Increasing
the Awareness of His Presence
Armand Kruger, MA
Summary: how talking
about God increased the awareness of His presence; how you
talk about God help/hinders in how you become aware of Him.
Experiencing God as a meta-state. Language is one way of being
in God's likeness: the ability to create with words. The reality
and risk of "creating" God with our words.
At the start of one of our
business meetings (at IfM) three of us got to talk about God
after our opening prayer. We were exploring Who He is, and
his role in our lives and business. I was aware that this
was not a mere talking "about" God, because we were
all "reaching inside" when we were saying what we
did about God. After a time my partner started to introduce
"awe" as a theme for what were saying and thinking
about God, and the rest of us just shifted into that theme
as if it was "waiting" for us. Awe became the theme
because we were saying "awe"-things long before
the "descriptive state-word" gave a name to where
we were at emotionally. The term brought to awareness and
gave a name to what was already an experienced reality. This
has happened once before when we were earnestly "seeking
His face" in discussing Christian ways of doing business,
as well as exploring and defining management/leadership theories.
Experiencing God:
Talking about God, about Who
He is, "interfacing" with Him through trying to
language His reality, seems to be one way of becoming more
aware of His presence. Philip Yancey in his book "The
Jesus I Never Knew" makes the point that God is always
present, His "absence" is a quality of our experience,
and who has not experienced a "dark night of the soul"?.
Experiencing the awe towards God flowed from the language
which we used, the words which points to, and the punctuation
of our experience in this "interfacing" with
God. Our words, and the semantics we used, created the particular
awareness for, and then solidified the state, in which to
experience knowing God in a certain way.
"The miracle of words"
is the only way I can describe my experience. Why this "wow"-discovery
after 4 years of neuro-semantics? I was struck with how in
using words, frames and levels I can have this magnificent
awareness about a reality which is independent of me and is
a "frame-of-reference" which goes with certain linguistic
qualifications.
Framing God:
God as a word is just another
word. For a Christian to "seek the face of God"
requires the use of the word with at least one essential feature,
namely "+my". Indexing this personal relationship
with God immediately frames the search for the presence of
God as a personal and experiential process. Framing God as
"my" God means that from that point on I will be
seeking God in a very particular way: the frame points, punctuates
and limits the kind of experiential process I will now undertake.
The personal relationship framed
by "my" also refers to a set of standards
about the fulfillment of this quest for "seeking".
One of the higher standards would be translating any one of
the attributes of God into the name of a personal experience.
Examples are when attributes like a "loving God",
a "righteous God", a "powerful God", etc.
refers to a personal reference experience which will "stand
for" the particular attribute. "Awe" as a resultant
experience is a statement of a knowing about God which exceeds
some existing conceptual boundary, and the involuntary gasp
of "wonderful, marvelous" and the misnomer of "unbelievable".
Obey and then Experience
God: meta-stating with the presence of God
Blackaby and King1
says "You come to know God by experience as you obey
Him and He accomplishes His work through you". Obedience
precedes experience! (John 14:15,24; 1John 2:3-6; Psalm 119:
33-35)
In a similar fashion our discussion
followed the above: asking about God in the particular circumstances,
seeking to interface with Him using the medium of languaging
His will and attributes as relevant to us at that time,
and then the emergent awareness of his presence.
This awareness of the realness
and awesomeness of the presence of God definitively textured
the "how" our meeting. In our discussions on focus
and actions criteria words like love, usage of talent ("unique
design") and time as guardians of God's gifts, enrichment,
awareness of destiny, etc. became the terminology of choice.
We were more tolerant and firm about "mutuality"
and "fair fees" than I have experienced us in previous
meetings.
My (AK) experience has been
that in this meeting we were also meeting each other in a
more "personally Christian" way (this with people
who have intimately worked together for more than one year!).
My experience of "we-ness" was within a frame-of-reference
of Christian unity. "How marvelous, how wonderful...!".
As one would expect from such
a beautiful state dependency, the rest of the meeting, which
went over three hours, were in this same spirit. Which in
it self taught me something about the attributes of state
dependency, namely that this "magnetized/pulling"
awareness was conducive to bring to bear more memory, and
more content/knowledge, but not more "reality".
We remembered more about God (scripture references) personal
examples of "times when God......." but the state
of awareness of the presence of God became a pervasive "sameness"
for the duration of the meeting.
In the image of God: creating
with words
Philip Yancey (1995) in his
"The Jesus I never Knew" (Zondervan Publishers)
pointed me to the writer Dorothy Sayers and her incredible
"Mind of the Maker" (Harper San Francisco). Sayers
argues that one way of thinking what it is to be like "in
the image of God" is to be aware that we "create"
with words the same way as God did! We do not create something
from nothing, but the artist (who she uses as her model) follows
the same mysteriously real trinitarian approach as is the
existence of our Triune God. (p. 37ff).
After a weekend of teaching
"Dragon Slaying" I was once again awestruck with
how the delegates through guidance for state-texturing follow
the "path of words" and reach the reality of an
emerging gestalt state! The words as qualifiers and pointers
bridges for them the starting place to the state desired .......and
then they make it so! In hearing the words of the state
induction/invitation they create the neuro-physiological emergent
state.
The domain of neuro-semantics
is how, with language, people create distinctions and make
comparisons through the levels of meaning. The giftedness
of self-reflexivity is powerful because of the ability to
use words to create semantic realities as the basis for our
distinctions and comparing the "realities" which
we have created!
The theory of God
The semantic realities we create
with our words takes on a reality/life of their own: "having
said it makes it so". The more abstract we go into the
realms of meaning, the loser it seems the ties to the complex
equivalences which we use to identify our experiential realities
with2. And this is where the
unconscious frames-of-reference can shape the awareness of
God and the selective attention to reading the Word of God
about Himself. The meaning of God may supercede the reality
of God to the point where people live in a relation with a
god that exists only for them. This god can be punitive, accepting
of sin in special circumstances, understanding of my lack
of effort because I didn't feel good, etc. The semantic feature
of the frame-of-reference (source experience) which people
choose by which they will know God, becomes real since it
is not updated, nor do people remember that "it is only
words". The reality of God is languaged in a limited,
but sufficient way in the Bible, but that means to know God
is to know Him through both Testaments and as an emerging
Gestalt: to obey God is to know Him, and to repeatedly experience
Him afresh through His Word.
Conclusion:
I
think I can begin to understand why in some books on prayer
the recommendation is that one starts one’s prayers in remembering
the attributes of God before one goes to the more personal
part of one’s prayer. It is as if one has to remember first
Whom it is we are praying to, before we remember what we are
pray for.
Ps
145:18 The LORD
is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in
truth.
Endnotes:
1. Blackaby,
Henry T.; King, Claude V (1990): Experiencing God: Knowing
and Doing the Will of God. Lifeway Press, Nashville; p.146ff.
2. Kruger,
Armand: "I love your criterial equivalences"
NLP World, Vol 6, No 2, July 1999.
Contact information for
Armand Kruger:
South Africa's Institute
of Neuro - Semantics
Armand Kruger
PO Box 494
Meyerton
South Africa, 1960
Fax: 2716-362-1559
armandk@lantic.net
http://www.neurosemantics.co.za
©2001 Armand Kruger All rights reserved.
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