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. 

 

Review
Culture
Film & TV
Paganism
5 min read

Kaos shows why we might think twice before inviting the old gods back

The illusory glamour of Olympian gods titillates us once more.

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles. He previously studied Dark Age archaeology at Cambridge, and afterwards worked in international law.

A mock classical ceiling painting depicts modern version of the classical gods.
Ye gods above.
Netflix.

The old gods are making a comeback all across Western culture. This is a conclusion increasingly reached by a spectrum of culture-watchers; some religious, some not at all. But, if true, the boldest and brashest example of this comeback may well be the new Netflix series KAOS, starring Jeff Goldblum, released last month.  

Kaos is a genre-busting mythological dark comedy-drama. One might say a modern re-summoning of the pagan gods.  

Charlie Covell, the writer and mastermind behind the show, and a self-confessed mythology geek, has created a colourful, high production, and often funny depiction of what the world might be like if the gods of Olympus still ruled over us. The plot follows several different strands taken from Greek mythology - most obviously Orpheus’s journey into the Underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice - and weaves them together into a larger narrative, retelling the downfall of the gods. 

As the show opens, Zeus reigns as king of the gods from his fantastically kitsch mansion atop of Mount Olympus. So long as the sacrifices and adulation of humankind keep rolling in, he is happy. But when he wakes one day to discover a new wrinkle on his forehead, this triggers not only a kind of mid-life crisis, but also possibly - so he fears - the end of the world as he knows it.  

Goldblum plays Zeus as, well, Jeff Goldblum: quirky, nervy, paranoid, and not a little menacing in an understated way. In other words, perhaps more “Jeff Goldblum” than you’ve ever seen him on screen before. It is certainly a compelling and sometimes hilarious portrayal.  

“A line appears, the order wanes, the family falls, and Kaos reigns.”  

This is the prophecy that has haunted Zeus for aeons. What he doesn’t know is that he shares this personalised prophesy with three other mortals in the story - Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), Caneus (Misia Butler), and Ariadne (Leila Farzad) - all of whom will play an unwitting role in bringing about the overthrow of the world order under the Olympian gods (hence: KAOS). The early episodes establish who these mortals are and begin to draw their disparate stories together.  

Counterpoint to Zeus is his brother, Hades, ruler of a literally black-and-white underworld, with David Thewlis brilliantly cast in the role as the world-weary and ailing keeper of the realm of the dead. Something is amiss down there which threatens the whole system of human souls and what happens to them. When he tries to warn his brother, Zeus’s disdain for Hades and his problems only makes matters worse. Also in the frame of this dysfunctional family are Hera (Janet McTeer) and Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) - brother and sister (and wife in Hera’s case) to Zeus, as well as being lovers behind his back, who are poised to put into effect their own betrayals, if Zeus goes too far off the rails. 

Last, but not least, since he proves the bridge between the gods and humans is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), one of Zeus’s many children. (But the only one who comes to visit.) A hedonistic agent of chaos from the outset, Dionysus seems to be the only one of the gods with any genuine interest or admiration for humans. Impressed by rock-star Orpheus’s passionate love for his wife, Eurydice (“Riddy”), it is Dionysus who helps Orpheus break into the Underworld to get her back when she dies, thus triggering the series of events that could let to the fulfilment of the prophesy. 

The illusory glamour of the gods of Olympus seem to titillate us once more. We don’t really believe in them, but we’d kind of like to see more of them all the same.

Smart, stylish, twisty and certainly original - (the entrance to the Underworld is through a dumpster bin around the back of a bar) - Kaos is an ambitious multi-stranded epic about power, fate, love, and family. But perhaps above all, it is saying something about the relationship between humanity and the divine. At one point, one mortal tells another that the only good things in life are human. This feels like a statement of underlying intent. And the way the gods (especially Zeus) become more capricious, more sadistic, more vengeful as the story unfolds, the more it feels like we’re encouraged to agree. Defiance of the gods is the real mark of virtue here. Rebellion against the gods, the natural outworking of that defiance. 

The irony is that whatever distaste which Kaos succeeds in cultivating in us, the viewer, for pagan forms of the divine may help explain why, historically, Christianity swept aside all the pantheons of pagan worship of the first millennium in the wholesale way that it did. Jesus Christ literally incarnates that bridge between the divine and the human. And what’s more, the message he preached claimed that, far from disdaining humanity, God loves them so much that he was willing to be the sacrifice for their good. And not the other way round, demanding incessant and capricious sacrifice by humans instead.  

Now, centuries later, in Western culture, familiarity seems to have bred contempt with that far more hopeful story. Instead, the illusory glamour of the gods of Olympus seem to titillate us once more. We don’t really believe in them, but we’d kind of like to see more of them all the same. And storytellers like Charlie Covell are only too willing to give the public what they want. If the old gods are indeed trying to make a comeback, Kaos shows us why we might think twice before inviting them in.  

Does Kaos succeed? It certainly makes a valiant attempt to marshal a large number of plot lines involving a huge cast of characters, unfortunately not all of whom are interesting enough to keep you coming back for more. And an awful lot is riding on there being a Season 2 - that is, if the threads we have followed so far are to lead on into a satisfying and meaningful conclusion.  

Without that, I’m afraid the whole thing may be left standing alone as a work of, well… chaos.