Spiritual experiences are becoming more common
One conclusion we can draw, at least, is that such experiences are common, and apparently becoming more so. In 1978, 36 per cent of respondents to a RERC survey said they’d experienced ‘a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, different from your ordinary self’. In 1987, the figure had risen to 48 per cent. In 2000, more than 75 per cent of respondents to a UK survey conducted by RERC director David Hay said they were ‘aware of a spiritual dimension to their experience’. In the US, spiritual experiences are also apparently becoming more frequent – in 1962, when Gallup asked Americans if they’d ‘ever had a religious or mystical experience’, 22 per cent said yes. That figure rose to 33 per cent by 1994, and 49 per cent in 2009. I carried out my own online spiritual experiences survey in 2016, sending it out through my website and newsletter.5 I asked people if they had ‘ever had an experience where you went beyond your ordinary sense of self and felt connected to something bigger than you’. I received 309 responses to the survey from a cross-section of Christians, atheists, agnostics and those who describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’ that is roughly equivalent to national demographics. A surprising 84 per cent of people said they had; 46 per cent had had less than ten such experiences in their lives, while 37 per cent had them quite often.
Spiritual experiences seem to happen all through life, but particularly in childhood and adolescence. They are slightly more common in women than in men and, interestingly, more common in ‘spiritual but not religious’ than in the religiously affiliated. This may be because some Christian denominations, like Baptists, are suspicious of putting too much emphasis on spiritual experiences, although this is not the case with Methodists, Pentecostalists and other charismatic Christians. Atheists are the least likely to report such experiences: 43 per cent of atheists in my survey said they’d never had a spiritual experience, although that still means the majority of atheists had had one or more. William James thought such experiences mainly happened to people on their own. In fact, 63 per cent of respondents said they’d had spiritual experiences with others.
Why are spiritual experiences becoming more common? As I argued in the introduction, I think it’s a consequence of the sixties counter-culture and the explosion of interest in ecstatic experiences, which has lessened the taboo around discussing them. When David Hay undertook his first survey in 1976, 40 per cent of people said they had never told anyone about their spiritual experience, out of fear of being thought mad.6 In my survey, 75 per cent of respondents agreed that there was still a taboo against talking about such experiences in Western society. However, 70 per cent said they had told a few other people about them. So, although it’s still deemed a bit weird and taboo to talk about spiritual experiences, particularly if you claim an encounter with a spiritual being, we’re becoming more prepared to admit to them.
Spiritual experiences may also be becoming more common because we increasingly expect to have them, due to the expansion of higher education since the 1960s. Hay’s surveys found spiritual experiences occur more often to the university-educated than those who leave education at 16 or 18. This suggests the importance of education, particularly arts education, in establishing cultural expectations of epiphany. We are primed for them through our reading of Romantics, like Wordsworth, Whitman, Tolstoy, Kerouac and others.
Although the RERC database houses an initially bewildering variety of specimens, and my own survey also brought in a rich and exotic haul, one can identify three spontaneous experiences that seem to occur quite often in a similar form:
1) epiphanies of connection and oneness
2) a surrender to God when at a particularly low ebb
3) near-death experiences
Epiphanies of connection and oneness
One evening in the winter of 1969, the author Philip Pullman had a transcendent experience on London’s Charing Cross Road. He told me:
Somewhere in the Middle East, some Palestinian activists had hijacked a plane and it was sitting on a runway surrounded by police, soldiers, fire engines, and so forth. I saw a photo of it on the front page of the Evening Standard, and then I walked past a busker who was surrounded by a circle of listeners, and I saw a sort of parallel. From then on for the rest of the journey [from Charing Cross to Barnes] I kept seeing things doubled: a thing and then another thing that was very like it. I was in a state of intense intellectual excitement throughout the whole journey. I thought it was a true picture of what the universe was like: a place not of isolated units of indifference, empty of meaning, but a place where everything was connected by similarities and correspondences and echoes. I was very interested at the time in such things as Frances Yates’s books about Hermeticism and Giordano Bruno. I think I was living in an imaginative world of Renaissance magic. In a way, what happened was not surprising, exactly: more the sort of thing that was only to be expected. What I think now is that my consciousness was temporarily altered (certainly not by drugs, but maybe by poetry) so that I was able to see things that are normally beyond the range of visible light, or routine everyday perception.
Pullman has rarely discussed the experience, although it left him with a conviction that the universe is ‘alive, conscious and full of purpose’. He told me: ‘Everything I’ve written, even the lightest and simplest things, has been an attempt to bear witness to the truth of that statement.’ Most famously, the experience informed the world of his Dark Materials trilogy, in which an animist cosmos is filled with conscious particles of dust.
Many of us have also had spontaneous experiences in which we have a sudden blissful and quasi-mystical sense of the oneness of all things. When I asked people to describe their spiritual experiences, the most common word they used was ‘connection’, and similar words like ‘unity’, ‘at one’, ‘merging’, ‘dissolving’ – such words appeared in 37 per cent of survey respondents’ descriptions. This tallies with what Dr Cheryl Hunt, editor of the Journal for the Study of Spirituality, told me: ‘Connection is the word people use most often to describe such experiences.’ Connection to what? Lots of things. People reported feeling connected to nature, to humanity, to all beings, to a loved one, to a group of people, to an animal, to the cosmos, angels, the Logos, the Holy Spirit, God, to the interdependence of all things. Atheists and theists reported similar moments of deep connection; they just interpreted them differently.
Here, for example, is one report of a connection to nature and the cosmos:
It was in a park, recently. A windy day, and I cut through these magical woods en route, and passed a natural pond, which was absolutely alive. The wind was in such a direction that it was inspiring all kinds of amazing patterns in the pond. I was mesmerised looking at this and felt in a trance. I imagined diving into this mystery. I felt part of the pond, the wind, the patterns, my thoughts and feelings, the trees, wildlife, and was laughing out in joy.
Here’s another moment of nature-connection: ‘Standing on the tip of a mountain, watching the snow fall and suddenly feeling a strange sense of expansion and contraction where I became aware of an underlying “sameness” between me, the snow and the mountain.’
People also report moments of ecstatic connection in cities: ‘I was in Bangkok surrounded by strange sounds and smells. Bells were ringing. It was quite hot, I was in a rickshaw. Momentarily I felt as though my own spirit had left my body and I became part of everything.’ T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets of how ‘the intersection of the timeless moment/Is England and nowhere never and always’ – a particular time and place suddenly seems flooded with the eternal. The most unlikely times and places can be intersections, as in this account from the RERC database:
