Essay
Culture
Weirdness
9 min read

The secret world of spiritual experiences

Amid prevailing cultural suspicions towards religion, exploring spiritual experiences reveals their profound significance to individuals and civilizations. Dan Kim calls for an open-minded investigation into the nature of reality.

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

Spiritual Experiences in London
Image generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney

In the spring of 1945, Psychologist Genevieve Foster, a chartered member of the New York Analytical Psychology Club, awoke from a nap and experienced a visionary experience where she saw a luminous figure of a human. This shining person flooded the entire room with dazzling light. There were no words or names between Foster and this figure except the experience of “an interchange, a flood, flowing both ways, of love”.  

She had no idea what was happening to her.  

She was a psychologist, and fully committed to the scientific method. Religious experiences were easily explained away as hallucinations or weird brain hiccups. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that this was real! This vision lasted for five days. Five days. Afterwards, she tried to talk to her husband and one colleague about the experience. Both became very alarmed and dissuaded her from talking about it any further or even entertaining the possibility that this experience could have been real.  

It was only in 1985 that she began to speak publicly about it. She had kept what she describes as, “the most important thing that has ever happened to me”, a shameful secret for 40 years.  

These experiences are often the most important moments of a person’s life and can even form the foundations of entire cultures and civilisations. 

When it comes to unexplainable spiritual experiences, we are advised by sensible Western society to sweep them under the rug immediately and never talk about them. Except maybe at the pub after a pint or ten. The modern world has been taking part in the most elaborate mass self-censorship campaign to date.  

In the 1990s, a Swedish study interviewed 50 people who had lost spouses in the previous year. They were asked whether they had experienced any form of contact with their dead partner. Only one person, a spiritualist, enthusiastically admitted she had. However, when the interviewer informed them that this experience was a common part of the grieving process, that one became 25. That’s an astronomical leap from two per cent to 50 per cent of respondents as soon as they were given permission to speak out. Clearly, they were so fearful of being thrown into the loony bin. Dale Allison points out this widespread self-censorship in his 2022 book Encountering Mystery: Religious Experiences in a Secular Age where he notes that this phenomenon means that these experiences go under-reported, under-researched, and under-understood by most people in the West today.  

Spiritual experiences are a universal part of human life, taking various forms such as ecstatic bliss, out-of-body visions, awe-inspiring mystical unity, death-bed visions, near-death experiences, intense feelings of love, and encounters with sublime beauty. Indeed, they are often described as religious experiences. These encounters are often pivotal moments in a person's life, sometimes laying the foundation for entire cultures and civilizations. Historical accounts, including Moses’ encounter with the Burning Bush, Siddhartha Gautama's transcendent enlightenment, and Paul's Damascus Road vision, testify to the profound significance of these experiences as sources of spiritual knowledge and meaning. This is just as true today. I’m reminded of the famous atheist A.J. Ayer who “saw a divine being” during a near-death experience after which he said:  

“I am afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions”.  

I certainly don’t think Ayer was the gullible type. 

You’d be better off being a conspiracy theorist than a sincere modern mystic. 

Yet, despite their profound importance, there has been a concerted cultural campaign to stigmatise, dismiss and reduce these experiences to purely internal, psychological events. Any claim that these experiences might, in any way, be real has been ridiculed and consigned to Glastonbury-like New Age festivals and niche subcultures that use words like ‘astral projection’. You’d be better off being a conspiracy theorist than a sincere modern mystic.  

We’ve created the societal conditions where the most important events of people’s lives are hidden like dirty little secrets by insisting on a tame, clinically sanitised, spiritually inert universe.  

However, it seems as though in the 21st Century, the tide is turning. Allison notes a remarkable statistic from Pew Research America. In 1962, only 22 per cent of pollsters said that they had had what they would describe as a religious experience. In 2009, that number was up to 49 per cent. Now, I really don’t think this is because there’s been an increase in divine intervention. That would be weird! Instead, the statistic is cultural evidence that shows that the zeitgeist is changing and is denting the widespread self-censorship. 

It is only relatively recently that we’ve started to catalogue and analyse religious experiences from around the world. The most extensive archive, The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, was only founded in 1969 and has, to date, collected 6,000 first-hand spiritual experiences which is ever-increasing. We’ve only just begun to tap into this rich data let alone archive even a fraction of these experiences.  

How reliable are these first-hand accounts, you might ask? Couldn’t you take each individual case and find materialist explanations for every one of them? Perhaps, but as William James wrote over 100 years ago, “Weak sticks make strong bundles”. It appears people of all ages, cultures, and creeds experience an ‘unseen realm’ and sincerely believe them to be genuine and true. These experiences have a material impact on their lives and even on whole civilisations. So, we should at the very least be careful in suggesting that humans have been experiencing mass corporate delusions from the dawn of time itself. In fact, that would be a pretty bleak conclusion with even bleaker implications. As Allison puts it, if all spiritual experiences turn out to be purely psychological illusions:  

“We would be forced to conclude that a widespread, cross-cultural human experience, one that commonly moves people to use the word ‘God’ and regularly prods them to become more loving and less selfish, an experience that far more often than not feels wholly real and indeed self-authenticating, and experience than even children of two or three years old have reported is, at bottom, illusory.” 

