I found this article from 2006 in the archives today in 2023 and decided to post it since I actually had an experience this year of being visited in a dream by God who floated me into a room and then spoke to me.

God asked me a question:

“Who made you?”

in the biggest most powerful voice you can imagine, a voice that sounded like it stretched from one horizon to the next, bigger than anything you’ve ever heard in the best movie theatre. It was amazing. The question was very godlike as well, not something I would have come up with if I imagined speaking to God on my own. That’s my sense, anyway.

My thoughts in the dream when this happened were immediately to wonder if it was some trick, if someone was beaming something into my brain, but also, just in case it was the actual creator, I answered the massive booming truthfully, saying,

“I don’t know.”

And then I woke up.

Here’s the former article from 2006 showing that the God presence spots in the brain may have been located. It would be an amazing tool to be able to trigger these at will.

God Spot Researchers see the Light in MRI Study

Brain scans of nuns have revealed intricate neural circuits that flicker into life when they feel the presence of God. The images suggest that feelings of profound joy and union with a higher being that accompany religious experiences are the culmination of ramped-up electrical activity in parts of the brain.

 

The scans were taken as nuns relived intense religious experiences. They showed a surge in neural activity in regions of the brain that govern feelings of peace, happiness and self-awareness. Psychologists at the University of Montreal say the research, which appears in the journal Neuroscience Letters, was not intended to confirm or deny the existence of God, but set out to examine how the brain behaves during profound religious experiences. – more

If I hooked up a button to some electrodes in your brain and every time I pushed it you saw God and felt a profound experience … a godly presence, would you then believe or not? Why or why not? For example, it may be that God does exist and these parts of our brains are working to suppress our awareness of Him, and by direct electrical stimulation, He is revealed, right?

This all gets at the heart of human conscious experience. What is real to us is our experience and that may involve various degrees of imagination, because the truth of it is, we never directly experience reality. We only ever experience our constantly rebuilt mental maps of reality, which can include things added from imagination. Imagination is our amazing ability to project forward and to create new experiences based on the past inputs we’ve had from our senses.

How do I know the tree I’m looking at out the window right now is real? I really don’t, but every time I look at it, then look away for a while, it seems to be the same tree I remember. If I heard the voice of God again, would it have the same continuity? I may never know.