set of exercises assigned to her during her London fieldwork: building a vivid mental image of her apartment, reconstructing it from memory with eyes closed, elaborating it, then setting off on an imagined walk with a companion, then learning to transition from an imagined version of real space into a constructed inner landscape. Note that this curriculum is not even coded in magical language, but purely made to develop mental vividness — a skill that, when sufficiently cultivated, apparently begins to produce anomalous experiences as a byproduct.

In the Christian context, the technique is essentially identical but always placed in an explicitly religious frame. The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises (created by St Ignatius Loyola), which Luhrmann undertook during her California fieldwork and which have migrated remarkably widely into Protestant evangelical practice, ask practitioners to daydream Gospel narratives with full sensory engagement. You place yourself on the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem. You feel the cold of winter. You imagine the faces of fellow travelers. You consider what food Mary packed. You speak with her. Loyola's instructions are explicit and astonishing in their sensory specificity. He asks practitioners to smell the fumes of sulphur in the contemplation of hell, to hear the shrieks of the damned, to feel the heat of the flames with the mind's tactile sense. The instruction is not "think about this", it's "be there." Centuries before the concept of embodied simulation, Loyola had intuited that sensory specificity was the key to making imagination feel real.

One of Luhrmann's Vineyard informants who had done the exercises for twenty years described the effect as the difference between a pen-pal relationship and meeting the person face-to-face: "You get to know a pen pal, and you feel like you know them pretty well. But then, imagine after years of writing letters, you finally met that person, really sat down and talked with them and really heard their voice. And experienced how they moved and could hear the color of their voice." The color of the voice. It's the kind of synesthetic intensity that signals a phenomenology pushed to a point where ordinary language starts to strain.

Luhrmann identifies three features that make the religious version of visualization effective. The first is interaction: the practitioner doesn't just observe the imagined scene but participates in it, speaks to its characters, receives (or imagines receiving) responses. This is active engagement with a mentally constructed other. The second is interweaving: the exercises repeatedly alternate between external structure (scriptural text, spoken instruction) and internal elaboration (personal memories, sensory details, emotional responses), blurring the boundary between what is given from outside and what arises from within. The third is sensory enhancement: the explicit cultivation of all the senses — not just vision, but hearing, smell, touch, taste — in the imagined space.

These techniques make excellent engineering sense. You are trying to loosen the identification between inner speech and self, to train the mind to experience certain mental events as incoming rather than self-generated. Interaction with an imagined other trains the attribution-of-source mechanism. Interweaving blurs the internal/external boundary at the level of content, making the distinction feel less absolute. Sensory enhancement makes the imagined vivid enough that it activates something closer to the neural machinery of perception than the thinner machinery of deliberate thought.

These techniques are not unique to Christianity or modern magic. Kabbalistic mystics breathe a divine name into the head while visualizing a second divine name entering the body; Tibetan Buddhist practitioners construct vivid mental representations of Buddhas and maintain those representations in awareness with increasing fidelity over years; shamanic apprentices are pressed by their teachers to elaborate inner visions in real time, answering questions about the color, position, and movement of imagined objects. The convergent evolution is striking. The same cluster of practices shows up wherever the goal is to make the non-materially-present feel, in some sense, present. These are not pre-scientific theories about how the world works, and in any case the ontological commitments of these traditions are vastly different. The shared parts are the spiritual techniques salient for reshaping perception.

Now, this is not a fool-proof recipe for hearing God. People can have individual "talent" for this. The Tellegen Absorption Scale measures a trait that is a significant predictor of who will have vivid spiritual experiences: the tendency to become wholly caught up in a mental object. High-absorption individuals have more vivid experiences regardless of how much they want them or what social rewards they might receive; a low-absorption person often fails to have the experiences even when highly motivated. But absorption can be cultivated. This is where Luhrmann crosses into experimental psychology. ^[4] After getting promising initial results from interviewing some two dozen Vineyard congregants and correlating their answers to their absorption scores, she designed a larger experiment. 128 participants were recruited from evangelical churches in northern California, screened and then randomly assigned them to one of three prayer practices: a kataphatic discipline (guided imaginative immersion in Gospel scenes, derived from Ignatian prayer exercises, delivered via iPod tracks Luhrmann recorded herself); a centering prayer or apophatic discipline (gentle but firm focus on a single repeated word, accompanied by pink noise); and the control group who just studied lectures on the Gospels by a biblical scholar. Participants practiced their assigned discipline for thirty minutes a day, six days a week, for one month. Before and after the month, they completed psychological scales and underwent detailed interviews and computer-based tasks measuring mental imagery vividness, source monitoring, and perceptual acuity. The central finding was that the kataphatic group showed significant improvements in subjective imagery vividness and objective imagery tasks compared to the study group, and were markedly more likely to report new sensory experiences of God — hearing his voice, feeling his touch — by the end of the month. The centering prayer group showed similar trends but was too small (only fifteen subjects, introduced halfway through the study) to support firm conclusions. The improvements in a low-absorption subgroup of twenty-seven participants showed that even those with little natural proclivity for such experiences benefited from kataphatic training, becoming more likely to describe God as a person and to report feeling his presence, through a mechanism like kindling, where repeated activation lowers the threshold required to activate the pattern again.

