In one of our evangelistic campaigns, there was a woman who had a special ability to pass on something which we called the glory of God — that is strong spiritual and intoxicating experiences, similar to the effect of taking drugs. She was praying for me that I would “get out in the Spirit” and become filled with the glory of God. It was not prayer in the real sense of the word, but rather a question of commanding things to happen in the spiritual world. After a while, I sensed a prickly feeling beginning to fill me. It felt as though I was beginning to be anaesthetised and enter a different level of consciousness. I was kicking violently with my arms and legs, and I was helpless to stop it. The whole thing concluded with a strong convulsive fit of laughter, and I had no control at all over my own reactions. Afterwards, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of peace and joy because I was aware that this had been my point of entry into a new realm. I had seen others enter into it and longed to have the experience myself. Subsequent experiences of the anointing were usually accompanied by feelings of joy, but I also remember feeling very empty when “laughing in the Spirit” on one occasion. In that particular instance, I got a terrible feeling that I was mocking God.
Prior to this experience of entering into “the anointing,” any falling on my part had been due to the preacher pushing me, or to my falling voluntarily. It was only after this experience that I started to fall over for real, so to speak, when preachers laid hands on me. Now that I had taken part of “the power,” I was able to transmit it to others also.
Not everyone found the experience of “being filled with the glory of God” altogether positive. One person said she felt terrible when we started to laugh in the Spirit. Although she deeply admired Kenneth Hagin, she could not get rid of this uneasy feeling during sessions of laughing in the Spirit at his Rhema Bible Training Centre.
During a session of being filled with the glory of God, a number of people were lying on the floor in various places in the tent we used for evangelism. Some of us were more or less spaced out for a varying length of time. When it was time to go for lunch, most of us had come back to normal and left the tent. One person was still lying on the floor, “out in the Spirit.” We did not want to disturb what we assumed God was doing, so we left her behind while the rest of us went to have lunch.
While we were gone, she went even deeper into another state of consciousness. A young boy who had been left behind, watched her start screaming as if she were in agony of death. She screamed so loudly that people in the neighbourhood came and asked the boy if they should call an ambulance, but he managed to persuade them that it was not necessary.
We returned after two hours, and as soon as we approached the tent, we could hear the terrible, agonising screams. It was not possible to make contact with her in the state she was in. The person who had prayed for the glory of God to come upon her in the first place went resolutely forward and commanded her spirit to return to her body. This seemed to have an immediate effect. The woman in agony woke up, and it was possible to communicate with her though she was in a state of deep mental shock. As the prayer leader talked to her, she gradually began to be more like her normal self, but for the rest of the day she looked awful as if she was trying to recover from a terrible experience.
After my own experience of this new dimension, I got the ability to transfer similar experiences to others. One of my friends was strongly influenced when I prayed for him. He was staggering backwards and forwards, strongly intoxicated with a sense of happiness which he seemed to be enjoying immensely. In the end he could hardly stand up straight because he was so intoxicated by this thing which I interpreted as being the glory of God. His body went into the kind of contortions that are typical of someone who is powerfully influenced by what we called the anointing. He was breathing heavily when a wave of this anointing rolled over him; in between, he was also laughing a bit.
There was another of my good friends who was unpleasantly surprised when I suddenly laid hands on him and began to pray “the power” into him, with the result that he fell down. After this incident, he was in two minds whether to partake in our powers and activities or not — he was being drawn both ways. But he could not keep on enduring the stress of this, and eventually he chose to go another way. Later on, when I met him after I had left the movement, he told me that he had a strong experience of something unclean coming over him when I had laid hands on him and he collapsed!
