A reader describes the “high” of glossolalia and his journey to nonbelief

November 27, 2014 • 9:22 am

I got an email from a reader who had a few comments about glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”), and then his email turned into a description of his journey from belief to atheism.  Because of the possible negative repercussions of the author coming out publicly, I won’t identify him except to use the word “he”. Anyway, the name is not important.  Feel free to comment or to add messages to the writer.  It also gives us a hint of what happens to a believer who speaks in tongues.

Mr. Coyne:

I’m a fellow atheist, but I came from a religious background, a believer for decades. Pentecostal to be specific. I saw the Jesus ‘n’ Mo cartoon on glossolalia on your site, and I thought I’d fill you in on what peopl who have never had the experience don’t know.

I had the experience when I was 27 years old. For me, it was an overwhelming experience. I wouldn’t liken it to anything like the euphoria of attending a rock concert or just emotional euphoria. In my case, that would be a completely inadequate and misleading description.

For me, it was like my body, from head to toe, was suddenly infused with this ecstatic flowing tangible (I want to say electric, but it was way beyond that) energy that was far and away beyond anything I had ever experienced before in my life. I became physically weak from it…While this was going on, I heard myself rapid fire uttering gibberish.The experience was ecstatic beyond words.

I fell to my knees just from weakness and being overpowered with the experience, and began weeping uncontrollably…I became extremely emotional AFTER the experience; prior to it, I was sort of blank emotionally, just listening to my pastor pray over me. A sort of “afterglow” of the experience stayed with me all day, and I couldn’t wait to get to Church again that evening for another shot..

During the preacher’s sermon, the experience overwhelmed me again and I was flooded again, but somewhere in the back of my mind I remember reading scripture that said during service things are to be conducted “decently and in order”, so I thought I was being disruptive and forced myself to stop.

I had that same afterglow for a few minutes, and then suddenly, without warning, I felt it sucked out of me and I felt completely empty. I was never able to repeat the experience again, no matter how many times I “sought the Lord”.

I’m sharing this with you because I want you to know that that there IS something to the Pentecostal experience. However, instead of becoming a strengthening factor in my own “Christian life”, it became a source of nothing but ongoing torment that lasted for decades. I couldn’t understand why God took this ability away from me, and wouldn’t give it back. What did I do wrong to be punished like that? (The experience is like the most powerful drug you’ve ever taken in your life. Once you’ve had it to the degree I experienced it, you want MORE.)

In those years, other things happened in my life that I won’t go into, but those life experiences along with the negative effect the glossolalia experience had on me long term eventually set me on my journey to re-examine my religious beliefs, trying to square them with reality. I saw the people that I used to go to Church with (by this time I had quit attending) professed to be acting like Christians, but on social and political issues took stands that were contrary to what I knew of Jesus’s teachings.

As far as the “Spirit Filled” tounge talking Christians go, I saw them falling far short of what the Biblical model of a spirit filled Christian is supposed to be.

Not a single time in my religious life did I see a miracle of any kind, even though these hypocritical selfish people made claims of miracles on almost a daily basis. It was all nonsense. Liars re-affirming one another’s lie.

I FINALLY decided to settle it all for myself, and did the one thing Christians don’t do…I read the entire Bible cover to cover, did some research to boot.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the Mark Twain quote that the best cure for Christianity is to read the Bible.

Smart man that Twain.

I’m 64 now. I was 60 when I read the Bible and woke up from the delusion of religion. I’m free from it now.

I still couldn’t explain my experience, but I am sure it had something to do with firing neurons and chemicals in the brain, because I’ve NEVER in the 64 years of my life seen ANY supernatural miracle of any kind whatsoever anywhere. I’ve seen phony baloney preachers and evangelists pretend to work miracles, and only a moron would go along with their play acting, because where the rubber meets the road, nothing ever really happened.

But in regards to my glossolalia experience, I struggled with it, I struggled hard. But that was because the experience was so powerful and vivid.

But I also had to look just as hard at what it did to me in the long run, and in the long run, it kept me, pardon the expression, fucked up for years.

