One of a series of lectures given at St Brides Liverpool in 2010 and 2011. The list is here.

All over the world there are people who have an inner experience which convinces them wwdeath experiences and whether they provide additional evidence.

Religious experience

Here are some examples. They come from the Alister Hardy Archive.

As I sat thinking, looking at the beauty of the valley below, I felt as if the whole scene became luminous, I was aware of the tremendous intensity of colour – I felt intensely happy, for no reason at all. I suddenly felt at one with the very life force of creation, whatever that is. I felt part of it. I felt caught up in a tremendous theme of praise… the feeling of elation lasting for some time.

It was an absolutely still day, flooded with sunshine. In the garden everything was shining, breathless, as if waiting expectant. Quite suddenly I felt convinced of the existence of God; as if I had only to put out my hand to touch Him. And at the same time there came the intensest joy and indescribable longing, as if in exile, perhaps, for home. It seemed as if my heart were struggling to leap out of my body.

My experience occurred when I was a child between ten and eleven years of age. Each day I was drawn to stand at a bedroom window at the back of our family terraced house in Pont-y-moel. I looked out between the sidewalls of the house across a narrow valley to the lower mountain levels of Mynydd Maen, which then rose steadily towards Twm Barlwm. For a year I was compelled to stand and wait and watch.

On a day in March a column of luminous light appeared from one of the empty levels cut into the mountain which had been used for pigeon cots. It enclosed a figure, grew upwards and as it touched the clear blue sky disappeared, the waiting was over. I had no need to return to the window. I was not surprised at the ‘appearance’ but I was surprised that the intense need to go to the window had gone. This ‘appearance’ is as clear to me today as it was then, and I know that I experienced, in that moment, true reality. It is the single most important experience of my life.

From out of nowhere, it seemed, I began asking myself ‘Who am I?’ I have no idea why I posed myself this question… 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 a telescope from one end to the other, from the microscopic end to the macroscopic end, and briefly experienced the world from the macroscopic end, whilst being aware that both exist simultaneously.

Since that time, I have read books on spirituality and human consciousness 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.

A six-year-old boy from a Christian family which went to church twice a year, answering a researcher’s questions about his religious beliefs:

Well once I went um… in the night and I saw this bishopy kind of alien. I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘I am the Holy Spirit.’ I did think he was the Holy Spirit.

He then called out to his mother. He explained what had happened. His mother rejected his account, explaining that the Holy Spirit looks like a ball of fire. He accepted his mother’s authority but added ‘But I often felt the Holy Spirit in me’.

C S Lewis had a classic Evangelical conversion experience:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

George Bush is reported to have said ‘I am driven with a mission from God… “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan”. And I did… “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq”. And I did’.

It can work the other way, though less often. Here’s Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

And I thought and thought and thought. But I just didn’t have enough to go on, so I didn’t really come to any resolution. I was extremely doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn’t know enough about anything to have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the universe, and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I kept reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins’s books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of the Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

Research

Stories like these are very common. Nobody takes all of them at face value. The question is: why take any of them at face value?

The standard starting point for empirical studies of religious experience is William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. James said they have 4 features:

1. ineffability: they cannot be put into words.
2. noetic quality: something has been learned.
3. transiency: they do not last long.
4. passivity: they seem to happen to the person rather than being something the person does.

In 1969 Alister Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Centre, which now has an Archive at Lampeter University, holding 6000 accounts of religious experiences. The examples I’ve shown come from there.

Hardy collected people’s spiritual or religious experiences, asking what is known as ‘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?’

Since Hardy’s time there has been a growing amount of research. Surveys indicate that between a third and a half of British people claim to have had direct personal awareness of ‘a power or presence different from everyday life’. Much depends on exactly what question is asked, but the figure seems to be going up: a study by David Hay in 2001 found 76% of the British population claimed awareness of a transcendent reality. Some believe the rise may reflect a change in culture: perhaps more people feel able to admit that they had spiritual experiences without thereby identifying themselves with belief systems they do not hold.

Also in 2001 Olga Pupynin and Simon Brodbeck in London asked passers-by in Trafalgar Square: ‘Have you ever had an experience that you would describe as sacred, religious, spiritual, ecstatic, paranormal or mystical?’ 65% not only answered yes but were also willing to answer further questions. The following discussion showed that these had been important events in their lives, often life-changing events, and they were grateful for the opportunity to talk about them. The top three categories were ‘spiritual, religious and mystical’.

There has recently been large scale research in China, India and Turkey.

