An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

pile
of angry questions.
Why wasn’t my life working? What would it 
take
to get it to work? 
Why could I not find happiness in relationships? . . . 
What had I done 
to deserve a life of such continuing
struggle?
 
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When he had finished, Walsch found himself unable to toss his pen 
aside and was compelled to keep writing, and answers to his questions 
and frustrations seemed to come to him. He felt as if he were taking dicta-
tion and continued for some years until he had a series of 
Conversations 
with God
eventually leading him to 
Communion with
God
.
Nature
The oral traditions are particularly sensitive to nature, with a focus on 
living in harmony with the earth and its energies. Black Elk (1863–1950) 
a Wichasha Wakau or Holy Man of the Oglala Lakota Oyate (Oglala 
Sioux Tribe) of North America describes this. 
Peace comes to the souls of men when they realise their relationship, 
their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they 
realise that at the centre of the universe dwells Wakan Tanka, and that 
this centre is really everywhere, it is within each of us.
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The eighteenth-century Romantic poets and artists were particularly 
sensitive to the natural world and reflected nature in all its moods in their 

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work. This is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) author of Le Contrat 
Social (The Social Contract),
When evening drew near, I would go down from the peaks of the Isle 
and willingly sit by the lake on the shore, in some hidden retreat; there, 
the lapping of the waves and the agitation of the water would steady 
my senses and drive away any restlessness from my soul, plunging it 
into a delightful reverie during which night would often catch me by 
surprise, without my noticing it. The ebb and flow of the water, its 
continuous and at times surging sound would unceasingly strike my 
eyes and ears and replace the internal stirrings which the reverie was 
subdueing inside me, and these were enough to make me revel in my 
existence without taking the trouble to think. 
. . .
What does one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing outside one’s self, 
nothing but one’s self and one’s own being; as long as this state lasts, 
one feels self-sufficient, like God.
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Artists are often particularly moved by nature, which leads them to a 
spiritual response,
Sir William Rothenstein wrote in his recollections, 
Men and Memories
, 
that ‘one’s very being seems to be absorbed in the fields, trees and 
the walls one is striving to paint’ and believed the experience of paint-
ing out of doors gave him insight into the poetry of the great mystics, 
European and Eastern. ‘At rare moments while painting,’ he says, 
‘I have felt myself caught, as it were, in a kind of cosmic rhythm; but 
such experiences are usually all too brief.’ Ben Nicholson is, perhaps 
saying the same thing more laconically when he is quoted in a mono-
graph on his work as remarking, ‘As I see it, painting and religious 
experience are the same thing.’
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The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) 
expresses the awesome, yet melancholy beauty of nature in his paintings. 
His figures usually have their backs to the viewer, and with them we gaze 
into the distance to the transcendent beyond. He said an artist needed to 
capture the natural scene as well as an inner response,
. . . pure will . . . to represent Nature simply, nobly and greatly, as she 
truly is, if one has a mind, disposition and feeling to recognize and 
understand her.

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The painter should not paint merely what he sees in front of him 
but also what he sees within him. If he sees nothing within himself, 
however, then he should refrain from painting what he sees in front 
of him.
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People have always felt an affinity with nature, yet aware of something 
‘other’ within it. Here are two accounts sent to Alister Hardy,
As a child in the country, I wandered by myself sometimes but was 
rather afraid when I became conscious of solitude and silence. I became 
increasingly aware of a Presence which I associated with nature around 
me. In my adolescence I gave It the name ‘God’, and aimed at being 
alone to commune with It.
Natural beauty and vastness has always aroused an attitude of 
worship in me, at times in spite of myself. The words of Psalm 8 have 
often been in my mind: ‘When I consider the heavens, the work of thy 
fingers, the moon and stars which thou hast ordained, what is man 
that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest 
him?’ This attitude persists and is enhanced by the discoveries of the 
astronauts. [603]
Since adolescence, on many occasions, I have experienced the 
presence of God in nature. As far as I can recall this has usually been 
in times of fine weather and in pleasant surroundings, but not always. 
Frequently, as the feeling first appears, I notice a gentle breeze passing 
across my forehead. In fact as I wrote this I had the very same experi-
ence, and I take it as confirmation that allowing the record of the 
experience out of my hands is alright. The experiences of God in nature 
come unasked and cannot be predicted. [from 003519]
Music
Glorious music is often associated with spirituality as it is beyond words. 
At a recent conference on mysticism, many uplifting lectures took place, 
but the event most delegates remembered as most closely reflecting the 
subject, was a violin recital of Bach’s Partita in D Minor on a solo violin, 
performed in a beautiful country village church. These two experiences 
express a similar feeling.
When I went to performance of Sir John Tavener’s Beautiful Names in 
Westminster Cathedral last year, I had an experience that I regard as 

