William James—father of American psychology, author of
stream-of-consciousness, popularizer of the subconscious— was an absolute beast
to take on religion the way he did, considering that religious fundamentalism
was in thick ferment, social Darwinism still womb-wet and hungry, and global
ignorance still blocking the sun. The task of outlining and appraising
religious belief and practice is a prodigious task in any age— mindboggling in
its scope and potential offenses. I’m sure we all grow weary of people who
flippantly blame religion for world problems and societal ills, and no doubt
there is a growing number of experts, and people in general, who think that the
world can and should be purged of religious belief altogether, and that we’d
all be more happy and healthy for it. The staggering lack of understanding
aside which these assumptions betray of what religious belief is and is
not—reducing religious belief to an antiquated and now useless, eradicable
behavior that has had its day in the sun and is positively harmful for modern
people— religious belief is not so easily peeled from our humanity. A study of
religion and the origins and effects of religious belief reveals that the
fundamental nature of religious sentiment connects in at the level of raw human
desire, subsuming all intellectual pursuit.
So William James steers us and all religion-deniers
straight. Here’s a guy, at the turn of the 20th century, who was light years
ahead of thinkers, theologians, and philosophers even in the 21st
century—probably due to a combination of genius AND honesty and courage. He was
a Harvard’s resident physician-philosopher-psychologist par excellence,
lecturing with the latest information in psychology and the psychology of
religion; but he was also towered over his peers in his bravery to explore an
area crawling with so much social taboo, challenges of obscurity in definition
and origin, and risks of fanning false hopes or snuffing those which weakly
flickered in the gale force winds of dehumanizing science. At some point in my
reading of this work, my skepticism of his 19th century limits curtailed
significantly. It quickly became clear that James was a cerebral giant, and
seems to have truly grasped the essential nature of religion as a universal and
irreducible trait of humanity that recurs in every age, culture and individual;
as ineradicable as hope; as unquenchable as love and desire.
Defining Religion
James commences by attempting to define religion. This is no
easy task because colloquial uses change even from person to person, not to
mention culture to culture. But James narrows his task by insisting that the
real pith of religion is the personal religious experience, not qualified or
classified by institutionalized dogma or communal requisites. In other words,
James decided that the pure ore of religion is acutely individual and
first-hand, and must be studied anecdotally and not merely statistically or
systemically as described by religious histories of the masses or
tradition—which James’ calls “second-hand religious life”—because they have
been censored and sanctioned by governing bodies of one sort or another intent
on filtering raw perspective and reproducing very limited and constrained
viewpoints and experiences for the purposes of control. These “original
experiences” he focuses on exclusively in this work, and summarily ignores all
dogma. With that clean chop of the cleaver, his work is focused and unbothered
by zealous fundamentalism which amounts to sheer scare tactics in the first
place. He ultimately classifies these original experiences, for the purposes of
his study, as mystical and ecstatic because they belong to the unique
experience of each individual, are unassailable by mere reason alone, and they
produce revelations and assurances that are unattainable any other way.
Having set the parameters for his subject, James offered
three tests for the value of a religious experience(s):
Immediate luminousness
Philosophical reasonableness
Moral helpfulness
All are predicated upon the subjective experience of the
individual, though number two may seem to imply otherwise. James’ point here is
that a religious experience or viewpoint offers a believer illumination,
ordered thought, and moral resources which appeared unavailable before the
religious encounter. The value of these experiences are primarily weighed
subjectively, and corroboration by outside observers are a subsidiary concern.
James wards off detractors by saying, “If the mystical truth that comes to a
man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the
majority to order him to live in another way?...it absolutely escapes our
jurisdiction.”
Regarding moral helpfulness, James quotes a Dr. Maudsley to
affirm that it is “the way in which it works on the whole” that defines whether
a belief is helpful or not. By demanding that his readers “judge a religious
life by its results exclusively”, he has again preemptively narrowed his field
of study to not merely vet the universality or cogency of a conviction itself,
but to concentrate on the effects convictions and illuminations have on the
lives of those who hold them.
