An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Research Worldwide
In China, Turkey and India, research has begun. The Hardy Question, 
Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, 
whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday 
self?
continues to be used, but is often rephrased to accommodate different 
cultural understandings. The terminology used in the questionnaires 
reflects the religious understanding of the country to be studied. So far 
results have been obtained from China and Turkey and there are plans to 
widen the research to include Japan, Brazil and the USA.

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Spiritual Experience Research
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China
The RERC and the Centre for Chinese Studies at the University of Wales, 
Lampeter with the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford received 
a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to undertake research in 
China. This vast land has been officially atheist since 1949 but since 1980, 
religion has once again been tolerated. The project involved four years 
work, beginning in 2004 and was undertaken by Professor Xinzhong Yao 
and Professor Paul Badham. The survey was of the Han Chinese and with 
the help of 110 Chinese researchers they collected 3,196 questionnaires, 
each 24 pages long, on many aspects of Chinese religious experience and 
belief, as well as conducting in-depth interviews. The equivalent of the 
Hardy Question was posed, followed by a list of suggestions, such as the 
power of the Lord of Heaven, Dao, Qi or Buddha.
Some people have experienced that they were once and/or are fre-
quently influenced by a kind of power that ordinary people cannot 
control and explain clearly. Have you ever had such an experience?
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Although China has a history which includes three major traditions, 
Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, the Chinese do not follow one 
spiritual path to the exclusion of others, but are quite happy to pray to 
different gods or take part in various rituals according to the situation. 
The traditions have become so intertwined that altars to representatives 
of all three at once are not at all uncommon.
When initially asked if they were religious, only about 8% thought so. 
However, the researchers found an astonishing response to the question 
about experiencing the influence or control of spiritual powers. 46.2% 
respondents claim to have experienced the God of fortune, 25.7% the 
Will of heaven, 21.2% their ancestors, 18.2% the Buddha; 6.1% have 
experiences of the Christian God, 5% had encountered spirits or ghosts, 
and 4.2% the Dao or Qi and 0.4% others. If one were simply to add these 
up one would get the impossible figure of 127% but this was because 
most Chinese have had had experience of more than one ‘spiritual power’. 
In another question, they were asked to say which of these powers they 
had experienced most deeply or most often. 55.9% claimed to have expe-
rienced one or other spiritual power, and this figure accords closely with 
the response in China to the Hardy question about experiencing ‘a power 
or presence different from everyday life’. This led to a result of 56.7%. 
The answers to these three questions taken together are sufficiently 
consistent to be taken as a reliable report of experiences people had had.

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
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Overall the results from China indicate levels of spiritual experience very 
much in line with that in the West. Despite suppression, religion had not 
died out and the basic human response to another dimension had survived.
Turkey
A predominantly Muslim country, Turkey has been governed by a secular 
regime for about a century. In 2006–2007 Professor Dr Cafer Sadik Yaran 
of Istanbul University undertook a national survey of Muslim religious 
experience in Turkey, travelling through all of the seven regions from East 
to the West and interviewing people from various backgrounds based on 
random sampling. He collected 1,236 valid questionnaires which include 
36 questions and a space for writing the most exceptional experience the