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bliss. The setting of the piece in the cathedral, the subject of the piece 
(the 99 names of Allah in Islam) and the gongs and bells in particular 
of Sir John’s orchestration all blended together so that these details no 
longer existed and the whole was fused so that I was caught up in the 
most amazing experience of being held and profoundly loved.
An experience similar to this was told to me by a student following 
her participation in the first performance of the piece that Sir John 
wrote for the Winchester University choir – Marienhymne (2004).
 
She 
was singing in the echo choir in Winchester cathedral – out of sight of 
the other choir and the audience – in the retro-choir which has all the 
icons and many candles – the light is dim. She said ‘I am a pagan and 
my goddess is Kali. In that piece, Kali took me in her arms and I never 
want her to let me go.’
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Music seems to reflect a deeper awareness of the universe and some 
people are particularly sensitive to this.
After conducting a concert with a large number of forces the music 
appears to linger in the universe for a long time afterwards – several 
hours. It happened first a long time ago when I conducted a perfor-
mance of Handel’s Messiah but has been repeated many times since. 
It is as if I hear the music of the universe, numerous angel choirs joining 
with the entire cosmos to make music. It is intensely uplifting and 
requires no effort on my part. It is as if the whole world is singing. When 
I am driving I often open the car windows to hear it more clearly.
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Sound
Drums are sometimes used in shamanic journeying to carry the experi-
ence along.
I regularly do shamanic drumming trips using the drum beat to travel 
on. These always produce insightful experiences. One experience will 
give you a flavour of them. I pass through a hole between the roots of 
a tree and down a series of tunnels under the earth which I associate 
with burrowing creatures such as badgers and rabbits. Sometimes 
I pass small animals huddled in corners on the way. In the end I come 
out into a bleakish desert place – a flat plain surrounded by tall 
snow-capped mountains. Into this landscape a unicorn appears – an 
amazingly beautiful creature – light blue with a glistening horn and a 
flowing mane. He asks me to ride on his back and I get the most 

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amazing pertinence of strength flowing through my whole being and it 
is this strength that I take back when I return to the ‘ordinary world’ 
by the way of the dark underground tunnels and the tree root.
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Gongs can also be powerful, as this experience attests.
It resulted from an incident that happened during a music-making 
course, at which some tam-tams (a type of large gong) were used. Some 
of the participants, impressed by the quality and depth of sound 
created using the tam-tams, asked for the musician who was playing 
them to ‘show us what they can really do’, whereupon the musician 
began to build up the sound, layer upon layer, until the volume was so 
loud and the sound waves so dense that it completely took my breath 
away. I was standing probably 6 feet away at the time, and the sound 
waves hit me with the impact of a solid object, like a train hurtling 
towards me at 100mph. I couldn’t move; I was rooted to the spot like 
a rabbit in the headlights of a car. Afterwards, my body trembled like 
a leaf for about an hour and I had the most awful sense that something 
dreadful had happened to me. 
As the days passed, I gradually forgot about what occurred until one 
evening, about a week later, when I attended another music event. As I 
was listening to the music, my hearing suddenly became acutely sensi-
tive and I had to run out of the hall as I couldn’t stand the volume. This 
was the start of the delayed shock reaction that I was to suffer from for 
at least the next 5 years as it worked its way through my system and 
which soon catapulted me into my Near Death Experience. 
Initially and for a few weeks after, not just my hearing, but all my 
senses became acutely hyper-sensitised. I couldn’t eat (the plainest of 
rice tasted too strong), I couldn’t bear the smell of food (not even cold 
food), I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t bear any variation of light, I couldn’t 
bear to be touched, I felt nauseous and dizzy all the time, my heart was 
constantly racing at two or three times its normal pace on account of 
the flood of adrenaline released into my system and I fell into a state of 
continual, abject terror – not of, or about, anything specific but simply 
as a physiological reaction to this physical event. My quality of life 
physically seemed unendurable, and psychologically, it was hell – 
I desperately longed to feel better, or to be out of my body so as not to 
suffer, but there was nothing I could do about it and I couldn’t 
run away from it. Had I been courageous enough, I would have com-
mitted suicide many times over but, ironically, I was too scared to take 
this action in case I hurt myself further! I experienced a continual 
state of black despair and negativity so intense, and for so long, that 