As an aside, the felt benefit of religious belief is the
emphasis of my research in Awakenings: Felt Benefit In Personal Values
(http://awakeningsproject.wix.com/awakenings). James’ focus on the end results
of religious belief underscores the misguided tendency so many have to
witch-hunt and mock those who have ‘strange’ beliefs, instead of working to
understand if those beliefs increase the wellbeing of believers and those
around them despite the beliefs’ plausibility or normality. “If the mystical
truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what
mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way?...it
absolutely escapes our jurisdiction.” The western mindset insists that everyone
be reasonable above all things, without a thought as to whether or not a
person’s logic, however flawed in others’ opinion, can enable them to enjoy
life and love adequately. The existence of hope belies our devotion to facts,
efficiency and all impersonal science. Science is just another tool that helps
us realize our hopes, and cold data will never substitute for the heat of human
desire. In other words, like it or not, science will always be at the behest of
our hopes—translated into illuminations, stories, systems, dogmas, and even the
gods and no-gods of our religions.
Mysticism and Religion
James believed that the “root and center” of religion is a
mystical state of consciousness. These mystical states are primarily
responsible for the deep convictions of the religious because through them
subjects feel as though they have experienced something more real, more
personal, and more hopeful than what their mundane existence has disclosed thus
far. One study James cited involved an individual who summarized their
conviction of truth gained in an ecstatic moment: “…the memory [of this mystical
experience] persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might
be a dream, but not that.” Myriad examples of profound assurance such as this
exist both within and beyond James’ work (see Eban Alexander’s descriptions of
near-death-experiences and their corollary persuasions in “Proof Of Heaven,” or
Christopher Bache’s psychedelic-induced impressions in “Dark Night, Early
Dawn”), and they confirm that mystical states of consciousness deeply shock a
person’s sense of reality, sometimes to the point of a complete denial of
quotidian sensory data in favor of impressions received during non-ordinary
states of consciousness. At those times, the inner vision becomes more real
than physical sight.
James’ restrictive use of the word ‘religion’ excludes mere
morality and institutional conformity which he felt were offshoots of original
religious experience. James believed that, as far as our ideas of reality go,
“Instinct leads, intelligence follows.” That means at the bottom of our
persuasions and rationalizations regarding reality, there’s lies an abstract
and fluctuating sense of the way things are and the way things ought to be.
Considering alone the haziness of memory and the inconsistent glue of logic, I
can completely agree that the myth of crystal-clear reality is a sham, and can
even become a defense against the ultimate and unknowable. “Our impulsive
belief is…always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately
verbalized philosophy is but its slow translation into formulas.” In other
words, our “inarticulate feelings of reality,” as James calls them, are the
best we have! Here James has home court advantage in the realm of the
psychology of religion. Again and again he reminds the reader that if religion
or theology were really dependent on reason and not feeling, then the universal
appeal of reason would probably do a better job of convincing people of the
truth of a particular religious belief over another. “Feeling is the deeper
source of religion…philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products,
like translations of a text into another tongue.” Religion, then, is founded on
feeling; but James is fair in pointing out that religion isn’t the only thing
founded on feeling. So is…well…everything else. But religion is closer to the
source of “immediate experiences” and feeling, and makes its home there.
Being a man of extraordinary reason and charging intellect,
James was, and still is, a rare species in that, being brilliant, he yet
understood the limits of his reason (aaaaand…everyone else’s). Reason arranges
and classifies information gathered by the senses, but it does not supersede
the senses or other faculties that it partners with, including the emotions and
imagination. “Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret
them; but they do not produce them…perception [is] always something that
glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes
too late…” This is not to say that blind will or raw emotional processing is
all that is necessary for human functioning, or that the intellect is a
completely ancillary and discrete process. Intellection is a generally
considered to be a more refined filtering and categorization of data, but it is
in some degree present in all the holistic operations of a person. In no way is
the intellect a process detached from the will or emotions that commission the
body’s scavenging for intel. “The intellect is not independent of what it
ascertains.” All this to say, reason is not the crackerjack of mental
functioning, though it may be a sophistication that evolved more recently; nor
are the religious out of their minds for living closer to their spinal cords.
