An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

11.
Spiritual and Mystical Experiences of 
Well-Known People
Apart from the founders of the traditions, there have always been people 
with a deep sense of the spiritual, whose influence has been enduring. 
Many have gained followers of their own. A wide range of people has 
been chosen to reflect the different ways in which spirituality is expressed. 
Plato, St Paul and C. G. Jung still have an impact on the way we think 
today. The life of Mother Teresa is an extraordinary testament to her reli-
gious faith. There have been inspiring leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi 
and the Dalai Lama. William Wilberforce and Francis Younghusband 
changed the world around them. Some people lead inspirational lives of 
courage, as they face down political opposition, as did Dietrich Bonhoeffer 
and Nelson Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi continues to do today. Two 
remarkable women kept company with the dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross 
and Cicely Saunders, while Chad Varah’s experience of a funeral triggered 
his life’s work. Less likely candidates are a couple of rock stars, but Yusuf 
Islam and Eric Clapton have extraordinary stories to tell.
Plato (427–347 BCE)
There is a saying that the whole of Western philosophy is but footnotes to 
Plato. His influence is such that although not primarily a religious thinker, 
he must be included in any study of religious thought. He left the first 
written records of the classical philosophy of Ancient Greece. Plato was a 
pupil of Socrates (470–399 BCE) whose life, death and ideas, he recounted. 
There is no record that Socrates himself ever wrote anything, as his 
method of enquiry was one of dialogue. He challenged the Athenians to 
question their beliefs and knowledge of basic concepts, which resulted in 
his being considered subversive. Eventually he was tried, convicted and 
sentenced to death. Plato described the death of Socrates in the 
Phaedo
, 
in an account which shows the calm with which Socrates drank poison, 
in graphic confirmation of his belief in the immortality of the soul.

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Plato began his own work by recounting the thought of Socrates, but 
soon developed his own ideas. In 
The Republic
Plato tells the story of the 
cave to illustrate just how little we really understand through the use of 
our senses. The reference to a guardian in the passage, is to someone who, 
in an ideal state, would be in a position of authority.
[T]hose who are destitute of philosophy may be compared to prisoners 
in a cave, who are only able to look in one direction because they are 
bound, and who have a fire behind them and a wall in front. Between 
them and the wall is nothing; all they see are shadows of themselves, 
and of objects behind them, cast on the wall by the light of the fire. 
Inevitably they regard these shadows as real, and have no notion of the 
objects to which they are due. At last some man succeeds in escaping 
from the cave to the light of the sun; for the first time he sees real 
things, and becomes aware that he has hitherto been deceived by shad-
ows. If he is the sort of philosopher who is fit to become a guardian, he 
will feel it his duty to those who were formerly his fellow-prisoners to 
go down again into the cave, instruct them as to the truth, and show 
them the way up. But he will have difficulty in persuading them, 
because, coming out of the sunlight, he will see shadows less clearly 
than they do, and will seem to them stupider than before his escape.
185
Plato drew a distinction between the world around us, perceived with 
the senses, and the realm of eternal Forms or Ideas. We might see some-
thing beautiful on earth, but it would be transient and imperfect, merely 
a reflection of an eternal Idea of beauty beyond time and space. He con-
sidered that the world which the senses revealed was not the real world, 
which he contrasted with the eternal world of the immortal soul.
This is an extract of a dialogue between Socrates, shortly before he was 
to drink the poison, and Cebes in the 
Phaedo
:
‘And did we not say earlier that when the soul uses the aid of the body 
for any investigation, through the instrument of sight or hearing or any 
other sense – for investigation through the body means through the 
senses – she is torn away by the body into the region of constant fluc-
tuation, and she herself wanders about like a drunken man, because of 
her contact with things in similar confusion?’
‘Certainly’
‘But when she pursues her inquiries by herself, she goes to the region 
of the pure, the eternal and immortal and ever-unchanging, and being 
akin thereto she ever dwells in it, when she is by herself and it is possi-
ble for her to do so: and she has ceased from her wanderings and 

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remains ever constant and changeless with the unchanging, because of 
her contact with things similarly immutable: and this condition of hers 
is called wisdom, is it not?’
‘After death’,
‘. . . the soul, the unseen, which departs to a place resembling itself, 
pure and noble and invisible, to Hades in the true sense of the word 
[meaning “unseen”] to dwell with a God good and wise – whither, if 
God so will, my soul must shortly depart – can it ever be that with such 
a nature and origin she is straightway dissipated and destroyed when 
once she leaves the body, as most men tell us?’
186
Plato recounted a NDE in the tenth book of 
The Republic
. It is 
the story of Er, who was thought to have been killed in battle and was 
put onto the funeral pyre. He awoke and told of his journey into the 
afterlife, recalling a judgement, after which the righteous went to the right 
and upwards to heaven, but the unjust went to the left and downwards. 
He explained that reincarnating souls drank of the River of Forgetfulness. 
However, he was not allowed to drink, but was to remember and 
return to earth as a messenger, in order to tell people of this other world. 
Er also recounted a vision of the cosmic axis of the universe seen as a 
column of light.
These ideas, of an eternal realm of the soul and the impermanence of 
earthly things drew Plato towards a spiritual attitude to life, a focus on 
what is beyond the everyday. As the New Testament was written in 
Greek, many of Plato’s ideas were absorbed into Christianity through the 
early thinkers. Later, Plotinus (204–269) drew on those ideas for a mysti-
cal Neo-Platonism which in turn influenced St Augustine (354–430) and 
St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).