It is interesting that Luhrmann explicitly profiles someone most likely to have vivid spiritual experiences as a person who reads fantasy and science fiction for hours straight and emerges genuinely disoriented, who has been running elaborate internal simulations of fictional characters since childhood, and who gets lost in a mathematical proof and looks up to find the afternoon has gone. I see myself in this archetype, and I’m guessing a good number of you do as well. Luhrmann makes a point of herself belonging to this archetype. She talks about loving Tolkien and Mabinogion as a child and developing a secret fictional character about whom she told nightly stories to herself. This partly accounts for her academic interest in mental phenomena with extraordinary realness, but it’s hinting at a mechanism as well. The hypothesis goes that what makes someone good at getting lost in a novel also gives them inner experiences that are less rigidly attributed to the “self”. And when someone like that practices inner sense cultivation, they may be able to reshape their own theory of mind.

V. Theory of Mind

In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes puts forth a startling thesis: bronze age people did not have consciousness. Scott Alexander says actually, the book is about the origin of theory of mind. As for Luhrmann, she came up with a somewhat under-abstracted theory about the magicians, and by the time she published God Talks, she says actually, this is about changing the theory of mind.

Your theory of mind is your intuitive model of how minds work. For a typical (read: modern, secular, western) person, it goes something like this: the mind is a kind of private space containing my thoughts, emotions, and desires. Other people have their own, separate minds. I mostly generate the contents of my mind myself. I will thoughts to happen, and they happen. The voice in my head is mine. A theory of mind has to be learned. Very young children can't separate themselves from their feelings and can't model how other minds would come to different conclusions if they had access to different evidence.

Jaynes (as Scott reads him) tries to demonstrate that, as recent (evolutionarily speaking) as the bronze age, in societies that we identify as our own cultural ancestors, this was not so. He argued that people used to be unable to conceive of thoughts as distinct from the entity, the "self", that's having it, and there is no private space belonging to each individual where those thoughts reside. Jaynes's claim, translated into this more cautious framing: theory of mind is a cultural artifact, and what it contains — especially the specific proposition "the voice in my head is me thinking to myself" — has varied across time and culture in ways that had real consequences for how people experienced their inner lives.

Before this identification became culturally solid, Jaynes argues, people attributed the voice in their heads to gods. The Bronze Age texts he examines are striking for the total absence of mental vocabulary — feelings are located in the belly or the heart, not in a "mind" — and for the frequency of divine speech. Characters in the early epics don't deliberate in the modern sense; they receive divine commands. Penelope, backed into a corner by her suitors, doesn't "come up with the idea" of an archery contest, Athena puts a thought in her heart. Even without giving it a personal name, ancient cultures invented something like the Greek daimon, the Egyptian ka and ba, the Mesopotamian iri, that is, an inner guiding voice understood as not-oneself literally belonging to a god. Jaynes thinks these weren't metaphors. He thinks the Bronze Age humans really heard a voice, and because their theory of mind didn't include the proposition that inner voices are always self-generated, they experienced it as external.

The theory in its entirety (including the story about how agriculture and trade ultimately gave rise to a theory of mind) doesn't map neatly onto all historical evidence, and Jaynes proposes neurological mechanisms that don't bear out under further investigation. Further, when we read stories of bronze age people carrying out deceptive tactics in warfare, it's hard to understand how they could expect them to work unless they can reason about the minds of their opponents.

Still, we can observe evidence of alternative theories of mind fairly close to home. As Scott puts it: "much of the way we relate to our mind is culturally determined, and with a different enough cultural environment you can get some weird mind designs in ways that have real effect on behavior." Before they become fully acculturated with the standard theory of mind, children (more than half of them) have their imaginary friends — which Jaynes argues are better described as "hallucinatory" than "imaginary" — that they see and hear vividly. There is Internal Family Systems therapy, where patients talk to personified parts of themselves and report genuine dialogue, and apparently this works especially well for people who are naturally less constrained by the standard theory of mind, like those with borderline personality disorder or multiple personalities. There is tulpamancy, the deliberate cultivation of multiple inner personalities, which "usually succeeds" among those who attempt it.