Religious Temperament: Once-Born and Twice-Born
James differentiated between two types of the religious
temperament: the once-born, and the twice-born. The Once-Born person is born
into life and immediately takes to it, is happy with life’s potential, and
finds it to be meaningful and fulfilling as it is. The Once-Born has warm
fuzzies about the world, and might say, like Margaret Fuller of old, "I
accept the universe"—hearing which, Thomas Carlyle is reported to have
commented, "Gad, she'd better!”
The Twice-Born person, on the contrary, is born into life a
‘sick soul’—sick with pessimism—needing to be symbolically born into life a
second time (“born again”) via a religious conversion or some other altering
crisis before they can find the world to offer a meaningful experience for them
with potential for joy and fulfillment. The label of twice-born is no
epithet—distinguished thinkers and writers throughout the ages have suffered as
‘ sick souls’ with severe depression and often torturous despair, yet with the
courage to face life and affirm it even in the midst of misery. These
tremendous sufferers I knew to exist, but I took it for granted how many people
before the 20th century, both anonymous and renown, have suffered and bore with
existence as if it was a sore test of endurance and one’s sanity merely to live
and think.
Consider a quotation from the 18th century genius Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe—whom so many in his day idolized, and many who currently
know of him still do—in which he likened his life to Sisyphus and the futile
and meaningless rolling of a rock up a hill again and again without end: “I
will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom I has been
nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75
years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual
rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.”
Especially in such cases, and for such people, religion
becomes a booster vaccine loaded with adrenaline to help ease the agony and
panic of being. “Here is the real core of the problem [which religion answers
to]: Help! Help!.. [and] deliverance must come in as strong a form as the
complaint.” It is a sad reality that, for many, the heart of life is pain; and
fear is, as Jack London put it, “coiled around the roots of our being.”
James was brave to
fully admit the horror of life as it manifests to some, and to recognize that
humanity must have something to cope. “The lunatic’s visions of horror are all
drawn from the material of daily fact… [and] every individual existence goes
out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.” Well tell me some good news doc.
“…there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that
did not daily through long years of the foretime hold fast to the body
struggling in despair of some fated living victim.”
That’s not what I had in mind Billy.
“Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at
life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.”
Egads, man! Make like Marley and speak some friggin comfort
to me! Okay, so, I get it. Religion is a potent and equally grotesque response
to the severe cruelty and horror of the world which we seldom allow ourselves
to consider or confront. So, at least religion is a good fallback.
Right?...right? James, where you at? Come at me Bro!!!
“It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the
absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to
higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as
to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil,
dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource.”
I think I’m going to be sick. But I get what he’s saying.
Religious Phenomena:
Saintliness and Asceticism
James addresses many forms of religious expression and
phenomena, and spends a lot of time on the qualities and value of the paragons
of religious life—saints whose traits range from blind optimism to
asceticism—and the lifestyles that provide different solutions for boredom,
danger, and pain. It becomes quickly clear that James labored over the meaning
of suffering in the world, and was profoundly intrigued with what potential
answers religion seemed to produce, consciously or otherwise. “Our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal
ingredient of the world’s order”, although, it seems to me the ancients weren’t
so satisfied as all that, and clearly believed in its ultimate eradication in
one doctrine or another. Even so, James takes very seriously the different ways
in which people deal with pain and boredom, and he’s sees deep significance in
the ‘yes’ and ‘no’s’ of the saintly towards being.
“Some men and women can live on smiles and the word ‘yes’
forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed…some
‘no! no!’ must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character
and texture and power.”
Perhaps some austerities and deprivations are often required
to produce a contrast which surfaces beauty and love. Without this contrast,
some would feel that life comes too cheaply, or that materialism drowns out the
spiritual.
“…some are happiest in calm weather; some need the sense of
tension, of strong volition, to make them feel alive and well. For these latter
souls, whatever is gained from day to day must be paid for by sacrifice and
inhibition, or else it comes too cheap and has no zest…In short, lives based on
having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being… Naked came I
into the world…My own bare entity must fight the battle—shams cannot save me.”
Well, you have to respect that. I’m not much for cutting,
but I imagine a person can find some justification for variations of
self-denial. And that’s what began to shock me about this book: so many
religious experiences and ideas—no matter how different from mine, or how
harmful they are purported to be—have a very specific reason for being, and
many rationales and lifestyles foreign to me (read: “us”) may have enabled the
survival and prosperity of entire civilizations. The sooner people like Richard
Dawkins can acknowledge this and stop overreacting against faith and even
fetish, the sooner he will be acknowledged and taken more seriously by
traditional thinkers who feel attacked by his belligerence.
The New War: Poverty
Religion definitely seemed to emerge in James’ mind as a
ward against materialism—one of the more positively salutary effects of
religion as far as he was concerned—and it accomplished this by becoming chummy
with poverty. Poverty is the war against fat and insulating materialism. He
actually develops this brilliantly. Let’s watch the author at work in his
natural environment as he builds his case:
“Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors.”
“The most barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in
war, and for war’s uses they are incommensurably good.”
“What we now need to discover in the social realm is the
moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally
as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war
has proved itself to be incompatible.”
“It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the
educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization
suffers.”
“Poverty indeed is the strenuous life. Among us English-speaking
peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung.
We have grown literally afraid to be poor.”
“A man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.”
And there you have it, the voluntary poverty and self-denial
that religion offers is the new war that we all apparently want! Of course,
this brand of poverty-appeal is for very specific temperaments that desire the
stress of combat of some kind; but hey, Henry David Thoreau would have been
proud of this poverty-mongering, having said himself, “None can be an impartial
or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should
call voluntary poverty.” Bro, meet bro.
As for the loss of comfort, this goes back to James’
explanation that not everyone wants comfort. This is, again, an example of
different ways in which people are fulfilled by embracing different measures of
the pain-pleasure tension. The various balances people strike between
simplicity and complexity in ideology play a part as well. For some, the desire
for beauty outweighs the risk of poverty, discomfort, and chaos, and may even
be enriched by difficulty. “Although some persons aim most at intellectual
purity and simplification, for others richness is the supreme imaginative
qualification.” So many reasons to be poor!
Conversion
In his chapters covering conversions, James explored the
changes and confirmations that occur in a person’s life that lock them into an
idea or a way of living. He cleverly dissected the psychology of conversion,
and identified several contributing factors:
A desire for a unified self
Regular successions of selves in a desire for unification
Catalysts for new successions
Desire or excitement for the new
Absolute exhaustion with the old
He builds slowly from an understanding of the complex nature
of the need for a unified sense of self—despite heterogeneous qualities that
make up every self—to the common vacillations that occur unconsciously between
multiplied states and identities coexisting, converging, and conflicting within
each person. Conversion becomes, in James’ estimation, a “succession of self”
which is quite frequent though often unconscious. Some successions-of-selves
are given more notice by the psyche than others, and some are valued more.
“As life goes on, there is a constant change of our
interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more
central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of
consciousness...all we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and
cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive
within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it.”
These changes and conversions are typical for all people,
but the contrast can be sharper in sudden conversions due to various factors
such as:
Pronounced emotional sensibility
Tendency to automatisms (neurotic behavior/obsessions)
Suggestibility
James would say that conversion is actually a very normal
adolescent phenomenon, indicating a “passage from the child’s small universe to
the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.” Conversions later in
life may signify internal volatilities such as a changing perspectives,
changing needs, and new skills that have reached critical mass and require new
challenges; or external fluctuations as simple as a change in environment, or a
crisis. Herman Hesse stated that the myth of a unified self contributes to the
myth that conversions are rare and isolated events.
“It appears to be an inborn need of all men to regard the
self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is
shattered, it always mends again…In reality, however, every ego, so far from
being a unity, is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated
heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and
potentialities” (from Steppenwolf).
More recently, author Gail Sheehy, in her book Passages:
Predictable Crises of Adult Life, marks many common later-in-life transitions
that would qualify as Jamesian ‘conversions’ because they are successions of
selves induced by transitions of states, consciousnesses, and crises, very much
like the adolescent changes that James spoke of. By acknowledging and educating
others on the reality of adult passages that often go unrecognized—due to pop
opinion and urban legends about the adult ego being cemented and irrefragably
one, and the taboo of the unnaturalness of adult crisis (consider the label of
‘mid-life crisis’ that is considered more a failure than a normal
passage)—Sheehy broke down the misunderstanding that conversions, successions
of selves, and passages are abnormal or unhealthy. My point here is that
Jamesian conversions are not exclusive to the domain of religion, but are
consistent with psychological transitions experience by all healthy people,
religious or not. Understood in this light, it is a shame that so many view
conversions as phenomena associated with neurosis and delusion.
The Subconscious
By slow degrees James approached the topic of the
subconscious, which was an extremely new idea and in its infancy of proving its
mettle as a legitimate point study in psychology. The subconscious was
introduced to the world of psychology in 1886—James wrote his work in 1902, a
mere 16 years with the new science— and the application of this concept in the
field of the psychology of religion was an experiment that we now know yielded
incredibly persuasive results, helping to solidify its tenure. James was
wicked-smart in administering the findings of the subconscious—which he called
“memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the
primary consciousness altogether”—to illuminate the monster-gods that religion
had produced in many instances, and thereby ushered the world into a new era of
empowerment and independence. Once he worked up to its theme in Varieties, it
was all downhill, opening up the deeper recesses of religious influences to be
scrutinized and subsequently demythologized. They never knew what hit them.
Doctrines
Much to my surprise and delight, James ultimately took his
subject all the way to the limits of ‘decency’ and actually attempted to
appraise the value of a few specific beliefs, most notably the idea of an
infinite God and doctrinal orthodoxies such as ecclesiastic rule and Scriptural
inerrancy. He used, of course, the
meritocratic metric of results—of the amount of good these beliefs seemed to
accomplish in the life of their adherents—and not the metric of how reasonable
a creed or belief appeared to others. The deities a person keeps around play
some kind of role, however poorly, in protecting and reinforcing something that
they think they need. The commands of a sovereign god would hardly be noticed,
much less revered, if they were antithetical to the needs of the devotee. “The gods we stand by are the gods we need
and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on
ourselves and on one another.” Some of his conclusions regarding specific
beliefs were intriguing—an infinite god is a monstrosity, and orthodoxy is a
scare tactic—but his willingness to weigh particular faith tenets was brazen
and timely. Love this guy’s stones.
And because he spent a lot of time critiquing cherished
beliefs, he spent some time developing an apologia for his right to do so, lest
he be accused of a form of iconoclasm which he himself denounced. Even his
claim that human reason is prone to error resolved into a barricade, knowing
that he would be criticized by dogmatists for what appeared to be a
relativistic standpoint. Times haven’t changed much, and fundamentalist
Christians are still fighting with the same outmoded arguments against ‘higher
criticism.’ James would counter naysayers by declaring that his honesty about the
limits of reason and science only made him more believable. The burden of proof
remained incumbent on those who claimed to apprehend absolutes with a finite
mind. James was unassailable when he said he feared to “lose truth by this
pretension to possess it already wholly.”
How Belief Works
The psychology of belief enters into chapter 18 with
beautifully simple yet elegant summaries of belief and thought in religion. The
idea of belief being ‘thought at rest’ is poetic, and maybe a bit
revolutionary.
“Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the
attainment of belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject
has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely
begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action…to develop a thought’s meaning
we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce.”
That statement goes far to establish parameters for thought
and belief. Giving thought the sanction and time to do its business, without
rushing it to crystallize into any form for a span of time, helps it get its
job done right. When thought has finished its recon of a given subject and
available data, then settling on a decision—a commitment to believe which is an
act of the will—would be in order because, as James noted, settled decisions
guide future action. Thought, then, is the scout, and belief is the general
giving out orders. Understanding thought as belief at rest keeps thought and
belief from being confused, and in doing so gives thinkers and believers the
right to operate differently—thinkers in gathering and analyzing, believers in
creating rules for action—and both will feel the freedom and necessity to cross
over into alternate operations routinely. A believer must not always be a believer
only, nor a thinker a thinker, but each must in turn explore and decide for
human cognition to have the greatest advantage. It grieves me how little this
is understood or employed by those who call themselves thinkers and believers.
