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.
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.
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