When I tried to speak with other atheists that were former Pentecostals, I learned they never had the experience, and couldn’t relate. They just faked it while in Church to get out from under the peer pressure. They just thought it was all fake. A lot of them DO fake it because there is so much peer pressure to have the experience.

I’ve only spoken privately with one other former Pentecostal turned atheist that has had the exact same experience I had, and his story is very similar to mine.

I sometimes wish a neuroscientist/biologist or someone in a qualified field that has actually HAD this experience look into it and find out what’s really going on, and what triggers it.

But if you’ve never had the experience, it’s easy to dismiss it as a religious ritual with no experiential substance to it at all. Make fun of it, mock it.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For those actually having the experience, it’s like taking the most powerful drug you’ve ever taken in your life. (And I mean THE MOST POWERFUL DRUG). When you see people flopping in the floor yammering gibberish in one of these church services, getting “drunk in the spirit” as they call it, they REALLY ARE getting zonked.

It’s what they’ve really got the hots for….It’s the only part of the practice that has any tangibility to it. No one gets healed. No one performs miracles, no one does anything supernatural.

They just want to get as high as they possibly can.

(And they believe God is their hook up for this spiritual “high” party.)

So you tell me, what’s divine about wanting to do nothing but be in a state of ecstatic euphoria, and then lie about everything else?

I’m sorry this correspondence is so long, I just wanted you to know that underneath all the ridiculousness of it, something really is happening inside these people. I experienced it myself all those years ago; I just don’t believe it’s supernatural.

[Name redacted]

85 thoughts on “A reader describes the “high” of glossolalia and his journey to nonbelief”

  1. No doubt it’s a kind of spontaneous “trip” taking place. I immediately thought of DMT, which is naturally occurring in the body, but the euphoria he’s speaking of may point to something else. Of course because this takes place in a religious setting it’s interpreted accordingly.

  2. Thanks for telling your story. It’s important for those who haven’t experienced this sort of thing to understand it better. I first realized that these experiences were real when Dan Barker talked about them. I always just assumed people were “faking it” & just convincing themselves that they experienced something other-worldly.

    I’m sad that you cannot “come out” as an atheist as I know keeping a secret about yourself like that is a painful thing but it does seem you have other atheists to interact with so that’s a good thing.

    1. The majority of these experiences probably are faked. I read book written by an ex Pentecostal minister who said the pressure to speak in tongues was so great that he did fake it when called up to the altar. Speaking in tongues was a mark of receiving the holy spirit and official acceptance into the Church. It’s no wonder people felt the need to pretend (which is easy enough to do). Among the Christian churches I think the Pentecostals have done some of the worst psychological damage to its members (Catholics are way up there too).

        1. Fake is what it is whether people want to admit it or not. Read the gospel to see what “speaking in tongues” really was. It wasn’t this going into an ecstasy of what we called as children “double dutch”. Even more phony was a video I once saw of Kenneth Copeland, that sterling man of doG, having a conversation “in tongues” with a well-known religious charlatan. How the two of them kept straight faces I’ll never know – it was obviously difficult for them at times.

          1. You’re absolutely right that tongues in the New Testament isn’t the same phenomenon this post touched on. Tongues in the New Testament referred to speaking in different human languages (an ability the speaker didn’t have before Holy Spirit intervention). There is a single reference to angelic tongues in 1Corinth 13 that some have used to justify the gibberish often heard in churches.

          2. Granted – I remember first hearing about the reference as a kid, playing D&D.

            But the question about whether someone is “playing along by consciously deciding” or something else is “obvious from the inside”, but the objective indicators of such a “deliberate” choice are still being discovered.

    1. The fact that LSD and other drugs (like heroin) produces similar effects is good evidence that what’s lumped together under the term “altered states of consciousness” have their origin in the brain.

      I’ve read that there is a part of the brain which, when stimulated, produces a powerful sense of awe and significance. It’s what’s activated in the “wow man, my hand is the secret of the universe” drug trips and — presumably — in mystical and religious experiences of ecstasy. When it’s damaged it leads to weird things like thinking your loved ones are imposters.