A thinker who believes nothing fails to act and live; a believer who no longer
thinks critically or independently can no longer change direction but barrels
down a path that they no longer choose. Both seem infatuated with an early
death.
What I didn’t like
For all of William James’ genius, there were still a few
things that proved him a man of his times. I’m not one to excuse the past for
being the past, so I’ll mention what I found to be disagreeable to me
personally, since I—let the minutes reflect—am the one reading it. As Nietzsche
once said, “It is my sympathy with the past that I see it abandoned.” So,
please humor me, and allow me the gratification of taking William James to task
for being—how shall I say—a stiff.
To start with, the author’s Insistence, towards the beginning of the book, that a
religious outlook must always be a solemn and serious look at life overshoots
just a tad. This, along with his praise of the ascetic trait in the section
titled “saints”, extols too highly the austere demeanor, even if it is well-suited
for some. I have to cry foul at this rhapsodic appraisal of the benefit of
solemnity. “[Religion] favors gravity, not pertness; it says ‘hush’ to all vain
chatter and wit.” In a way, I understand. He is trying to communicate that the
thrust of religion is that “all is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the
appearances may suggest”; but I and many others believe that wit , cynicism,
humor—even black comedy and gallows-humor— are staples of human personality and
hope, especially in extreme conditions. I know James didn’t have the pleasure
of meeting Mel Brooks, but from the sound of it, he may not have been thrilled
with Brook’s jab, “Humor is just another defense against the universe.” Why
could James not acknowledge that a cathartic cynicism inherent in dark humor
was replete through all religious texts in the form of laughter, irony,
sarcasm, tales of suffering and retribution, caustic apologia, polemical
retort, poetry, hyperbole, and in the will to pass on outlandish stories which
essentially evoke pleasure in paradox. I see no need to pitch religion against
the more sophisticated forms of intellectually satisfying humor (can you tell
how I get my kicks?). Even the line that James borrowed from Renan to epitomize
and condemn cynical authors, using their own words, is brilliant and defeating
to the intention of his use, “Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it
seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us”
(Renan). We’ve all heard it before, but you can laugh, or you can cry. I always
thought the response to that aphorism was obvious, but I guess some would
rather cry. Go figure.
Some of James’ defenses of religion and asceticism sounds
reaching, and throughout the book tautologies abound. “We can count upon the
saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other
person.” Huh? I know a lot of ‘saints’, and they aren’t all the lend-a-hand
types. Many are aloof, disrespectful, and oftentimes downright adversarial
towards anyone who is unlike them. I’m not saying that a sweeping justification
of unbelievers or a condemnation of so-called saints is in order, but neither
do I feel that an unqualified endorsement of believers solves any real
problems. Might actually create a few.
I also found James’ defense of choosing examples of extreme
religious passion to form the basis of his studies of the religious temperament
to be bizarre and not as helpful as he would have us believe. “The essence of
religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must judge them, must be
that element or quality in them which we can meet nowhere else. And such a
quality will be of course most prominent and easy to notice in those religious
experiences which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.” It appears he
wanted to have clearly defined boundaries for his research and reportage, but
unfortunately when it comes to religious experience, the varieties are legion;
and allowing the categories to be too sharply focused, when in reality the
issue is much more broad, cuts out a lot of relevant material that the greater
portion of humanity finds relatable.
Don’t get me wrong, I have often used the phrase “the extremes help
define the moderate,” but I think the absolute exclusion of the mean skews
results, as extreme examples can often jump categories and detract from
generalized applications. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein knew this well,
saying that in the realm ideas and language we must be careful not to attempt
to sharpen a mental picture or a word when a vague idea is more faithful to the
reality we experience. “Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct
picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we
need?...Imagine having to sketch a sharply defined picture ‘corresponding’ to a
blurred one” (from Philosophical Investigations). The real problem James ran
into was trying to go back and justify his critique of religious experience
based on exaggerated examples of neurotic, highly sensitive personalities that
actually only constitute a very small percentage of those who consider
themselves to have religious sensibilities. Besides that, he neatly severs all
those from his study who self-style themselves as religious by virtue of
second-hand belief and doctrinal fidelity (not having had a mystical experience
themselves, but desiring one), and this faithfulness is a very real facet of
religious experience as most people understand it, and which I happen to think
is a very useful and valid division of religious categorization.