This wouldn’t just affect how we view spiritual experiences but every experience that we have. If our experience of the world is so unreliable, then how are we to trust even our rational minds and the conclusions we come to? How can we trust our vision and our sense of touch? So, the stakes are pretty high about what we make of all this.  

Behind the question of spiritual experiences is the more profound question about the nature of reality itself. Is there a spiritual realm? Do we have souls? Can there be a God or gods? These questions are so critically important that we shouldn’t just take on cultural assumptions wholesale.  

It is only in the last 30 years that we’ve discovered that 95% of our universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, which are just sci-fi-sounding names given to the totally invisible, unmeasurable, unobservable ‘stuff’ that govern the structure of the universe. If we were to somehow map the entire universe with the most advanced technologies from the smallest atom to the largest galactic superstructures, we would still only have access to 5% of the universe. That’s staggering! Spiritual experiences and dark matter have that in common. While we can’t see dark matter with any of our scientific instruments, we can see their effects on the visible universe like their gravitational impact on the universe, and the expansion of the universe. That’s how we can speculate about its existence.  

In a similar way, spiritual experiences compose a significant chunk of the mystery that is the human experience, and we can see their effects on people and on human cultures. And the crucial question becomes, what causes them? Is it a pure psychological illusion, or is there something real but unobservable causing them? Materialism has never been ‘proved’ but it has been culturally assumed, and in fairness, not without some good reason. Scientific instruments and discoveries have shown that many things that were once considered supernatural or spiritual are in fact explainable by totally natural causes. A healthy scepticism is always welcome, but somewhere along the line, a huge leap was made that said:  

‘Because we can attribute some spiritual events to natural causes, we can assume that all of reality consists of natural causes only’.  

That’s a dogmatic statement, not an evidential one. That’s a bit like insisting that only 5% of the universe really exists because it’s the only 5% we can accurately measure. You might still not be convinced, but my call is simply for open-mindedness. Whether or not there is a spiritual dimension to reality is by no means a closed case. It begs continual investigation and genuine wrestling.  

I could hear the waves of the sea, but it was as if I was one with it; the stars above me seemed to shine with a supernatural brightness. 

When I was 15 years old, I had my first spiritual experience. I was sitting on a beach, late one night, with three friends talking about life, faith, and meaning. (Yes, 15-year-old boys do have moments of sincerity…) At some point, one of them suggested that we try praying to God and see what happens. We were all vaguely Christians. We said some faltering teenage prayers asking God to turn up. At In that moment, I felt an awesome, physical weight on my shoulders. It wasn’t painful or scary, but it was overwhelming. There was a tender warmth and a sense of presence; an infinite love that accompanied the weight. I could hear the waves of the sea, but it was as if I was one with it; the stars above me seemed to shine with a supernatural brightness. Words can’t describe the experience except for “I met God”. What was striking was that we all had this similar experience together.  

That experience lasted maybe two minutes, but those two minutes shifted the trajectory of my life. I am now a Christian with all the bells and whistles like miracles, resurrection, afterlife... And look, I’m not gullible. Maybe I was primed, perhaps it was placebo wish-fulfilment, maybe it was something in the water or just a run-of-the-mill hallucination. Despite this, I am fully and rationally convinced that my experience was real; not just in a subjective in-my-head reality, but a genuine something-outside-the-material-realm-met-me kind of reality. So obviously, this is also a very personal question. The stakes are high. But it’s not just for me but for many, if not most, people in our lives.  

If it turns out that only a fraction of spiritual experiences are real... the universe becomes wilder and infinitely more exciting and untamed than the 20th Century would have us believe 

I can tell you now that I can probably explain away most of the stories I have heard from friends and strangers about spiritual experiences to coincidence, enthusiasm, lack of sleep, and mushrooms.

But not all… and that’s crucial.

Even if 99 per cent of them are total illusions, that one per cent has the potential to change everything. If it turns out that only a fraction of spiritual experiences are real, that they are actually moments when a human being encounters something beyond the material world, everything changes. The universe becomes wilder and infinitely more exciting and untamed than the 20th Century would have us believe. No longer an inert mass of stardust, our world becomes ablaze with spiritual fire. Things that we find most valuable in human existence then start to have the potential to be real. Actually real. Love can be real. Beauty can be real. Our sense of self-worth and infinite dignity can be real. God can also be real which raises complicated emotions.  

Your spiritual experiences don’t make you crazy. They make you human. The question is, what are you going to do about it? You could ignore them and explain them away, continuing with the materialist dogma of today. That’s safe, but you could also risk missing out on the most important experiences and insights of your entire life. I often wonder how different Genevieve Foster’s life may have been had she been able to openly talk about and explore the implications of her experience. Or, you could pay attention to them and see where they lead. They don’t come often, and they don’t last very long but when they come, they are like unexpected gifts that have the potential to change your life forever. 

