Station on a murky November Saturday evening is not the setting one would choose for a revelation of God! . . . The third-class compartment was full . . . For a few seconds only (I suppose) the whole compartment was filled with light . . . I felt caught up into some tremendous sense of being within a loving, triumphant and shining purpose . . . A most curious but overwhelming sense possessed me and filled me with ecstasy. I felt that all was well for mankind . . . All men were shining and glorious beings who in the end would enter incredible joy.7
In these moments, we feel we have transcended time and space. We also transcend the fretful ego and feel a love-connection between ourselves and other beings. One survey respondent writes: ‘On public transport, surrounded by people I have no connection with, I suddenly get an overwhelming feeling of love for them all.’ The love-connection can be with humans or non-humans – a recent moment of ecstasy for Barbara Ehrenreich came when she was kayaking in a bay and was surrounded by dolphins. The rationalist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote of one moment of ‘mystical illumination’ he experienced when ‘I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances.’8 Those five minutes, he said, turned him from an imperialist into a pacifist.
Moments of surrender in life-crises
The second most common type of spontaneous spiritual experience is a moment of surrender in a life-crisis. People find themselves at a low ebb, they feel powerless and helpless, and they give up, surrender to God/the cosmos/a higher power. They then often report a sense of healing power, or grace, which enables them to continue with life and sometimes radically improves their situation. They’re not so much ‘peak experiences’ as ‘trough experiences’. Here’s one such account from the RERC:
During my late 20s and early 30s I had a good deal of depression. I felt shut up in a cocoon of complete isolation and could not get in touch with anyone . . . things came to such a pass and I was so tired of fighting that I said one day, ‘I can do no more. Let nature, or whatever is behind the universe, look after me now.’ Within a few days I passed from a hell to a heaven. It was as if the cocoon had burst and my eyes were opened and I saw. Everything was alive and God was present in all things . . . Psychologically, and for my own peace of mind, the effect has been of the greatest importance.
Here is the dramatic moment of grace experienced by Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, when he hit rock-bottom in his struggle to give up booze:
All at once I found myself crying out, ‘If there is a God, let Him show himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!’ Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me in my mind’s eye that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay there on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness . . . and I thought to myself, ‘So this is the God of the preachers!’ A great peace stole over me.9
William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience, noted that such moments of surrender can be profoundly healing. They’re the precise opposite of the self-help attitude of Stoicism and CBT. You’re not relying on your self, you’re surrendering to some Other. ‘Give up the feeling of responsibility,’ James wrote, ‘let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.’ But what are we surrendering to? James was ambivalent. One may be surrendering to a genuine ‘higher power’, or it may be a healing power in the subliminal mind, which we access via a sort of self-hypnosis. ‘If the grace of God miraculously operates,’ he wrote, ‘it probably operates through the subliminal door.’
Either way, it works for a lot of people, as the success of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programmes shows. Several AA attendees I’ve spoken to say the ‘surrender to a Higher Power’ aspect of the programme was very helpful for them, even if they weren’t sure what they were surrendering to. However, AA doesn’t work for everyone: AA says 33 per cent of participants are still abstinent after a decade, while other reports suggest only 5 to 10 per cent stay sober.
Near-death experiences
Finally, the third most common type of spontaneous spiritual experience is the near-death experience. I had one of these myself, back in 2001, when I’d been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for five years, following a terrifying trip on LSD when I was 18. For 5 awful years, I had been beset by panic attacks, mood swings, depression and social phobia, which made me deeply ashamed and crippled my ability to connect to others. I felt dissociated, a stranger to myself, and had no idea if I would ever get better.
My family and I were on our annual skiing holiday in Norway, where my great-great-grandfather had built a hut in the woods. On the first morning, we decided to go down the black slope on the mountain opposite our hut. At the steepest part of the slope, I crashed through the fence on the side of the mountain, fell 30 feet or so, broke my femur and back, and knocked myself unconscious. I woke up and was bathed in a warm white light. It felt like the white light was conscious, that it was a separate being that loved me, but also that it was the deepest part of my nature, and of all our natures. It was incredibly peaceful to rest in the unconditional love of this white light, like coming home after long wandering. I felt released from all the anxiety and fear I had been carrying around for the last five years – the fear that my brain was broken and I was destined to be miserable, the need to prove myself to others. It seemed to me that there is something within us far bigger than the ego, and this ‘something’ – this luminous loving-wisdom – can never be entirely lost, not even in death. I still don’t know what it was exactly that I encountered – whether it was my soul, or God, or just a bang on the head. But I do know that this brief experience was fundamental to my recovery from PTSD. It gave me the insight that what was causing my suffering was not burned-out neural transmitters but my own beliefs, which I could change. I felt rejuvenated, reconnected to my deepest self, able to open up and trust other people. I never told anyone what had happened, because it was so beyond my normal frame of reference. But I’ve always felt grateful to whatever it was that I encountered, and it permanently changed my attitude to death.
The scientific study of near-death experience (NDE) began in the late-nineteenth century, and took off in the 1970s with the publication of scientist Raymond Moody’s bestseller, Life After Life. NDE research is now a well-established academic field, with several research teams around the world.10 Thanks to better cardiac resuscitation methods, more and more people survive cardiac arrests, and roughly five per cent of survivors report some sort of NDE. In a few cases, survivors have out-of-body experiences during surgery and are able to report many details of the operating procedure. People often report quite similar NDEs, and researchers have built up a model of typical features: an NDE is rated ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’ according to how many of these features it has (my own NDE rates a shallow four, rather gallingly). The typical characteristics include:
• an out-of-body experience, seeing the body left behind
• moving through darkness, often described as a tunnel
• going into a light
• meeting deceased relatives
• an encounter with a ‘being of light’ often identified as God, accompanied by feelings of peace, joy, bliss
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