What to count

Language problems

These countries were chosen because their cultural backgrounds were very different. Findings so far seem roughly similar, but because of language differences it is impossible to be certain that one is comparing like with like.

False claims

There is also the problem of people claiming to have religious experiences when they really mean something much more ordinary. The main groups are people with mental illnesses and members of religious groups which encourage people to think they have had a religious experience. How do you distinguish the really authentic ones? In practice the main criterion is the one the major religions have traditionally used: has your religious experience made a noticeable difference to your lifestyle? If not, it wasn’t an authentic experience.

Types

Researchers find 4 main types of religious experience:

1. Distinctive way of experiencing aspects of the natural world, or the natural world as a whole.
2. Sense of presence – of God, or an angelic being, or of an ultimate supra-natural reality.
3. Religious visions and auditions, both inner and outer.
4. Sense of unity with God or with the Ultimate, as reported by mystics.

The term ‘religious experience’ implies that the experience reflects some kind of religious tradition. People who have these experiences often prefer to use the term ‘spiritual experience’ because it was nothing to do with any religion they know about. Researchers often use more neutral terms like transcendental experience, paranormal experience, peak experience and mystical experience.

Who has them?

All ages and cultures.
Religious and non-religious alike.
They are more prevalent among the better educated. Researchers who reject religious belief argue that this will be for evolutionary reasons.

What experiencers say about them

Usually but not always pleasant

Most but not all are life-enhancing and greatly treasured, and lead to increasing concern for other people. A few frighten people with a sense of the presence of evil.

Unlike everyday experience

Experiencers say they cannot be explained merely in terms of the everyday world. They usually explain it with reference to some kind of higher power like a divine being. Non-believers interpret them as part of the natural world but still consider them different in quality from ordinary experiences.

Reveal a different dimension

They say their experience has revealed another dimension different from ordinary reality or a deeper level of experience within reality.

More real than ordinary life

They say this other dimension is more real than ordinary life.

Analysis

The question is: do these experiences provide evidence that there is a divine being there? Any one experience is only weak evidence. What makes the case stack up is:

• large numbers of people have them;
• they themselves are convinced that they have experienced another reality;
• it leads to changes of lifestyle.

People who don’t believe there is another reality argue that all this may be true but it’s still just a bit of misinformation provided by the brain.

Religious experience and the brain

This argument can take a stronger form or a weaker form.

The stronger form is really a logical error. This is the argument that religious experiences can be completely explained by brain processes. Epileptic seizures, surgical interventions in the brain and electrical stimulation of parts of the brain can all produce experiences of religious images and concepts. Again, if you’ve had any of those it won’t change your lifestyle, you won’t look back on it as a glimpse of a higher reality, and most religious traditions would not count them as authentic.

Nevertheless some people argue that because religious experiences can be correlated with stimulation of a particular part of the brain, therefore there is no truth in them. The reason why this is a logical error is quite simple. Look up at the ceiling. If you had the right wires attached to your brain a neuroscientist might be able to spot which part of your brain is being stimulated when you look at the ceiling. However clear the result was, the neuroscientist would not reach the conclusion that your vision of the ceiling is completely explained by the brain processes. In addition to your brain processes, the ceiling really is there. Similarly with religious experience: knowing which part of the brain is involved doesn’t tell you whether your thoughts are true.

The weaker form of the argument needs to be taken more seriously. This is the argument that religious experience doesn’t give you any knowledge, because of the way knowledge works. A religious experience may make you feel confident that there is a god, but you don’t know it as certainly as we know that the earth goes round the sun and that antibiotics won’t cure a cold. Yet the person who has the experience thinks they do know it as certainly. So what is the reason for judging that inner experiences of individuals don’t count as knowledge?

We have inherited a history of judgements about these things. The value of inner experiences was most hotly debated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Reformation produced a movement called ‘enthusiasm’, in which people convinced themselves that they had knowledge given them directly by the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately it seemed that the Holy Spirit was telling different things to different people.

The beginning of the Enlightenment was very largely a reaction against this idea. Enlightenment thinkers said that the way to justify your knowledge claims is to explain the reasons why you believe what you do, and allow other people to examine them critically. In this way the Enlightenment produced two principles about truth claims which have stood the test of time: all truth claims must be subjected to rational examination, and the rational examination must be public. All modern science depends on these two principles.