 

Article
Books
Culture
Education
Wisdom
5 min read

We need libraries: they expose our limitations

These physical monuments to our own ignorance instil knowledge and humility.
Children sit in a library listening to a story
Spellow library children's talk.
Children’s Commissioner for England.

On 19 July 2024, my wife, toddler, cat, and I moved back to our hometown of Liverpool. Ten days later, three children were killed and ten more were seriously injured following a mass stabbing at a children’s dance workshop in nearby Southport. 

In the aftermath, amid widespread misinformation about the killer’s background, riots erupted across the country. With unrest intensifying, on 3 August rioters set fire to Spellow Library, less than two miles away from our new home. The apparent reason for the fire? It contained Qur’ans. Imagine that: books in a library! (There’s an all-too-easy joke about far-right thugs not understanding what libraries are that I’ll try to resist making here.) 

Nothing the country witnessed in those riots matches the unspeakable horror that occurred within that dance studio in Southport. And yet, I found the library fire deeply unsettling. I hadn’t worked out why, until recently.  

I’m a theology lecturer and work from home a lot. I’m often listening to music while replying to emails, planning lectures, or marking essays. Recently, however, I’ve been in a musical rut. My usual stuff feels stale and nothing new catches my attention. I mostly use streaming services, and this week it hit me: the platform is the problem.  

Streaming platforms operate through search engines: I search for an artist, song, or album, and start listening. In other words, I have to know what I want to listen to before listening to it. Platforms might suggest new music, but this is invariably based on what I already like. It very rarely exposes me to anything outside my comfort zone.  

In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the mythical WMDs that served as the war’s McGuffin. His answer has gone down in political infamy:  

“there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.” 

When teaching students, I constantly stress the importance of ‘unknown unknowns’. Good education exposes us to things we don’t know that we don’t know. It gives us increasing awareness of our own ignorance. Streaming services greatly reduce the chances of finding music I don’t know that I don’t know. Instead, I listen to music I know I know, or music I know I don’t know.  

I used to love trawling through music shops, pouring over the vast sea of artists I hasn’t even heard of, imagining my favourite album was buried amid the reams of CD cases. It saddens me that I can’t remember the last time I did that. Music shops are physical monuments to my own ignorance. When I see all the artists, all the albums – even the genres! – I haven’t even heard of, I’m unavoidably confronted with my own ignorance.  

So, too, with libraries. How many times I’ve wandered the stacks of university libraries and thought “I didn’t even know there was a book about this topic!” when picking something off the shelves! And this is their value to students: they are physical monuments to their own ignorance. They instil a passion for knowledge, and a deeper sense of humility, as students are forced to grapple concretely with everything they don’t even know they don’t know

(Incidentally, this is what I’ll tell my wife next time I buy another book I invariably won’t read. I can already imagine her response: “But my love, we have plenty of physical monuments to your ignorance at home already.”) 

I found the destruction at Spellow Library so disquieting. It is a supremely, nihilistic act. It is to reject engaging with our ‘unknown unknowns.’ 

Like music streaming platforms, libraries are increasingly digital spaces. My primary experience of reading nowadays is to type something into a search bar. My reading – just like my music – is increasingly myopic; increasingly confined to the realm of ‘known unknowns’. But true humility is only fostered through engagement with the ‘unknown unknowns’ of our life. We need the physical monuments to our own ignorance. We ignore them – or, as the case may be, set fire to them – at our peril.  

There is a significant spiritual element to this, and this is why I found the destruction at Spellow Library so disquieting. It is a supremely, nihilistic act. It is to reject engaging with our ‘unknown unknowns’; a fearful unwillingness to be confronted by our own ignorance.  

In a famous graduation speech entitled “This is Water” writer David Foster Wallace encourages those present to think about the ‘water’ in which they swim. What is so ubiquitous in life that it goes unnoticed? We might call these ‘unknown knows’: things we simply take for granted. On a theological level, the physical nature of our existence is one such phenomena. That we exist somewhere and somewhen is not a given; both space and time are creatures, too.  

And this ought to make us reflect: why are we made to be physical if we might not have been? The Bible is clear that this physicality is a gift. So much so that God Himself chooses to dwell amongst us in physical form. The Christian story is that, in Jesus Christ, God becomes human. The Christian Gospels go to great pains to stress his physicality. He eats, He sleeps, He cries, He bleeds. He reads from physical scrolls when in the synagogue.  

That God-given physicality means I can surround myself with the depth and breadth of my own creaturely ignorance; with my ‘unknown unknowns’. To my shame, I don’t do this often enough, and my increasingly digital life makes this harder. I have become physically detached from my ‘unknown unknowns’.  

And so, now Spellow Library is reopen, I am going to make a concerted effort to visit and support society’s physical monuments to my creaturely ignorance. They may make me uncomfortable as I am overwhelmed by the extent of my limitations, but they may also just make me humbler. And that is the real gift of our God-given physicality.  

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.


If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?


Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.


Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief