What changed, and stayed changed. Religious experience is defined in part by what it leaves behind, the permanent alterations in how a person understands themselves and their world.
One of the most consistent findings across all research on religious experience is that it changes people, persistently, in ways they often cannot fully articulate. The changes are rarely dramatic in outward form. People don't typically quit their jobs, abandon their families, or join a monastery. But something fundamental is reoriented: a relationship to death, to meaning, to God, to other people, to themselves.
Hardy's archive is particularly valuable here because accounts were written retrospectively, often years or decades after the experience. The effects described were therefore tested by time, not just immediate aftermath. If someone says their fear of death was removed, they are saying it remained removed across the subsequent years of their life.
Each effect below could apply alongside others, someone might report both faith deepened and meaning restored and fear of death removed from the same experience. Percentages show how often each appeared across the 2,080 accounts.
The person's existing faith, however formed, became more certain, more alive, or more personally real. Not a change of belief structure, but a change in the felt quality of belief: from intellectual assent to direct knowledge, from habit to conviction. Many accounts describe faith that had been abstract becoming suddenly, irreversibly concrete.
A more thoroughgoing change, not just deepening but restructuring. People describe moving from one tradition to another, from no faith to faith, from institutional religion to personal spirituality, or from a conceptual God to a known presence. The experience didn't fit the categories they had, so the categories changed. Faith transformed overlaps substantially with conversion, but extends beyond formal religious change: many transformations happened entirely within the person's inner life.
Life regained coherence and direction, particularly common in crisis-triggered accounts where the experience arrived at a point of despair, depression, or grief. The restoration was often described not as comfort but as comprehension: not "things feel better" but "I now understand what things are for." This makes the effect philosophically distinct from mere emotional uplift.
The experience produced a permanent change in how the person related to their own mortality, not suppression of the thought of death but a genuine reorientation toward it. Very common in near-death accounts and bereavement accounts, but also frequent in people who had no brush with death at all. The content of the experience seemed to provide direct evidence that death was not the final word.
Following the experience, a new or enhanced capacity appeared, for prayer, for awareness of others' inner states, for precognition, for healing, or for what respondents described as "knowing things without knowing how." Many accounts describe this cautiously; people were aware that such claims were unlikely to be believed. The archive records the claim without adjudicating it.
A concrete reorientation of moral priorities, greater love for other people, reduced self-centredness, a change in career direction toward service, giving up a destructive habit, or a new commitment to honesty. These changes are often modest in scale but highly consistent: the experience produced a movement toward others rather than self. Hardy noted that this ethical effect was present across traditions and belief backgrounds.
A claimed physical or psychological healing that followed the experience, symptoms that disappeared, conditions that resolved, recovery that doctors could not explain. These accounts are recorded as reported by respondents; the archive makes no independent medical assessment. What is notable is the consistency of the structure: healing described not as gradual improvement but as sudden resolution, often at the moment of the experience itself.
Accounts where no persistent effect was described, the experience was real and significant while it lasted but did not produce clear lasting change. These accounts are relatively rare and should not be discounted: many describe experiences of great depth and beauty, with no lasting effect simply because none was mentioned. The account's focus was on the experience itself, not its aftermath. The small number of such accounts is itself noteworthy given how frequently lasting change is claimed.