Events | 2009.11.06
Face to faith: The Religious Experience Research Centre's evidence of everyday divinity is a joy, says Roger Tagholm
The Religious Experience Research Centre\'s evidence of everyday divinity is a joy, says Roger Tagholm
About three times a month a letter or email arrives at the library of the University of Wales at Lampeter. So far, so unremarkable, you might think – until you know their contents
The library is home to the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), which today celebrates its 40th anniversary with an Open Day at Harris Manchester College in Oxford, its former home. The letters and emails are from members of the public who believe they have had a "spiritual or religious experience or felt a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday life".
"Vauxhall station on a murky November Saturday evening is not the setting one would choose for a revelation of God," runs one account. "The whole compartment was filled with light. I felt caught up into some tremendous sense of being within a loving, triumphant and shining purpose. All men were shining and glorious beings who in the end would enter incredible joy. In a few moments the glory had departed, all but one curious, lingering feeling. I loved everybody in that compartment. I seemed to sense the golden worth in them all."
The centre has some 6,000 such accounts, which, it could be argued, form an "evidence" of sorts for some unspecified "other". The RERC was established in 1969 by the marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy , who was both a Darwinian and a member of the Unitarian church. He believed that man did indeed have a spiritual nature and that there was an extrasensory reality beyond the individual self. Appeals for people\'s religious or spiritual experiences were placed in the religious media, and then, later, in the wider press, beginning with an interview in this newspaper written by Geoffrey Moorhouse who would go on to recount his own spiritual journey in his Indian travel book Om.
Today, the centre\'s director is Professor Paul Badham, who taught theology and religious studies at Lampeter until retiring last year. MA students and postgraduate students working in the field of religious experience, as well as researchers and writers from around the world, use the centre\'s archive and library.
In 1990, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, suggested it extend its work to other cultures. A grant from the Templeton Foundation enabled it to explore religious experience in China, and the University of Istanbul has carried out similar research in Turkey. Professor Cafer Yaran of the faculty of theology at the latter is due to give his findings at today\'s celebrations.
It is easy to mock those who claim to have had a mystical experience. Richard Dawkins dismisses all such experience as simply a function of "the mind\'s simulation software". But Badham notes that all human experiences are mediated through brain activity – it doesn\'t mean the experience is simply a product of the brain. "When I see something with my eyes it brings about events in my brain, which is how I interpret what I see. This does not mean that what we see isn\'t really there. So with religious experiences. Of course they are associated with something going on in our brain, and increasingly neuro-specialists can locate where in the brain. But this does not mean that such experiences are unreal, any more than what we see is unreal."
The centre\'s work is heir to William James\' Varieties of Religious Experience . It quietly points towards something that the mystics have long known: that religious or spiritual experience is common to humanity, part of "our evolutionary heritage", as Badham puts it. Sir Alister, who died in 1985, would surely be gratified at the centre\'s continuing survival and its international reach – and would echo Badham\'s words: "Dogmas divide, experience unites."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ience-research-centre-lampeter
