Do you get the sense that it's mostly generational?
I do.
How do you tell the difference between a true, valid experience and a false one?
Moses lays out one rule about how to eliminate some "revelations" as not being from God. I was not aware of that rule, by the way, when I had my first experience. Moses says that if God wants to reveal Himself, the first revelation will be in one of two ways: Speaking to the person in a dream, or appearing in a vision. The person who says his first experience was hearing a voice from God while he was awake is almost surely being fooled. Odds are the person may tell you too that it's an audible voice in the way regular voices are. There should be no confusion between how voices are being heard. If someone is hearing a spiritual voice, he should be certain he's not hearing a physical voice.
I believe if God chooses to reveal Himself, the first time He wants the person to be confident he's not hearing a physical voice. Things are seldom calm enough when people are wide awake, interacting with the world. Thus Samuel's first experience confused him a little. At first he thought he was hearing a physical voice.
If you don't mind me asking, what sort of experiences did you have?
I'll tell you about my first experience, before I knew about the rule Moses gave. I was asleep and suddenly I was in a dream. I didn't see anything. There wasn't much to see; but I heard a voice speaking to me. I was resting in the dream, inclined as if in a bed; and I was surrounded by flames. When the dream was over, I woke up and was wide awake immediately. It was like I had walked from one room to another through a door -- there was no period of "waking up" since in a way, I felt awake during the dream (as paradoxical as that sounds). There was nothing like some prophecy.
At the time, I thought I had heard the Voice of God Himself. I think I got it mostly right, but now I'd say I heard my Guardian Angel. I cannot say that I have ever heard from God Himself in person. My revelations came to me through my Guardian Angel or through other spiritual beings. I had trouble recognizing my Guardian Angel, but the other spiritual beings let me know who they were when they appeared.
Once a spirit turned up and claimed to be Jesus. To be honest, I wasn't sure it was. My mind wasn't calm enough, I didn't trust my own perceptions. If it was Jesus, I didn't want to offend him; but if it wasn't, I didn't want to be fooled. So I expressed my doubts and asked him to leave for a while until I got my act together. He was not upset with me. When he came back, I felt sure it was Jesus, and he wasn't offended since he knew I was doubting myself, not him.
The Bible has an interesting story about Hagar. She sees an angel and later claimed to have seen God. Ha, she had not seen God. That was an emergency. Hagar was not ready for that vision, but it was an emergency. She misinterpreted what she had seen, but the intended message got through. I would say to a certain degree, most spiritual dreams and visions contain slight problems. No one is hearing or seeing perfectly.
The revelations I trusted the most was ones which showed me flaws in myself. I am not a masochist who enjoys being humiliated -- they weren't like that. I was shown how I had been wrong in the past and how I could be right in the future. Michael showed up one evening. I asked him why he enjoyed power. You see, I had a problem with power -- I saw wanting power as a flaw. So I was curious and asked him. His answer was so he could do more good. He did not have to preach at me in a condemning tone. I knew I had been wrong trying to avoid wielding power. I was reproved. If I loved people, I had to want more power. I would even be willing to take some risks at times. I might make a mistake, thinking I was doing good, and do great harm.
There was one time when one of my prayers may have led to a problem. I used to go city by city in my prayers; and one night when I was praying for Seattle, my concentration broke. My practice was to view everyone with benevolence, even while praying for places some might call dens of iniquity. I was not careful enough that night and a part of me was slightly angry with people while I was praying for Seattle. I was shocked when I learned there had been an earthquake in that area. I had mixed feelings, to be sure. Part of me said, "You didn't do that. It was a coincidence." Part of me felt guilty. Part of me said, "The stress in the earth there needed to be relieved sooner or later; maybe it's better if they had a smaller quake instead of waiting to have a really big one." Which was it? Who knows? What I did learn though was that I had failed to keep my emotions under control. Even if it was pure coincidence, I had allowed myself to be angry without cause. No one in Seattle had injured me. I needed to work on keeping myself in check -- that was something I could know for sure.
LOL! The fact that so often people's revelations from God just happen to line up with their own views is pretty telling IMO.
Isn't it? If someone agrees too much with me, I start to wonder if he is trying to flatter me by going along with everything I say. I prefer to have people tell me what they honestly think. They don't need to agree with me. If I was getting spiritual revelations that lined up with my views 100%, I would have to ask if I was being played by a demon pretending to be an angel. What would I be learning? What would the point be?