They say when you talk to God it's prayer, but when God talks to you, it's schizophrenia.

If you have the time to read it, I would like to share a story with you. (I posted a piece of this on a different thread a few days ago so apologies if you have read a little before)

I went to a strict church from the age of 13 until well into my twenties. This church I now believe to be a cult. Growing up this place became my everything. I had to attend 5 nights a week unless I wanted to be pulled into the office and interrogated as to where I was etc. We were taught regularly that only the members of this church were saved and everyone else would sadly go to hell. You had to remain in this church to be saved.

I wasn’t liked much by the oversight because I liked the band Nirvana and I was therefore kicked out because my hair grew past my shoulders. (They told me to cut it and come back in 6 months. I could have but I felt something was off and felt this church was loveless with a fake love) This separation from the church crushed me into a deep spiritual depression. I was now the devils child and going to burn in hell forever.

What could I do?

Nothing was working. My prayers were not answered (surprise surprise) and I was getting nothing out of it, so one day a few years later I stopped praying .....and started reading and listening.

I read in so many places within the bible of people who didn’t just live their lives through a church, they were having a one on one experience with God and hearing Him in "real time".

I wanted that relationship and asked for this also. If it were possible with those in the past, its going to be possible with me in the present because as I had read - God is the same today as he was yesterday.

The first thing that came to mind was – To get to the Father you must go through the Son, and to get to the Son you must go through the Holy Spirit. Don’t go to the Father first because you are queue jumping the Spirit and running straight into a closed door. There is an order and a process that needs to be performed, yet this (God willing) may change with each person.

I listened and tried a few other things I heard but will not mention them here to stick to the main story.

I noticed I kept thinking of phrases that seemed really poetic or wisdom like, such as - "God is the original source of energy, from that which we came, so shall we all return. He is perfect because He does not lack anything to be completed by it."

I liked them so much I felt I needed to write them down and stare at them to contemplate their meaning. (Hours or years later I would sometimes read for the first time, other peoples "real time" wisdom that mirrored mine, as if for confirmation that was disguised as a complete coincidence)

I asked questions in my head and wrote the answers that came from the silence into a journal. At the start the answers were a little forced from my own mind but slowly as I learnt to turn off my own thoughts, the answers started to become real and I was actually learning things that amazed me with its clarity and Wisdom that had never sounded so true before.

You cannot explain God, because He cannot be explained.

I saw the face of God, yet I never even saw him. God spoke to me yet I never once heard him talking. The answer that was first ends up being the last. To find the beginning you first have to be at the end and to have an answer to your question you must first question the answer etc etc etc... And such was it constantly like with my experience with God. Sometimes the answer was there, most of the time I had to work hard for it. It was like looking into chaos and pulling out a piece if harmony. If I asked a question it could take days to be answered after possibly going through a mountain of information and maybe a life experience or two.

Open Prayer is useful in some ways, but irrelevant in others. You can’t hear God talking when all you are doing is praying. The only way to hear Him is to ask Him to answer the door within yourself and listen deeply into the silence.

You will never hear him as a voice, yet something does echo back from within the silence that can be translated.

I am not just a Christian anymore, I am a Mystic. I don't need the church to be saved because the church is already inside of me.


Thankyou for listening and please share your own experiences with the Lord.

You have to understand that praying to God isn't a unique occurrence and God talking to the person praying is definitely a unique occurrence. Something like that needs to be looked at very closely and in a lot of cases, it can't be explained, so it will fall under some sort of mental disorder, simply because it doesn't happen to normal people. If the expects didn't said otherwise, then the experts would be crazy.

I would describe myself as a Christian Mystic. And I very much hear you.

In seminary I was confronted with all the other solar messiahs and the Mystery of the Dieing God. Over and over through out almost every civilization you are confronted with these inconvenient truths.

I could not abide Justin Martyrs "It was the Devil imitating Jesus" when most of these predate Jesus by hundreds to several thousand years.

So I have felt the presence of God, yet I can not the capitulate to the cognitive dissonance main stream Christianity espouses.

If there is a God, then he would speak to all people at all times.

When I study, I find a core message in almost all of the major religions. Love.

In the end faith is faith. And there are as many faiths as there are people on the planet. No two people have exactly the same faith, yet groups pretend they do for reasons varying from good (community) to bad (greed) to evil (control and domination). Ultimately most formalized religions transform into the antithesis of the postulates they espouse.

So, have faith, love everyone as you want to be loved, and learn peace with yourself and with those around you.

What about this whole "internal dialogue?"

where does the line start to blur

reply to post by FoxfilesMulder


lol, ask anyone high up in freemasonry.

Naive or what.

reply to post by Lysergic


Many times there are large amounts of blur.

Ten pages of writing at midnight with what you consider as being the most profound thing you have ever read turns out to be the ramblings of a madman the next morning after a nights sleep. The ramblings are of course related or within a parable but irrelevant to the sole question.

Yet somewhere within these writings will have an answer in the form of Wisdom. It may be one word that leads you to the next part of the final answer or a whole phrase that needs nothing more than contemplation.

True Wisdom rings true, like something you once knew but since forgotten.