Wanna feel the Holy Spirit? Crank up the bass.

Wanna feel the Holy Spirit? Crank up the bass.

I joke all the time about this with the people in my church: If you want people to really feel like the Holy Spirit is in the building, get on the soundboard and make sure the bass guitar, the bass drum, and all the lower notes on the keyboard, are cranked all the way up to 11. Conversely if you want ’em to feel like he’s missing, you do the opposite and turn all of ’em off.

It’s one of those jokes which is funny because it’s true. If you actually did this, it’s actually how people would respond. The higher the bass, the more people “felt” the Spirit move. Turn it all the way down and you’ll get, “I don’t know what was wrong this morning, but I wasn’t really feeling the Spirit today.”

’Cause bass causes stuff in the building to vibrate. Including people. Most of us know this already… but we never really think about how else it affects us.

Go to any movie theater and you know they make darned sure there are subwoofers under the floor, and they’re cranked all the way up. They want you to feel every crash, bang, gunshot, and explosion in that movie. Low sound waves shake your innards, and turn a spectacle into an experience.

Same with dance clubs. Same with concerts. People weep at concerts. Same as they’ll weep at worship services. It doesn’t always register how this is the physical effect of soundwaves, and how our brains have connected the sensation to our emotions, so it triggers us. All we know is we feel.

So when people don’t know there’s a difference between spirit and emotion (or even when we’re totally aware of this fact, but we’ve never bothered to discern which is which), we’ll assume the feelings are the Spirit at work. Especially when it feels really good.

Conversely, when “my spirit is downcast,” we’re still talking about emotions and sensations. Not anything the Spirit is actually doing—and he’s usually doing quite a lot! But because we don’t feel something positive, we presume he must be absent.

This isn’t a uniquely Christian thing. Most people don’t know the difference between spirit and emotion. Most people don’t think there is any difference. Pagans in particular, but I’ve caught even mature Christians making this mistake as well. I know better, and even I slip up sometimes. I’ve yet to meet a Christian who hasn’t.

Emotions are physical. Spirit isn’t.

Look up “spirit” in any English dictionary, and you’ll find among its definitions, “Mood or emotion of a person or place; usually positive.” People regularly use “spirit” to describe the feel of a crowd, classroom, boardroom, rally—of audiences of all sorts. What’s the mood? What’s the vibe? Do they have spirit?

Obviously this definition of “spirit” doesn’t come from bible. In the scriptures, spirit means something which isn’t solid, like the wind, like the breath in your lungs. Nowadays we recognize air is made of molecules, but we know better than to claim spirit is made of molecules; it’s not physical. We don’t really know how to describe it further, ’cause science can only describe physical stuff, and since the bible doesn’t bother, we should know better than to speculate. We’ll just say spirit isn’t made of molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, or any of the energies we can measure in our universe. It’s something different.

And no, it’s not emotions. It’s not mood. It’s not vibes. It’s not mental power, nor thoughts, nor consciousness, nor any of the topics we find in psychology. If you’ve mixed up those things with spirits or the Holy Spirit, you’re gonna get a very weird idea of what God’s like.

Because emotions aren’t spiritual. They’re physical. When I see something which triggers an emotion, my brain loads me up with whatever molecules I instinctively figure I need, just to get me through the next couple minutes. Endorphins, epinephrine, dopamine, whatever. If I bottled those chemicals and injected ’em into the brain of someone else, they’d feel pretty much the same way I do. (Everybody’s different, so maybe the mixture wouldn’t be what they’re used to. More intense; less intense; extreme experiences might trigger way different emotions in ’em. Still.)

But we don’t have to inject anyone with chemicals. People are disturbingly easy to emotionally manipulate. Follow the right steps and their brains will produce these chemicals on their own.

For that matter, we can manipulate our own chemicals. I know how to psyche myself into feeling happy, sad, angry, excited—whatever the situation requires. Most humans regularly do it. We just aren’t aware we can, or how we’re doing it… or how emotions even work. We never bothered to control them. Some of us insist we can’t control them—or figure the way to control them is through meditation or medication. I have coworkers who regularly get drunk or stoned; there’s one of them whom I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen not stoned. He doesn’t do it because he loves marijuana that much; he does it to control his emotions. It makes him feel how he wants to feel.

Have you ever heard a Latter-Day Saint describe their first God experience? Turns out they psyche themselves into it. Seriously. They’re told to read their bible or Book of Mormon, then go ask God to show ’em whether it’s true. They’re told to pray really hard, and God will answer their prayers by giving them an emotional experience. A “burning of the bosom,” some call it. It’s supposed to confirm he really is behind whatever they struggle to believe. So plenty of Mormons pray for, and get, this experience.

And of course they get this experience! Because everyone can psyche themselves into ’em. I’ve done it many times: I psyched myself into believing God supported a plan, or was behind certain circumstances. He wasn’t, but since I wanted him to be so bad, I fooled myself. I never sought proper confirmation. I followed my own desires, got my emotions to confirm these desires, and tried to claim it was God nudging me in the direction I wished. Wasn’t God in the least. All me.

Manipulative preachers—who may not always realize just what they’re doing—can psyche you into such experiences. They can speak fast or slow, louder or softer, fervently and emotionally—and lots of people are empathetic, meaning their emotions quickly sync up to whoever they’re watching. If the preacher seems sad, they get sad. Joyous, and they ramp themselves up with joy. Anxious, and you can watch their posture change in their seats as they twist themselves into anxious positions. Some throw themselves into the preacher’s every cue. Others not so much. But everybody feels something…

…That is, everybody but the skeptics, who sit in the back of the room and say, “I can’t believe everyone’s falling for this. What a bunch of suckers.” But put these same skeptics in a room with a speaker who tells ’em everything they wanna hear, and in that room they’ll become suckers too. Nobody’s immune to this. Well, nobody but sociopaths, or people with psychological traumas and disorders who can’t control their emotions.

Whenever people don’t recognize we’re actually in charge, they often assume the Spirit is. Especially when they come out of a church service feeling really positive about God, or Christ, or religion, or other people. Or, depending on the message, distressed and fearful about sin.

Skeptics mock it, and call it manipulative mass psychology. They’re absolutely right. If these Christians were legitimately feeling the Holy Spirit, we wouldn’t only see emotion. We’d see supernatural. We’d see signs and wonders. We’d see the Spirit’s fruit. People would do for one another. People’d be loved and encouraged, be cured of diseases, be prophesied over. There’d be changed lives, not just warm hearts. If all we have are warm hearts, God may have been there… but people were listening to their own hearts. (Which lie to us. Jr 17.9) Not so much God.

“I’m a spiritual person.”

When pagans and Christians alike describe ourselves as “spiritual people,” often we mean we’re emotional people. Stuff gives us the feels—really quickly!

These “spiritual people” can’t always articulate what emotions they’re experiencing, or why they have ’em. They usually don’t know the words for it. Or they think words are inadequate: The love they have for their family is so powerful. The awe they have for nature’s beauty is so powerful. The lust they have for their neighbor’s spouse is so powerful. The desire they have for the new iPhone is so powerful. You see where I’m going. They’ll describe all these things (except maybe coveting the iPhone) as “spiritual.” They’re short on vocabulary, so they’ll just use “spiritual” wrong.

Yeah, no. These feelings aren’t spiritual. Nor supernatural, nor unique. Everybody on the planet feels like this. Doesn’t make us spiritual. It means we feel. We’re not emotionally dead inside. That’s a good thing, but it’s not spirit; it’s endorphins.

When people reduce our “spirituality” to nothing but emotion—no matter how great these emotions may feel—we’ve actually limited ourselves. We’ve reduced “spirit” to a materialist view of the universe, and cut ourselves off from any true spiritual view. Not to mention God himself. If the only way we recognize God is through how he makes us feel… well, anyone and anything can duplicate that, and lead Christians astray. We’ll be busy chasing warm fuzzies while the real God passes us by.

Unless, as God often does, he works with what little he’s been given, and uses our emotions to truly draw us to himself.

Still, we’re not gonna go too far in God’s direction if we never get past the false definition. We’ll keep following our emotions, and call it “being spiritual.” But the only motive we have for “following God” is the emotional payoff, and the result will be people who aren’t really Christian, but endorphin junkies. We’ll follow that instead of him: We love the emotional high, not the LORD.

And just as addicts will do whatever depraved thing they can to get high, “spiritual” people will often do whatever twisted things they can to feel “spiritual” again. Including things God can’t possibly approve of.

So don’t trust your feelings. Jr 17.9 (Don’t listen to the Jedi!) Seek truth. Trust God.