An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

The Religious Experience Research Centre
Although surveys and accounts of religious experiences had been under-
taken in the USA by Edwin Starbuck and William James, in the United 
Kingdom it was Alister Hardy, a professor of marine biology, who first 
attempted to elicit a response on the subject of spiritual experience from 
the general public. After failing to get a satisfactory response from the 
religious press, where he originally imagined he would make contact with 
people aware of such experiences, Alister Hardy repeated the exercise in 
the secular press. In 1969 he gave an interview in 
The Guardian 
describ-
ing the work he was doing on spiritual experience based on accounts of 
spiritual experiences collected by a press agency. He broadened his appeal 
across the spectrum from 
The Times
to the 
Daily Mail. 
In
 The Observer 
he used an account by Beatrice Webb describing her ‘apprehension of a 
power or purpose outside herself’ which led her to ‘a religious interpreta-
tion of the universe’. This was followed by this statement:
Professor Hardy proposes, if readers will kindly cooperate, to study 
and compare as many personal records of such experiences as possible. 
He invites all who have been conscious of, and perhaps influenced by, 
some such power, whether they call it the power of God or not, to 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
232
To his astonishment, he then received over a thousand accounts of 
spiritual experiences from a wide range of age groups. He was then able 
to begin his research by building up data in accordance with the scientific 
principles of the time, in order to formulate a natural history of the human 
experience of the spiritual. In order to facilitate this work, he set up the 
Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College, Oxford in 
1969. He began by recording and classifying the data into 92 different 
categories. Since those days many studies have been undertaken using 
the data.
Hardy thought of humans as spiritual animals, and spiritual experi-
ence as a natural phenomenon. He found that many quite ordinary, 
unreligious people had had extraordinary experiences of this greater 
power. He also found that many were not church-goers before or after 
their experiences, but had nonetheless been transformed. In 
The Spiritual 
Nature of Man
he traces his own career and thinking leading up to the 
setting up of the unit. He then offers a wide range of different spiritual 
experiences and draws some conclusions. Apart from building up 
academic knowledge, Hardy felt that he was pointing the way towards 
an experimental faith, encouraging people to try, sincerely, something 
like,
God, if there is a God, help me to find you, and having found you, 
help me to have the strength and courage to do what I feel to be 
Thy will.Hardy admits that this is child-like, but maintains that the spiritual nature 
of man is not intellectual. It is more fundamental. The material he 
gathered showed that spiritual experience is widespread in the United 
Kingdom and Hardy wanted to show that it was universal, as Huxley 
described in the 
Perennial Philosophy.
He further expounded his vision in 
the Gifford Lectures, the first series published as 
The Living Stream
and 
the second as 
The Divine Flame
.
Today, the renamed Religious Experience Research Centre is located in 
The University of Wales, Lampeter. The archive now holds over 6,000 
accounts of spiritual experiences which have been computerised for 
easy access to researchers. The Alister Hardy Society, which supports the 
research and provides a forum for those interested in the subject to explore 
religious experience and contemporary spirituality, has well over 400 
members and holds an annual Open Day and an annual conference. 
Groups in different parts of the United Kingdom hold meetings through-
out the year to listen to speakers and to discuss spiritual experiences and 
their implications in various fields.

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Spiritual Experience Research
233
From Sir Alister Hardy onwards, the centre’s directors have furthered 
the research. These are some of their publications. Hardy published 
the first summary of the research in 
The Spiritual Nature of Man
. 
Edward Robinson, who succeeded Sir Alister as Director of the RERU (as 
it was known then) published the first study of the children’s experiences 
drawn from the accounts in the archive collected by Hardy, in 
The 
Original Vision.
He later wrote 
This Time Bound Ladder
and 
Living the 
Questions
.
David Hay undertook various surveys of people’s religious experiences, 
published in 
Exploring Inner Space
followed by 
Religious Experience 
Today
and later with Rebecca Nye, focused on childhood in 
The Spirit of 
the Child
. His most recent works are 
Something There, the Biology of the 
Human Spirit
and 
Why Spirituality is Difficult for Westerners.
Peggy Morgan, Director during 1996–2002, wrote and launched a 
distance learning MA Unit on Religious Experience. With Clive A. Law-
ton, she edited 
Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions
and with Owen 
Cole has written a sympathetic and comprehensive study of 
Six Religions 
in the Twenty-First Century
: Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, 
Islam and Sikhism.
Current director Paul Badham discussed NDEs in his book (with Linda 
Badham) 
Immortality or Extinction?
and in his occasional paper 
Religious and Near-Death Experiences in Relation to Belief in a Future 
Life.
His book 
The Contemporary Challenge of Modernist Theology 
has 
a chapter devoted to Modern Religious Experiencing. With another direc-
tor Xinzhong Yao, he has recently published 
Religious Experience in 
Contemporary China
.
Wendy Dossett is also a director of the RERC, as well as Secretary of 
the Shap Working Party for World Religions in Education and Director of 
the MA in Religious Experience. She has written widely for A level stu-
dents in Buddhism, Psychology of Religion and Religious Experience. Her 
helpful guide for A Level students entitled 
Religious Experience
was pub-
lished in 2006. She has also published research in Japanese Pure Land 
Buddhism, and in Religious Education.
Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin’s 
Seeing the Invisible
217
 brings 
together a wide-ranging selection of spiritual experiences from the archives 
of the Religious Experience Research Centre.