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Perfect — you mean Sir Alister Hardy (1896–1985), the Oxford biologist who founded the modern scientific study of mystical or spiritual experiences. Here’s a clear overview of who he was, what he did, and why his work at Oxford is still influential.

🧬 Who Alister Hardy Was

• Full name: Sir Alister Clavering Hardy, FRS
• Lived: 1896–1985
• Background: A marine biologist and zoologist who taught at the University of Oxford.
• Shift in focus: In later life, Hardy turned from biology to the scientific study of religious and mystical experience, convinced that such experiences were an essential (and evolutionarily significant) part of human nature.

🕊️ The Oxford Connection: The Religious Experience Research Unit (RERU)

• In 1969, after retiring from his zoology chair at Oxford, Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Unit (RERU) at Manchester College, Oxford (now Harris Manchester College).
• His goal: to collect and analyze first-hand accounts of people’s experiences of a “presence or power beyond themselves” — whether or not they called it God.

The “Hardy Question”

He used a simple but profound survey 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?”

Thousands of people from all walks of life responded with detailed descriptions — mystical moments, visions, near-death experiences, feelings of unity, awe in nature, and profound inner peace.

These were catalogued and analyzed for patterns: what triggered them, what people felt, and what effects they had on their lives.

📚 Key Works

1. The Living Stream (1965) – outlines his idea that spiritual experience is an evolutionary phenomenon.
2. The Divine Flame (1966) – explores the evolution of consciousness and spirituality.
3. The Spiritual Nature of Man: Study of Contemporary Religious Experience (1979/1983) – the main presentation of his Oxford data from RERU.
   
• It includes hundreds of summaries from actual accounts collected at the Unit.
• Hardy saw mystical experience as a natural human capacity, not limited to religious belief.
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🌿 Hardy’s Main Ideas

Theme	Summary
Evolutionary spirituality	Religious and mystical experiences are adaptive — they help humanity evolve morally and socially.
Universality	Such experiences occur across religions, cultures, and even among atheists.
Continuum of experience	From mild intuition or awe to full mystical union — all part of one spectrum.
Scientific study of the sacred	Hardy wanted to treat spirituality as a natural phenomenon open to empirical study, not as a matter of faith alone.

🧩 Legacy

• After Hardy’s death, the RERU became the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), now based at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Lampeter).
• It still houses over 6,000 accounts of spiritual/mystical experiences — the largest archive of its kind in the world.
• The Centre continues research into spiritual experiences, their psychology, and their relevance to wellbeing and human potential.

👉 Website: https://www.studyspiritualexperiences.org/

🪶 Summary Quote

Hardy once wrote:

“Man has an inbuilt tendency to seek experience of the divine — it is part of his biological nature.”

He wanted to bridge science and spirituality — not by dismissing religion, but by studying its experiential basis through evidence and observation.

Would you like me to outline Hardy’s typology of mystical experiences (the categories he and later researchers developed based on the Oxford data)? That gives a really interesting picture of the range of mystical experiences people reported.