Who knows, maybe the only available data for such a study
was primarily reportage from extraordinary cases of mystical transport in
neurotic and ultra sensitive people. Or maybe James simply wished his topic to
remain proscribed, thereby reducing the perceived influence of religion by
narrowing it in definition. But when he makes statements that suggest he
believes religion is a boon to mankind, and that it is here to stay, I wonder
if he has forgotten his narrow criteria for eccentric religious experience.
Later in the book he even swallows up the confines of his definition by
referring to the universality of religious reality, “By being religious we
establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at
which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private
destiny, after all…The love of life, at any and every level of development, is
the religious impulse.” He blows his category even wider by the statement, “The
‘more’ as we call it, and the meaning of our union with it, form the nucleus of
our inquiry.” Who doesn’t want to be united with the ‘more’? In these
sentiments his rubric begins to slip and he thinks, correctly in my opinion, of
religion for the masses and not for the peculiar few. But I’ll cut him some
slack. After all, he’s dead, and I’m not. So…there’s that.
Conclusion
James concludes quite
rightly that there are a multitude of ways to view and live life, and of these
ways there are different combinations and alternations of ideas, methods,
wants, and needs of different people in different places at different times.
How could there possibly be only one right way to think or act for so many
different contingencies? Our ideas and practices should be as diverse as the
sundry ways we each experience reality.
“What, in the end,
are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated
systems of ideas that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common
sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true?...And why,
after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many
interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation
by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as
mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by
analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each
time come out right?”
James deftly illustrates the validity of various ways of
believing and living by asking his readers to consider alone the way people
experience pain differently. “Does it not appear as if one who lived more
habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of
religion from one who habitually lived on the other?” Intolerance of religion
betrays a basic failure to understand the global variety of human temperament
and value expressions directly related to all the diverse factors that make us
unique. Again, it would be a huge step towards understanding each other if we
could at least acknowledge that there
are some people, maybe much more than we are comfortable in admitting, who
can’t find the same simple pleasure in existence as everyone else.
We have to get it into our skulls that we all need to
believe and express ourselves differently to manage our very unique lives. In
this central theme of the work, we hit the payload. DON’T MISS THIS!! Here,
James brings us to the crux of his interest in mystic states that he believes
are the quintessence of the authentic, because personal, religious experience:
“Some years ago I myself made some observations on this
aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One
conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth
has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness,
rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness,
whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie
potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
So there it is. James was religious himself, not in terms of
believing specific things about God or a Holy Book, but in so far as he had an
experience with nitrous oxide that had touched him profoundly, and helped him
see something new which had given him an unshakable confidence. What is this
new thing he realized through laughing gas?
“The keynote of it [nitrous illuminations] is invariably a
reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose [paradoxes] and
conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.”
Doesn’t sound so bad. So this is what James thinks people
are chasing, and what, I believe, he was chasing and seeking to validate in
this work. But really, generalizes the lesson in a way anyone can take
something home.
“No account of the universe in its totality can be final
which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded…At any rate,
they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”
Now that is fantastic. Why would we shut each other out—each
person being a window to other worlds, feelings, hopes, dreams, loves—when we
could be seeing everything new through each other? Why would I only limit
myself to one way of viewing the world, one defined and unchangeable self to
experience it, one mode of expressing the joy, struggle, and courage of my
existence? It makes perfect sense that we should all experience the universe in
as many different ways as we are each different, and report back to each other
in words and images that are faithful to the extraordinary and unspeakable ways
it feels to BE ME. Why would we limit that???…unless we are afraid. Fear is as
valid an experience and view as any other, but it is just ONE! How sad when
fear is the only view we allow. In shutting out discomfort and even the
possibility of danger to our egos, we risk shutting out hope, love, and beauty.
I don’t want to shut any window that might bring a word or a vision from beyond
the walls of my skin. It appears James didn’t want that either. The Other is a
chance for salvation from a very limited life and perspective.
“For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is
enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to
live on a chance.”
