We were in Tunisia and went on an excursion down to the Sahara. It was our last family holiday before the break up. It was a moment of enlightenment.Ī colleague of mine had a similar experience several years ago, after a long period of inner turmoil due to confusion about his sexuality, which led to the breakdown of his marriage: There was a feeling of acceptance and oneness. All my ‘problems’ and my suffering suddenly seemed meaningless, ridiculous, simply a misunderstanding of my true nature and everything around me. The marble seemed a reflection of the universe. I felt suddenly removed from everything that was personal. I saw reality as simply this perfect one-ness. All of a sudden, it was as if the familiar world melted away, replaced by a vision of beauty and perfection. At one point in hospital, when she hadn’t spoken to anybody for four days, she picked up a marble that was lying on her bedside cabinet, and started playing with it her hands, watching it closely. She became so depressed that she felt suicidal and was hospitalised for several weeks. Over the last few years I have been collecting reports of spiritual experiences (or awakening experiences, as I prefer to call them), and have also found that many of them were triggered by trauma and turmoil.įor example, 25 years ago a woman named Emma was suffering from serious depression, which was partly the result of her upbringing by an emotionally abusive mother. When Hardy analysed the triggers of spiritual or religious experiences, he found that the most common trigger of them was ‘depression and despair.’ 18% of the experiences were apparently triggered by this, compared to 13% by prayer or meditation and 12% by natural beauty. Many Network readers will be familiar with the work of Alister Hardy, who established the Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford University in 1969 (it is now based at the University of Lampeter in Wales). It seems almost paradoxical, then, that these experiences are frequently induced by states of intense despair, depression, or mental turmoil. When the experience is especially intense, the whole phenomenal world may dissolve into an ocean of blissful spiritual radiance, which we realise is the ground of all reality, the source from which the phenomenal world has arisen, and the real nature of our being. They are experiences of rapture, in which we perceive reality at a heightened intensity, feel a powerful sense of inner well-being, experience a sense of oneness with our surroundings and become aware of a force of benevolence and harmony which pervades the cosmos. Spiritual experiences are overwhelmingly positive experiences. Originally published in the Scientific and Medical Network Review, Winter 2009
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