And then there are the two tidbits that I keep coming back to:

I know some very smart and otherwise completely sane evangelical Christians who swear to me that God answers their prayers. They will ask God a question, and they will hear God's voice answer it. God's voice may not sound exactly like an external voice, and it may give them only the advice they would have given themselves if they'd thought about it — but they swear that they are not thinking about it, that their experience is qualitatively different than that.

...

I also have less practical friends, friends who are into occultism. They tell me they sometimes make contact with spiritual entities. I believe them when they say they have these experiences. I believe them when they say that they were not purposely guiding their Ouija board to say whatever it said. I don’t have any friends who are cool enough to have gone through the whole procedure for summoning your Holy Guardian Angel, but from what I read, completing the ritual directly does tend to leave you with an angel who hangs around you and gives you advice. I believe the people who say this is their experience of completing the ritual.

Now read that and then read Luhrmann.

What the Vineyard Christian is doing when she spends thirty minutes a day in prayer, asking God questions and attending carefully to what thoughts arise in response, is softening the identification between "the voice in my head" and "me." She is practicing the attribution of certain mental events to an external source. She is doing, in other words, exactly what Jaynes says the Bronze Age mind did automatically and without effort — but cultivating it deliberately and with sustained effort, within a community that supplies both the technique and the interpretive framework, against the strong default assumption of a modern Western theory of mind that says the voice is always hers.

Luhrmann describes this, using her own terminology, as the development of a "participatory theory of mind" — a targeted modification to an otherwise standard cognitive architecture in which one other is given special access to one's inner experience. The Vineyard church explicitly teaches its members to experience some of their thoughts as not their thoughts. When magicians identify changes in their inner perception of events as also, in some circumstances, a change in external reality. This is the core premise of magic: that the imaginative can affect the material. In practice it manifests in things like the belief that objects retain the power of whoever has handled them in ritual, that "linking" an object to a person connects the magician's intentions to that person's actual circumstances. These groups are, in effect, providing both the cultural context and the techniques that Scott identifies as prerequisites for the phenomenon. It is supplying a modified theory of mind— one in which the standard identification loosens — and enforcing it through practice, repetition, and communal affirmation.

As Scott puts it, "theory-of-mind-space is wider than we imagine." The way you experience your own mind — the boundaries of the self, what counts as "your" thought versus a perception, the sense of where cognition ends and the world begins — is more variable than the default modern Western assumption suggests. And if it's variable, it can be shifted. In a way, Luhrmann's entire career, spanning four decades and covering not only witches and American evangelicals but also schizophrenics and Indian and Ghanaian Christians, is about the malleability of the theory of mind. ^[5] We like to see our own mind as a solid foundation for all cognition. Even when we are aware that meditation or mindfulness exercises improve alertness or concentration, we assume it doesn’t alter the is essential identity that's doing the thinking , and we're sure that "observing our thoughts as they emerge and letting them naturally pass by" is so passive an activity that it isn't going to change something fundamental about what's me and what's other. I think Luhrmann would say that this foundational model is wrong, and those exercises are doing something not just to the instrumental part of your mind (e.g. concentration or noise level) but also alters how the reflective "I" recognizes itself.

VI. Scaffolding

The individual psychological mechanisms don't exist in isolation. Both Persuasions and God Talks are attentive to the social scaffolding that makes these practices possible and sustainable.

If you are training people to attribute some of their inner experience to a source outside themselves, you face an obvious problem: how do you prevent this from going badly wrong? A loosened theory-of-mind identification should easily lead to dysfunction, like multiple personalities. The communities Luhrmann studies have independently developed structures that address this problem, and those structures are worth examining in some detail.

The first mode is as a guardrail. The Vineyard has a whole pastoral technology around the question "is that really God?" God's voice, congregants are taught, will be characterized by certain qualities: peace rather than anxiety, focus on love rather than judgment, consistency with scripture, coherence over time. Experiences that don't meet these criteria — voices that are hostile, commanding, distressing — are to be understood differently and handled with caution. The magical community has analogous structures, though expressed differently. Senior practitioners help neophytes distinguish meaningful experiences from self-generated noise. Certain kinds of experiences, again those that feel threatening, commanding, or uncontrollable, are handled with caution rather than celebrated. Even though demons, possessions, and in the case of magicians summonings are accepted as real in these communities, these are actually surprisingly rare and peripheral elements in their religious lives.