  5. Strange these specific acts and their associated highs only happen in their specific church, couldn’t it also happen at home or at the mall or mosque?

      1. Yes. Outside of church or any religious context it often leads to the kind of Spirituality Barbara Ehrenreich recently touted. It’s very common — and very personal.

        Something like: “I felt the Higher Power so I know it’s there. It couldn’t be from the brain. It didn’t feel as if it could be that simple and disappointing. It transformed me. Why would anyone try to persuade me I’m wrong? They must have an agenda.”

        1. I think there are a number of possibilities when we speak of glossolalia. There are the experiences touched on by gentleman like the one in the post. They’re real experiences that can have life changing consequences. Another possibility, and probably the most common, is when people are in an emotionally charged environment in which tongues speaking is a normal expression of spiritual fervor or feeling. Imitation would play an important role, as well as a kind of behavioral conditioning. Another possibility is just flat out faking in order to receive some reward for manifesting holy spirit possession, to fit in, etc.

          1. Psychologist John Schumaker has written a couple books linking religious experiences to the same brain mechanisms found in hypnosis and psychopathology. The all involve suggestibility and “processing information along multiple pathways.” So expectation, environment, dissassociation, and altered brain states combine in distorting reality in certain ways.

      2. I’m guessing that phar84 also meant to ask why non-Pentecostals don’t experience ecstatic episodes of glossolalia.

        I would also guess that non-Pentecostals actually do, just without the glossolalia. I would also also guess that Pentecostals simply learn to express their ecstasy with glossolalia because that’s how others around them express it. But non-Pentecostals certainly have ecstatic episodes.

        1. Actually phenomena akin to tongues speaking are found in other religious traditions, especially some indigenous religions.

          1. Never said they weren’t.

            Non-Pentecostals do have ecstatic episodes and they do find other ways of expressing it, my point being that the psychological phenomenon in question most likely does happen “in mosques”, that is, to Muslims. It simply may not include glossolalia as a means of expression.

          2. Cultures such as tribal Africans and Native Americans dance to drums, sometimes for many hours, and have hallucinatory experiences. Sometimes aided by drugs, but I don’t think that is really necessary.
            Unusual states of awareness and perception are also achieved by meditation and starvation, exhaustion, etc. Sam Harris could probably identify with the Pentecostals.

        2. Was actually just noting the provincial-ness of Glossolalia. Ecstatic episodes seems to be expressed according to their respective location/culture.

  7. I suspect that Armstrong and others who promote the “true religion/spirituality comes from experience” meme are at least in part talking about this sort of thing. When it happens to you, you will KNOW it can’t be just a state of the brain. You just know because you do. Analyzing this critically and seeking another explanation means you’re in denial.

    I find it a bit funny to read about this sort of ecstasy coming from the Pentecostals. They’re supposed to be the bad, judgmental fundamentalists who have substituted their narrow views of God for the Real God, which is a Spirit discovered through opening one’s heart to love and the Many Paths view of religions. And yet, here they seem to have the same sort of experience the Sophisticated Theologians and apologists tout as the Real Deal straight from Spirit, the transformational moments which turn you into sophisticated believers and turn you away from fundamentalism forever.

    Apparently not.

    Thanks to anonymous for this fascinating story. Reason is powerful: it can even overcome an overwhelming event in an entrenched framework of interpretation.

    1. Dopamine and adrenalin mix is the best drug out there.

      Like the highs of mania: I can’t even describe the ecstasy. No one who hasn’t experienced it can understand it.

  8. Thank you to anonymous for sharing a very personal, but fascinating and intelligently considered experience.

  9. What is delightful about this account is how a seemingly religious experience led to non-belief! That’s what makes believers abandon their beliefs: seeing how utterly fake religion is. Once you realize that the whole thing is a giant con job, you can never go back to belief or religion again.

  10. Although ‘speaking in tongues’ is church-specific’ (although I suspect it occurs in other religions, only not called such), this sort of ‘frenzy high’ is common to most religions – e.g., it’s why ‘whirling dervishes’ whirl. Basically some switch flips in the brain and rational consciousness dissolves into the euphoria of pure feeling. Undoubtedly related to mystical experiences as well, and also to the so-called ‘religious awakening,’ or what might be called the ‘lightning bolt,’ experience wherein one becomes overcome with the raw sense of being the center of the ‘divine’s’ universe. It is the high sought by many believers. (But also by many who can’t believe, but ‘if only it could happen to me’ – I know, because looking for such an experience kept me bouncing between religions for years before I read up on neurotransmitters and realized it wasn’t likely to ever happen.)

    In this culture, deciding not to ‘come out’ is understandable. It’s not necessarily useful anyway. My religious friends have known I’m an atheist for years – they still treat me like a believer, and hope I’ll be saved one day. (On some level they don’t believe it anyway, as far as I can tell.)

    It helps to keep reading a lot of secular literature, philosophy, and science – reminding yourself that there are rational minds like yours in the world, even if they don’t live in your immediate vicinity.

  11. I have been a buddhist for many years and have done a lot of meditation practice. It is quite possible to get into strange mind states. I have not experienced glossolalia but many others-lasting several days or just fleeting. It is possible to become fascinated or enamoured of these experiences and also to cultivate them into a kind of habit-easier and easier to get there. Any decent teacher will say they are temporary experiences. And not to hang onto them or cultivate them. They are not a sign of spiritual accolishment-rather of imbalance-altho’ they might inform you about varieties of mind experience.Soner or later the fascination wears off and it stops. If they are cultivated it is called spiritual materialism. And definitely not encouraged.

    1. I appreciate the secular variations of Buddhism. My brother practices and teaches something like this.

      Personally, I’d substitute the term “spiritual materialism” with “spiritual masturbation.”

      1. Yeah, not too much difference. And maybe the suggestion that it is due to hypoxia is also somewhat correct.

  13. That was very interesting. I can certainly see how people would be swayed by such an experience while in church, and in a very receptive state of mind, and seek to have the experience it again.
    As for what brought on the euphoria and other parts of the experience, I cannot know. Of course reasonable speculations are that prolonged vocalization might decrease blood oxygen, resulting in a kind of near-fainting spell. Low blood sugar can also bring about remarkable perceptions. I think I recall a discussion in WEIT some time ago about spontaneous hallucinatory experiences that people have had, and one detail was that they were hard to reproduce.

    1. Fatigue from prolonged concentration can produce visual hallucinations quite well. During the war, aircrew who spent hours looking for periscopes amid the waves would quite often experience visual hallucinations.

      When I was young and used to drive long distance all night, I occasionally ‘saw’ quite clearly, vehicles or other objects in the distance that weren’t there when I reached them. I took it as a warning to cut back on the night driving.

  15. Many thanks to anonymous for sharing this story. I’d like to add that, for me also, reading the bible from end-to-end is what started me on the road to atheism. I was much younger (in high school) and had been a leader of our church’s youth fellowship (the fact I had been away when they held the elections may have contributed to that). I was seriously considering being a minister and spent one summer vacation reading the bible from end to end (full disclosure: I did skip some of the lengthy who begat whom lists). Anyway, by the time I finished, there were so many inconstancies and clearly impossible claims that I started looking at why. And when I took a required religion course in college and found that “biblical archaeology” showed the majority of stories were simply myths, I decided I was an atheist.

    1. If reading the whole bible, as opposed to cherry-picking favored passages, is this effective at stimulating doubt in believer’s minds then I have a wish: that Christians will start challenging each other to read the whole thing a la ALS ice bucket challenge. If someone out there can plant this seed in Christian Facebook users that would be great. Admittedly, this is unlikely to succeed given the patience and time required to read the bible versus the instant gratification (?) of the ice bucket challenge.