However there’s a catch. All public knowledge starts off as thoughts within an individual mind. If you measure a table, and it’s two metres long, you reach your conclusion because you think you remember that you used the measuring tape correctly, you used your eyes to see what the measurement was, and so on. Behind all public knowledge lies an assumption that our inner subjective mental processes are normally reliable. We know we sometimes make mistakes, but we also know that unless we trust our mental processes we won’t have a clue what’s going on. So normally, the best stance to take of our mental ideas is critical trust: we trust our experience except when we have reason not to.

Can critical trust be applied to religious experience? How does ‘I had an inner experience and I know there’s a god’ differ from ‘I looked up and I know this room has a ceiling’? There are three relevant differences:

1) Sense experience is universal but religious experience only happens to some people. This is true enough, but it’s a common situation. We all depend on people who have skills and information that we do not have. I prepared this talk using a computer, and thereby depended on programmers whose minds can do things my mind cannot do. The fact that I couldn’t do it doesn’t stop me trusting their insights.

2) Sense experience is largely uniform; when we look up we all see the same ceiling, and we can talk to each other about what it looks like. When people have religious experiences they describe different divine beings. If religious experiences express truths, why do they conflict with each other?

Defenders of religious experience argue that it really does put people in touch with a divine being, but the divine being is not specific to any one religion. The research shows that people of all religions and none have them. Only 22% of the ones in the Hardy Archive spontaneously use the word ‘God’ to describe the religious experience they have had. More often they claim that what they communicated with was ‘ineffable’, ‘unknowable’ or ‘indescribable’.

John Hick has produced the best known defence of this. He distinguishes between the transcendent as it is in itself and the way we think of it and experience it. In itself the transcendent is outside our concepts. Whatever concept we have of God is inadequate. There is an inbuilt human capacity to be aware that the Transcendent is there, but we experience it in ways which are conditioned by our culture.

3) All our other information comes from the five senses. Religious experiences may make use of the five senses, but they seem to be generated by something different, a kind of sixth sense. How can we tell that this sixth sense is reliable?

This is a key question. We know that the world as we experience it is a minute selection of the world known to science. We only hear a small part of the sound scale. We don’t detect most of the chemicals in the environment. Physical things like the chair you are sitting on seem solid and static, though they are really lots of molecules buzzing around in space. How then do we have any real knowledge at all? One extreme position is that we don’t; the other extreme is that only the things we know about exist. Most thinkers take a moderate position called critical realism; there is a real world out there, but our minds only notice some of what’s going on. It’s like catching things in a net. Our categories of thought are the meshes of our net. Only what can be caught in them is available to us. We don’t notice all the rest.

The claim is that religious experience catches elements of reality which our five senses miss. The question is: how do we know that the bits it catches are true? Should we assume they are false unless we have corroboration from another source, or should we assume they are true unless we have reason to doubt them?

Rupert Sheldrake responds:

To brush aside what people have actually experienced is not to be scientific, but unscientific. Science is founded on the empirical method, that is to say on experience and observation. Experiences and observations are the starting point for science, and it is unscientific to disregard or exclude them (The Sense of Being Stared At, 2003: Hutchinson, pp. 4-5).

Out of the Body Experiences

IWhat happens in an Out of the Body Experience is that you look down on your body from above, seeing and hearing what is going on, but unable to communicate. Afterwards you can describe accurately what was going on. It usually happens during an operation. It’s that ability to describe what was going on which is most difficult to describe naturalistically, but it often happens.

The most impressive case I’ve come across is Pam Reynolds. Pam is a professional musician who had a big operation to remove an aneurysm from her brain. To prevent blood circulating around her head during the operation her heart was stopped, her body temperature was lowered, and she was for all practical purposes temporarily dead with no measurable brain function. After the operation she could tell the doctors what had happened during it. As you can imagine the doctors were astonished, but this is what happens in out of the body experiences. The interesting thing about Pam is that because she was a musician she was able to tell them that the drill which opened up her skull vibrated at a natural D. This drill had not been used until she was totally unconscious and none of the doctors had a clue about the musical note at which the drill vibrated but it turned out that she was right.

Near Death Experiences.

Near Death Experiences usually begin with an Out of the Body Experience but there’s more to come. Typically you realise that you have died, and then you enter a dark tunnel with a bright, welcoming light at the end. There you seem to be met by a being of light and love, and often by your dead relatives as well. At this point you may get the message that your time is not yet ripe, and you must return to your body, often against your will, and sometimes into pain. If you don’t get turned back at that point, you then experience a review of your life.

People who have near death experiences often live completely transformed lives afterwards. Typical effects are greater compassion for other people and a more spiritual, less materialistic attitude to life. Many change to more caring professions, some become religious, and 82% report that they no longer have any fear of death.

