This project explores how sensory dimensions of religiosity relate to notions of truth and psyche across charismatic Christianity and spirit mediumship in contemporary China. After decades of campaigns against ‘superstition,’ culminating in the formal banning of most religious institutions and practices in the 1960s-70s during the Cultural Revolution, a wide range of spiritual engagements have returned as a powerful force, both within and beyond the recognition of the party-state. What is it to deploy sensation and perception—the rudimentary tools of empiricism—to discern spirited truths, in what’s been described as an atheist secular world? How does the psyche, itself a modern inheritor of multiple traditions, enter the scene of discernment? Drawing on ethnographic research across churches and temples, this project explores intimate spiritual encounters—divine voice and touch, demonic nausea—that shape and drive contemporary religious movements, including global charismatic movements.