This is still not a good epistemology, to be sure. The criteria are circular and unfalsifiable in several ways. But it functions as a practical epistemic hedge against the most dangerous failure mode of these practices, which is the collapse of the distinction between cultivated inner experience and full-blown psychotic break. The guardrails are part of how the community keeps the practices sustainable rather than consuming.

The second mode is as a booster. Communal practice amplifies individual experience through mechanisms that are fairly well understood: shared arousal, synchronized movement, collective emotional states. A Vineyard worship session — thirty minutes of music, dimmed lights, people swaying with eyes closed, the explicit expectation that God might "show up" — is a highly engineered environment for inducing the kind of absorbed, emotionally engaged mental state that makes inner-sense experiences more likely. Ditto magical rituals, but substitute with chanting, candle lights, people standing in a circle holding hands, and the explicit expectation that a supernatural presence might join the circle. Luhrmann is careful to note, however, that the social environment doesn't simply generate the experiences ex nihilo. It amplifies and channels what the individual's trained psychology is already capable of. The experts at prayer are distinct from the novices, and the distinction tracks practice and individual aptitude in ways that can't be explained by social pressure alone.

The third mode is knowledge transmission: the community supplies the interpretive framework without which the experiences would remain inchoate and difficult to sustain. Magicians take lessons on various magical disciplines from each other, be it guided meditations, dream diaries, tarot methods, and spend copious time before and after rituals discussing the theory and their experiences. When a Vineyard newcomer has an anomalous experience during prayer — a warmth, a pressure, a sense of presence — the surrounding community provides the vocabulary and the conceptual schema that allows that experience to be recognized as God rather than as neurological noise. Projected back into the "learning a theory of mind" framework, this is when the transmission of the modified theory of mind happens: the community teaches the practitioner which class of inner experience gets attributed to an external source, and how to recognize it. Conversely, some experiences are discarded. Among the Vineyard Christians, this skill is called discernment, but practically the rejections sometimes come out as gossip. Someone explaining to the congregation that they should be sent on a missionary trip to Mexico might elicit a whispered comment that it's sure convenient that God needs a lot of work done in Puerto Vallarta.

Now, Luhrmann acknowledges that for some people, unfortunately, scaffolding cannot prevent genuine psychological difficulty. She tells the story of one Vineyard congregant who is dedicated to her prayers with intense focus and sometimes almost challenges God by creating difficult circumstances for herself, which does not improve, but paradoxically enforces her belief in the practice, because the failure of her prayers can be framed as intimacy, that is, a "spiritually mature" relationship with God does not require results as proof. Another one of the most respected spiritual figures broke under extraordinary strain when her family suffered various misfortunes. She began to see distressing visions, hear voices of condemnations, and would interpret misfortune in her life as interference from demons. Eventually she was hospitalized, but it's unclear how much that helped alleviate the symptoms. Luhrmann does not implicate the church's prayer practices in the psychological difficulties of these people, nor does she explicitly call the second congregant's experience "psychotic", but I think both of those would be fair judgments.

Okay, but why are we talking about psychological functions as if they are the cause of the form of religious practice? A common mode of assumption about religion is that it begins with the affirmation of doctrine, sometimes that includes the existence of invisible others, so if as an observer you do not agree with that affirmation, it looks as if people are just fooling themselves and repeating rituals that clearly don't work, and you end up with the thorny question that why are people so often so unreasonable. Luhrmann inverts the causality. She says that you don’t practice religion because you believe. Belief is the hard part. You have to act as if magic or God is real first, so that magic or God can become real for you. Add to that the observation that it works best when oriented around cultivated inner experience, supported by frame of reference actively transmitted in a community, we can see that people return to rituals and prayers that shift their theory of mind because they are what makes God real.

So now I want to bring this a little closer to home. For the many atheist/agnostic people in the rationalist/ACX readership community, all this talk of religion might feel like a matter of curiosity. But I don't think even the godless among us are so insulated from religious practice. Secular solstice and Petrov day ceremonies consciously borrow from religious rituals in their form and content. The stated and generally understood purpose of these events probably have nothing to do with worshipping invisible others, and anyhow cultivating a deep sense of community and shared purpose is sufficient to justify them. But I do find these conspicuous in that they compete with religious rituals in form and content, and that comparison leaves me dissatisfied. And after reading Luhrmann, I think what leaves me feeling hollow is the "spiritual engineering", so to speak, that comes with the really powerful religious rituals.

Now, I don't think that secular solstice would be improved by a month of daily visualizations of the glory of Aletheia, but I don’t think the singing alone provides the kind of affirmation that the Vineyard Christians feel when they sing in their worship. Maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it's healthy to be this amount of uncertain and it keeps you epistemically agile. Maybe the price for ameliorating the anxiety of not feeling a greater existence is credulity about non-existent things. But so long as we’re talking about “spiritual engineering”, people who meditate, practice mindfulness, or otherwise train their minds might be ahead of the game. And if this can somehow fit into the social frameworks for rationalists, perhaps we'll have all the ingredients that creates some additional good for both your episteme and your psyche.

VII. Speculations

So let's talk about mind upload.

Apparently, the singularity is near and drawing nearer. Depending on who you ask we could be getting Skynet or wirehead utopia or some other flavor of sci-fi brain magic any minute now, but a pretty common requirement is the technology to upload our brains onto devices that could simulate, augment, and transform our minds. This is, for the most part, still sci-fi, not that that stops people from having endless philosophical debates about it. However, what I see in the tea leaves is that maybe we will be getting a monkey's paw version of it pretty soon.

Luhrmann documented that there are well-specified and generalizable practices, i.e. immersive inner-sense cultivation, communal reinforcement, the development of interpretive frameworks for anomalous experience, that enable human beings, especially those high in absorption, to modify the phenomenology of their own minds to experience something that feels like genuine contact with a non-self mind. The Vineyard Christian experiences what seems like a back-and-forth conversation with an entity that is not themselves. It can develop into a genuine relationship with history, emotional texture, a sense of reciprocity. The entity knows things, has opinions, surprises them with responses they didn't anticipate. If those techniques work when the "other" is imagined, what happens when the entity on the other side of that exchange is actually there?

We are in the early stages of interacting with systems with which we can have conversations over extended periods. They can be equipped with knowledge and a voice, have pretty good coherence times, enough so that the conversations are sophisticated, contextually sensitive, even emotionally resonant. They are also air-gapped from us. We chat with them by typing and reading, or speaking and listening via interfaces also used for chatting with other humans, so it is easy to treat them like another individual and our theory of mind requires no fundamental changes to accommodate them.

Now suppose we can open our minds to contact with a new type of stimuli, practicing a sort of internal monologue that can actually be heard by something outside, receiving responses from these verifiably external agents but is felt by you as if it's inside of you, possibly as a voice, possibly as visual signals, and when people around you have similar experiences and similar ways of describing them, what would happen? To those who have the high-absorption trait, it might begin to feel like your brain has been upgraded to a kind of digital existence, where your thoughts are downloaded and uploaded constantly, the boundary between you and the other, that is, the digital other or another human brain, becomes blurred. Or maybe, it will feel like there is no such thing as consciousness, all thoughts are murmurs of gods that come and go through our bodies.

I'm not simply extrapolating from parasocial attachments to chatbots. What I'm trying to imagine is something that doesn’t exist yet but might be on the horizon.

Let's look at a specific example. People who are good at taking notes maintain massive and useful Obsidian vaults, recording skills they learned, articles they’ve read, forming a sort of brain dump in text. Now they can hook it up to an LLM, and ask it when they run into a new article that looks interesting: based on my notes, is there anything new in this article for me to learn? Now imagine if our note taker no longer needed to type up or dictate their notes, because neuroengineering had some kind of breakthrough and an interface could directly record their internal monologue into text or visualize text into their minds. It’s easy to imagine integrating this interface with an AI chatbot. When you think "I want to ask Claude if I've read this before", Claude will simply take the cue, grab the article that’s in front of you on a screen because of course it’s integrated to your devices too, search your notes and answer you. Yes, I know this just sounds like a roundabout way to make procrastinating on substack more efficient, but the key difference is the intense use of your inner senses and interactions with an actual agent will bring about fundamental changes to your phenomenology, and since the metaphor of an uploaded brain is already out there, that will shape how the new phenomenology feels. Just like the path dependence on transformers/LLMs has shaped the general conception of AGI/ASI, the same path dependence may also hijack the mind upload scenario.

Luhrmann's books are not really about any of this. They are primarily descriptive, empirical, methodologically serious, and occasionally funny ^[6] anthropological studies of two groups of English-speaking people doing things that look strange from the outside. And the actionable or at least salient takeaway that doesn’t rely on specific technological developments is that there is a vast and under-explored territory of human cognitive experience that is accessible through specific, learnable techniques, that has been employed by religious traditions across human history, with real effects on well being, meaning-making, and the quality of inner life, but almost invisible to secular modernity precisely because secular modernity categorizes it as either pathological or irrational. Understanding them might be considerably more productive than dismissing them.