Near Death Experiences were first brought to public attention in 1975 with the publication of Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life. In 1980 Kenneth Ring’s Life at Death agreed with Moody’s findings and described Near Death Experiences as occurring in 5 stages:

• peace (60%);
• body separation (37%);
• entering the darkness (23%);
• seeing the light (16%);
• entering the light (10%).

In 2001 the medical journal the Lancet published a study of Near Death Experiences, and found the following:

• Awareness of being dead 50%
• Positive emotions 56%
• Out of the Body Experiences 24%
• Moving through a tunnel 31%
• Communication with the light 23%
• observation of colours 23%
• observation of celestial landscape 29%
• Meeting with deceased persons 32%
• Life review 13%
• Presence of border 8%

There are close similarities with past religious teachings. The medieval Jewish text the Zohar says:

We have learned that at the hour of a man’s departure from the world, his father and relatives gather round him and he sees and recognises them… and they accompany his soul to the place where it is to abide.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead states that when a person’s ‘consciousness-principle’ gets outside its body ‘he sees his relatives and friends gathered round weeping and watches as they remove the clothes from the body or take away the bed’. Researchers speculate that religious teachers had had, or knew of, near death experiences. Today with our advanced medical techniques they happen more often.

It doesn’t suit everybody. A J Ayer (1910-1989) was the first British philosopher to popularise logical positivism, with his book Language, Truth and Logic (1936). The idea was that metaphysics is meaningless: so never mind God existing, the very idea of God has no meaning. In 1988 his heart stopped beating for 4 minutes. On resuscitation he told the doctor that he had seen a divine being, and would have to revise all his previous books and opinions. This meant a complete reversal of everything he had stood for. A few weeks later he altered his account. He then said, ‘my recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope it will.’

Susan Blackmore is the leading researcher into Near Death Experiences who attributes them to naturalistic factors. She has had one herself:

Severe stress, extreme fear and cerebral anoxia all cause cortical disinhibition and uncontrolled brain activity… Tunnels and lights are frequently caused by disinhibition in visual cortex, and similar noises occur during sleep paralysis… Out of the Body experiences and life reviews can be induced by temporal lobe stimulation, and the positive emotions and lack of pain have been attributed to the action of endorphins and encepalins; endogenous opiates that are widely distributed in the limbic system and released under stress.

How does she explain the fact that so many people after a Near Death Experience can describe what was happening to their own body? She attributes them to a combination of ‘prior knowledge, fantasy, and lucky guesses and the remaining operating senses of hearing and touch’. Most people who have had Near Death Experiences are not convinced by these explanations; they think there was something more going on.

The way to test Blackmore’s thesis is to find a control group, people with similar experiences and similar medical knowledge who have not had an Near Death Experience, and ask them to describe what they would have expected to see while they were being resuscitated. Penny Sartori did this with a study of heart attack patients in hospitals, published in 2006. About 25% reported Near Death experiences. Those who reported them were able to describe accurately the procedures which had been undertaken during resuscitation attempts, while those without them had no idea what had happened and were unable to guess correctly. Penny placed pictures on the tops of cupboards in wards, in the hope that people might see them while they were out of their bodies, but nobody did..

I shall finish with a bit of outrageous cheek. In 1982 Mellen-Thomas Benedict had inoperable cancer and knew there was no hope. While preparing for death he decided to study various spiritual teachings. One day he felt sure he would die. He arranged with his carer to leave his body unattended for six hours after his death, as he had read that this was a time when things might happen. In the event he ‘died’, came round again and described his experience. It began with the usual Out of the Body Experience. Then he met the Light.

As I began to move toward the Light, I knew intuitively that if I went to the Light, I would be dead. So as I was moving toward the Light I said, ‘Please wait a minute, just hold on a second here. I want to think about this; I would like to talk to you before I go.’ To my surprise, the entire experience halted at that point. You are indeed in control of your near-death experience. The Light kept changing into different figures, like Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, mandalas, archetypal images and signs. I asked the Light, ‘What is going on here? Please Light, clarify yourself for me. I want to know the reality of the situation.’ I cannot say the exact words, because it was a sort of telepathy. The Light responded. The information transferred to me was that your beliefs shape the kind of feedback you are getting before the Light. If you were a Buddhist or Catholic or Fundamentalist, you get a feedback loop of your own stuff. You have the chance to look at it and examine it, but most people do not. As the Light revealed itself to me, I became aware that what I was really seeing was our higher Self matrix… I was not committed to one particular religion. So that was what was being fed back to me.