  16. Fascinating. And apparently, the experience can’t be forced. Which might be, ironically, why so few you talked to actually had it …

  17. I never doubted the experiences were real, and I’m not sure that Jerry was suggesting they weren’t.

    I have read that anyone can be trained to go into these states, believer or no.

  18. Sam Harris explains some of these spiritual experiences in His latest book “Waking Up”. He would have a good explanation for this high.

  19. The feelings described are quite real and when naively perceived feel as if they arise from outside of ones self, and easily ascribed to the Deity, divine grace, a transcendental state of universal consciousness – the list goes on.
    Anyone who seriously mediates, and I base this on my own experience, can easily induce this state of bliss, which at times can be quite overwhelming, subsuming self-awareness. Some account describe this feeling as “drowning” or expanding to fill the universe, self-transcendence, hence the temptation to believe it is somehow divinely inspired.
    This divine inspiration is just an illusion cause by the auto-suggestive activation of the appropriate neuro-pathways in the brain, i.e., the mesolimbic dopamine system, along with the release of endogenous opiods, perhaps. I have limited knowledge of neuroscience and perhaps someone can elaborate on this point – the point being that these intense, super-mundane, transcendental feelings arise solely due to brain activity.

    1. “…a transcendental state of universal consciousness…”

      There’s no better description of a good drug trip. I wonder how many of us were saved (from religion) by the 60’s?

    2. In the book, My Stroke of Insight written by a brain scientist who had a stroke in her left hemisphere. She describes the feeling of being a great being, unencumbered by her body. It was a feeling of peace and bliss.

      This led me to wonder if meditation is really shutting down the chatty left brain.

      1. I currently think that meditation, properly understood, is intended to balance the two sides of the brain.(not cut one out) The experience in ‘My Stroke of Insight’ seems to be what is experienced(maybe) when the left side is non or less functional. Mostly people in this culture rely far too heavily on the left side which supplies prethought ideas and solution. And the right side which has more to do with direct perception is neglected in favour of easy answers. There is a wonderful book(only700 pages) by Iain MacGilchrist which addresses in great, scholarly detail this hypothesis. I found it a complete turn on but maybe you need some meditation experience to find interest in wading thru it. Meditation is not special experiences or temporary highs but a slow cultivation of intelligence due to observing and thereby understanding ‘the mind’.And both sides of the brain are involved.

  20. I applaud the obvious sincerity and self-awareness of the writer.

    I’ve been a rabbi for 40 years, and have led congregations throughout that period. Judaism encourages skepticism, and Jews have a cultural/familial component to the religion that is quite separable from “faith.” So a Jewish journey to atheism is invariably much less dramatic than that which the writer described. On the other hand, I am not a layperson but a rabbi. I live my own mini-drama.

    I have just retired, and would like to start a group to study the God we don’t believe in. No praying allowed. I can’t be defrocked although I might be unsuited (old joke).

    2. I don’t know. I have heard many conflicting accounts of what a nitrogen narcosis feels like. The references I have are only from other divers and the elevated pressure might influence the chemistry of it leading to a different experience.

      But I’ve heard descriptions ranging from a state of euphoria, feeling very drunk or even nightmarish feelings. This sounds different to me. More like a hallucinogenic drug.

      But then I have never experienced NN myself. Although I would really like to do so one day under controlled conditions.

  22. …and would like to start a group to study the God we don’t believe in.

    That sounds exhausting. 🙂

    Good luck!

    2. To Jesper: Some subjects might be feckless, but the study of those subjects is scholarship!! RR

  24. Welcome. Thank you for sharing your story. The mind is an amazing place and it can do all sorts of fantastic things. It doesn’t require its owner to comprehend, struggle though we may.

  25. Fascinating story, author, thanks for contributing it. I may now be a little less skeptical about some of the glossolalia claimants…

  26. Thanks for telling us your story. It’s fascinating.

    Perhaps a Brit can help me here? I saw an episode of a British series last year in which one of those mind guys was able to create an experience of religious euphoria in an atheist by using particular words and gestures. He’s fairly well known, but I can’t remember his name. He explained how he did it, and he chose his ‘victim’ by getting applicants to answer a questionnaire. I remember one of her criteria was that she’d had a close relationship with her father.

        1. There are some great videos of Derren in conversation with Richard Dawkins on YouTube (a fraction of which was used for one of Dawkins’s TV series; which one escapes me for now).

          /@ / San Diego

    2. The Derren Brown programme is amazing, and well worth the watch. I’ve found two video links: the first one on YouTube doesn’t work in the UK but may work across the pond – this is it. The second one, here, works in the UK.

      1. Yes, that’s the episode I was talking about – thanks HaggisForBrains (I love that name!). It is definitely worth watching – I wish it had been on TV here in NZ.

      2. Yes, thanks HaggisForBrains (I love that name :-)), that’s the episode I was talking about. It’s definitely worth taking the time to watch. I wish it’d been broadcast on TV here in NZ.

        1. I wondered about that myself.
          An internet check finds Haggis to be a Scottish dish much like sausage but grosser.
          A “Scottish supper”, for Burns, should be on any temperate zone inhabitants bucket list.

  28. This is not directly realted to the question asked.

    Does anyone know if “speaking in tongues” is in any other gospel than Mark? The reaso I ask is because according Bart Ehrman in his Misquoting Jesus, the verse containing “speaking in tongues” in in the verses which appear to have been added to Mark, quite awhile after that gospel was written. That section also contains a verse related to handling of snakes. But I think handling of snakes is mentioned in another gospel.

    Many New Testament scholars think that the last chapter of Mark ended at verse 8.

    George

    1. It’s not in any other gospel nope. It’s mentioned in Acts and first Corinthians (which is older than Mark).

      1. Right. Mark was probably written (the first gospel written) shortly after 70 CE a little while after Paul had been executed. According to Ehrman’s there was some editing of the New Testament quite a while after the writing. Perhaps that was one of those incidences.

        If the last chapter of Mark did end at verse 8, then it had a rather unsatisfactory ending. Verse 8 ends with the women running away without telling anyone Jesus was not in the tomb.

        Related to that ending, according to Randel Helms in his Who Wrote the Gospels?, the writer of Mark wasn’t all that much concerned about the resurrection. He was expecting Christ to return very soon which would be much more important than the resurrection. Because that hadn’t happen was one the reasons Mathew and Luke were written, to “correct” Mark.

        George

        PS

        Man this really went off on a tangent!

        1. Here I go again.

          According to Ehrman’s there was some editing of the New Testament quite a while after the writing. Perhaps that was one of those incidences.

          I should have include “perhaps to make the New Testament say what church cannon thought it should say. Another case of such possible editing is in the Epistle of 1st John. That is the only place in the New Testament where there is an explicit reference to the trinity, and that reference appears to have been added.

          George

  30. That does sound a pretty tripy experience. reminds me of the first (and last) time I took cocaine : “That’s nice ; that’s VERY nice. I’m never going to touch it again. That’s too nice.”
    I’m moderately surprised that no one has yet mentioned the similarity between the description and many descriptions of (female) orgasm. But I’ll leave further travel down that road to people who can talk more convincingly about “pleasure centres” and “sublimation” and such like psychobabble. There are times when psychobabble is actually worth wading through, searching for the nuggets in the mud. But I’ll take the boat. Me and my sock-mounted rock.

    1. Your experience with cocaine sounds similar to Greta Christina’s experience with heroin. That is, you both came up with the same decision:

      “I had access to a pleasure machine. And I didn’t want it. I wanted it at most maybe two or three times a year; and ultimately, I didn’t want it at all.”

      It was too nice to tangle with.

      So this, I think, is my point:

      Pleasure is not the same thing as happiness.

  31. I was raised Pentecostal and the baptism in the spirit with speaking in tongues was a must. As teenagers we would be encouraged to seek the spirit at the alter after service at every opportunity. There would be revival meetings that would last a week or two and the pressure would mount to receive the spirit. I’m sure some did fake it as the social pressure was great.
    I received the spirit (one of the last of my group) at camp meeting one summer. I went forward at the alter call and was met by a helpful prayer warrior to help me. Looking back it must have been the hypnotic effect of the atmosphere- the noise of hundreds praying and crying, the organ music, and all those who had received the spirit speaking in tongues. It came on suddenly, unexpectedly (after all I had been praying for this month after month to no avail). It seemed like I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to. It was much like anonymous described it, but in my case relief and a profound thankfulness for finally being found worthy of such a gift. All in all, I feel my experiences with this was a way to express my desire to be accepted by God and to express my feelings of inadequacy and my various childhood needs without actually saying so directly. It was a babbling cry of the heart. There was not much of a high, but just relief of whatever concerns I had.
    I would think hypnosis could explain much of how this could happen initially. As for being able to speak it years later, I can, but it just sounds like it always did, gibberish. How anyone could find it beneficial is beyond me.

    1. At the risk of being too wordy I must explain my last paragraph.
      I was raised in constant fear of the Rapture occurring before I could live my life.
      I was afraid of “backsliding”. I was worried that I wasn’t doing enough to please God. I didn’t want to find myself in hell.
      These are some of the anxious thoughts that plagued my young mind. This may have helped produce a mind ripe for tongues.
      I no longer have these fears and can credit reason for it. Why anyone would want to recreate any portion of that experience is a puzzle to me. I am glad to be free of these fears and do not want to go back to a form of coping that I no longer need to employ.

      1. Thanks for telling your story. I have never even been close to such a religious state of mind – I mean the worry about not being worthy, etc. Hard to imagine, yet believable. I’m so glad you’ve come out of it. It sounds like an experience no one should be forced to endure.

    2. “It was a babbling cry of the heart. There was not much of a high, but just relief of whatever concerns I had.”

      I’m the person that sent Mr. Coyne the email about the “high of glossolalia”. I believe I failed to mention that the intensity of the experience varies from one person to the next.

      Back when I was still a believer, and struggling over the ability being “snatched from me”, I would try talking to other believers about it. Some described their experience as mildly euphoric to no more than the excited high from attending a rock concert.

      Other’s had the exact same ecstatic energy filled, overwhelming experience that I had.

      Overall however, the experiences described were all over the board when it came to the intensity of it and the high. And of course, there were those who faked the experience just to escape the peer pressure.

      I agree that a type hypnosis sets the stage for the experience, but the experience itself isn’t a hallucination. However, you’re wrong that no one finds it beneficial. THAT depends on how intense your experience IS while in that state. For yourself, the euphoria wasn’t that profound, but for some of these people it’s stronger and more powerful than any drug they’ve ever taken in their life, I know, believe me.

      And for some, it becomes an issue they struggle with the entire time they are a believer. I’ve talked to a few of those people.

      I’d really like to know the scientific explanation of what’s REALLY going on in the brain, and why it can be so overwhelming.

      But supernatural? NO

      1. I found it beneficial when I was young, under intense psychological pressure and in that subculture. Now, I don’t see the benefit.
        I’ve now left all that behind, escaped, if you will. No more anxiety about eternal life, offending God, hell fire etc.
        Why now would tongues be beneficial to me now?
        You’re right, of course, to each his own.
        As for hypnosis, it has nothing to do with hallucinations nor did I suggest such a thing. But there are hypnotic techniques that Pentecostals use to get the response they want, whether they do it on purpose or just because they found it works. Noise, music, repetition all contribute. Notice that a healer will strike a subject with the palm of their hand on their forehead and yell something like “in the name of Jesus” and they all fall flat. Those are techniques used at times to provoke altered states.
        I am not an expert (meaning I don’t have any idea) but the mystery religions 2000 years ago had initiation rites that included bright lighting, noise, music etc. Remember that Paul said he was converted when he saw a bright light. Could he have been recalling an initiation ceremony? After all, he did come from the epicenter of the mithraisism. Some say Christianity got the eucharist from them.
        Enough for now.

