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:
Vauxhall 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