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I began to feel that I was carrying the sins of the world on my shoulders 
and that I was the unwilling, innocent conduit for the purging process. 
Maybe that’s aggrandizing my role, perhaps I’m suffering delusions 
of grandeur, but it genuinely felt like I was symbolically somehow 
going through an ‘Archtypal’ human experience rather than something 
personal. 
This triggered the following extraordinary experience of being some-
how ‘dead’.
During one of the nights when I couldn’t sleep, I was lying in bed, 
experiencing what felt to me like a constant bombardment of electrical 
shocks shooting through my body from head to foot, as if I were 
plugged into an electrical socket and being mildly electrocuted. I was 
thinking how unbearable this sensation of ‘fizzing’ was, when I sud-
denly became aware that I had stopped breathing and, in fact, had not 
been breathing for a while. With this realisation came a reassuring 
sense that this was absolutely fine, that this was a state with which 
I was, in fact, far more familiar and ‘at home’ than when I was breath-
ing – almost as if the living state was a temporary deviation from the 
norm. In an instant I both realised and accepted, quite matter-of-factly 
and with complete equanimity, that I was dead and no longer had a 
body. I had become simple awareness, with no form, and nothing 
around me, just a sort of grey nothingness. No sooner did this revela-
tion occur (so it seemed) than I was once more back in my breathing 
body, shocked by this new experience. In hindsight, regardless of how 
it might be interpreted by others, for me it felt like an experience which 
had a quality of ‘true reality’ about it, as if – however briefly – I had 
instantaneously returned to my ‘eternal form’.
During another night of ‘fizzing’, I experienced another interesting 
change of perspective on life. From out of nowhere, it seemed, I began 
asking myself ‘Who am I?’ I have no idea why I posed myself this 
question (other than as a distraction to the ‘fizzing’, but then, any num-
ber of more prosaic questions could have served just as well). 
I answered myself with my first name – but immediately shook my 
head. The answer was preposterous, ridiculous! So obviously Not True! 
So I asked again ‘Who am I?’ and answered myself by saying ‘woman’. 
That answer seemed almost equally absurd. I posed the question a 
third time and answered with the word ‘human’ this time. It felt as 
though I was having a conversation with a part of myself that was 
patiently sighing ‘try again – you’re just not getting it, are you?’ So, 
once more I asked ‘Who am I?’ and this time I finally answered to my 
own satisfaction – ‘I Am’. I suddenly felt as though I had shot through 

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a telescope from one end to the other, from the microscopic end to the 
macroscopic end, and briefly experienced the world from the macro-
scopic end, whilst being aware that both exist simultaneously. 
Since that time, I have read books on spirituality and human con-
sciousness etc and have come across the ‘I Am’ phrase to denote the 
‘Godly’ or ‘Divine’ aspect of ourselves many times, but at the time of 
my own experience, I had had no prior knowledge or experience of 
this ‘Am-ness’ nor had come across those words in such a context. . . . 
[100054]
Whether pleasant or distressing, non-religious triggers have been shown 
to have far-reaching spiritual effects. It is particularly noteworthy that it 
seems to be at times of deepest despair that hope is given.

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