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Paper short abstract:

God's hug is one way that charismatic habits of attention seems to link metaphor to the body as love and care manifests in sensory experience—practice gets under the skin. This paper explores the forms of attention, sense of surprise and novelty, and sensations that occur when speaking in tongues.

Paper long abstract:

The experience of being hugged by God is one example of the ways that charismatic habits of attention seems to link metaphor to the body as ideas of love and care manifest in people’s sensory experience—practice gets under the skin. A hug from God was described across multiple interviews, yet with a variety of meanings. Charismatic worship engenders a range of warm cuddly somatic experiences. Many are connected to a sense of being deeply loved and lovable. Some begin the cross the line from a sense of being loved to physically experienced warmth in the chest and even to a very distinct sense of being embraced.

Speaking in tongues could be described s Christian meditation with a touch of psychedelia: its phenomenology is closely akin to microdosing of psychedelics. The effects of mindfulness and other forms of mediation may be as a result of their specific forms of attention. Psychedelics seem effective because engender a particularly plastic brain state especially open to novelty. novelty and new thinking. Taken together, the blend of attention and novelty might tell us something about how explain why speaking i tongues is often accompanied by hallucinations, like God’s hugs, and also why the sense of me other and concreteness seems to vary with practice. This paper explores the forms of attention, sense of surprise and novelty and sensations that occur when speaking in tongues.