        1. “I found it beneficial when I was young, under intense psychological pressure and in that subculture. Now, I don’t see the benefit.
          I’ve now left all that behind, escaped, if you will. No more anxiety about eternal life, offending God, hell fire etc.
          Why now would tongues be beneficial to me now?
          You’re right, of course, to each his own.”

          I think what you’re really missing here, as far as an individual wanting to practice glossolalia, and indeed, NEEDING to experience it repeatedly, is that you’re gauging it against your own.

          Yours, from your own description, wasn’t as intensely intoxicating as it can be for others. Like I said, the experience varies among believers. For some, the experience isn’t nearly as ecstatic.

          But for those to whom the intensity of the ecstatic, euphoric drug like effects can be so overwhelming and overpowering, it’s the equivalent of being exposed to a highly addictive drug for the first time, and wanting more as a result, needing that “fix”, just like a drug addict, becomes part of their spiritual (so to speak) lives. It’s a habit they want to cultivate because they’re getting stoned for cryin’ out loud.

          I’ve seen those kinds of effects on people within the Pentecostal faith. They would hold home prayer meetings for the express purpose of getting that jolt. Of course it’s all gussied up under the religious umbrella of seeking a “touch from God”, but when you get down to where the rubber meets the road, what they’re really there for is that high that they can’t get anywhere else.

          I’ve seen the disappointment on the faces of those that couldn’t get the hook up, the envy in their eyes watching someone else fall in the floor, “slain in the spirit”. I’m not speaking just of myself, I’ve SEEN this in others. I’ve seen the negative impact it had on them.

          There IS an element within Pentecostalism that very much resembles the drug culture when it comes to getting high, but you will NEVER hear a Pentecostal admit that. Most likely they would become infuriated at the insinuation.

          But it’s true nonetheless.

          I no longer have any of these feelings for the experience, and to tell you the truth, wish I had never had it in the first place, but what I’ve described does go on in Pentecostal circles, though they filter it through their woo and spin it completely different.

  32. Reggae – like and except for its entitling and understood word, noel, much of the rest of this all – state’s (Iowa high school students from all over) choir rendition of last weekend held locally sounds very much like the frenzied and trance – like incantating hexing of the witchery of glossolalia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sug5NE_iAEo&feature=youtu.be

    Likely, (most of) the folks of the choir and / or the (righteously, ie, rightfully) adoring audience inside Hilton Coliseum did NOT ‘hear’ this musical piece in the interpretational way that I did!

    Blue

  33. Very interesting.

    In my younger, charismatic, days I experienced similar and even had a dramatic deliverance experience.

    The author is right, fakery isn’t the issue. There is something real happening and it does induce a temporary state of euphoria. In Christian speak, it’s worshipful.

    To this day is the only part of my Christian experience that I can’t explain away. I’d love to have it explained, though only to satisfy my curiosity. I don’t need the explanation to prove religion is false.

    I also had a testifying experience that I now know to be sleep paralysis, this was a couple of days after the deliverance so I wonder if the two are connected. It was a time of immense emotional turmoil for me and looking back I was probably drpressed. Who knows. Maybe there is a connection there too. Hard to say for sure.

    Ramble over, it’s interesting to hear other people’s stories on the experience.

    1. I don’t know why you would want to “explain away” an experience, especially since as you say it is not pertinent to the facts of nature. (Apart from being an emotional state.)

      See my comment below for a pity prediction (e.g. an ecstatic state).

  34. Ecstasy is a powerful emotion, that can be triggered in a lot of situations, including various religious contexts. Some religions like quaklers and voudou are more or less based on it. Therefore the reification inherent in the letter’s “the experience” seems misplaced (unless I’m misinterpreting the reference). Especially since the author recognize that others do not necessarily share the ecstasy during glossolalia, and can even fake it.

    Glossolalia are said to stimulate the language centers in much the same way that deepities or white noise are. That it can be part of a trigger for an ecstatic state isn’t surprising.

Comments are closed.