What was happening when the experience began? Most accounts are clear about their context, crisis, prayer, a moment in nature, or nothing at all. Multiple triggers could apply to a single account.
In contemporary awakening accounts, meditation and teacher transmission are among the most common triggers. In the Hardy Archive, accounts written mostly between 1969 and the 1980s, crisis and prayer dominate. These are not accounts from people on a deliberate spiritual path. The experience arrived unbidden, often at the worst possible moment. This distinction matters: it suggests that religious experience is not primarily a product of practice, but can arrive in anyone, at any time.
Triggers are not causes, they describe the context in which the experience arrived, not why it happened. The same trigger (prayer, crisis, nature) may or may not produce an experience in the next person. Percentages reflect how often each trigger appeared across the 2,080 accounts.
Illness, accident, danger, extreme distress, or personal catastrophe. The experience arrived precisely when ordinary resources had run out, when the person had reached the end of what they could manage alone. Crisis is the most common trigger in the archive by a wide margin, and the pattern is consistent: the experience arrives at the point of greatest need.
A moment of intentional prayer, sometimes a cry of desperation, sometimes a routine practice, sometimes a specific request. In many cases the experience did not simply accompany the prayer but seemed to answer it: the content of the experience responded directly to what had been asked. Many prayer-triggered accounts overlap with crisis, reflecting a prayer born of necessity.
No discernible trigger. The experience arrived without preparation or context, often during routine activities, walking to the shops, sitting at a desk, waiting for a bus. These accounts are particularly important because they challenge explanations that rely entirely on psychological preparation or religious priming. Hardy himself noted that spontaneous experiences were far more common than expected.
Contact with the natural world, a landscape, light, weather, living creatures, or the sea. Hardy himself wrote extensively about nature-triggered experience and considered it one of the most philosophically interesting features of the archive. The natural world seemed to become transparent to something beyond it: the ordinary dissolved into the sacred.
The death of someone close, a spouse, parent, child, or friend. Bereavement-triggered accounts frequently involve contact with or communication from the deceased, often in the days or weeks following the death. These are among the most common veridical claim accounts in the archive: many people describe receiving information they could not otherwise have known.
The liminal state of falling asleep, waking, or dreaming. Many accounts describe experiences that occurred at the threshold of consciousness, hypnagogic or hypnopompic states, or in dreams so vivid and charged that they were clearly distinct from ordinary dreaming. The loosening of ordinary waking consciousness may provide access to experiences that are otherwise difficult to reach.
A church service, religious ceremony, act of communal worship, or the taking of Communion. Given the predominantly Christian framing of the archive, it is perhaps surprising that worship is not more common as a trigger, but the archive's most striking finding is how often experience arrives outside any religious context. When it arrives in worship, it is still experienced as something given, not produced by the ritual.
Intentional contemplative practice, silent prayer, meditation, or other spiritual disciplines. Far less common in the Hardy Archive than in contemporary awakening accounts, reflecting both the era and the archive's predominantly ordinary (non-practitioner) respondents. Those who were practicing had a higher base rate of experience, consistent with most research on contemplative states.
A life-threatening situation or clinical near-death event. The experience arrived as part of a serious illness, accident, or medical emergency. These accounts are among the most detailed and consistent in the archive: the proximity of death seems to precipitate experiences of particular depth and clarity.
Reading the Bible or another sacred text. A passage seemed to speak directly to the person's situation, not just as relevant text but as a living communication addressed specifically to them. In many accounts, the words themselves triggered or accompanied an experience that went beyond intellectual understanding.
Circumstances that did not fit clearly into the above categories, artistic or musical experience, physical labour, care of another person, or no clear context at all. This category represents the range of ordinary human situations in which religious experience can arrive, including many that seem entirely prosaic.