William James' Varieties of Religious Experience

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 8 of 13

William James'
Varieties of Religious Experience
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 22, 1985

Transcript:
The date is August 22nd, 1985. This is the seventh lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Transformational America. Tonight's lecture is entitled William James Varieties of Religious Experience Consciousness As The Multiple Faceted Integral.

William James. We’re basically trying to understand the American experience and we're discovering problems. The problem is that we were never educated properly. We were never told about our heritage and our background in a way that we could understand it in a way that we could live it. And so, we have turned to television. We have turned to popular sports. We've turned to everything except ourselves, our own tradition. And we have discovered throughout this year that every time we go back to our tradition, we're rewarded. That there's an unbroken stream of excellence in the tradition. And we hope to show that it goes right up until the present day.

Now we have three lectures and William James. And I won't give a lot of introductory material because I gave that three years ago and that tape is still available. I listened to it today. And aside from five minutes on the second side that somewhat shaky in terms of sound, the lecture still holds. It still stands.

James is our most important figure after Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson who closed out the 18th century and open the 19th was the protean genius who gave the American matrix i's real shape. And William James who closed out the 19th and opened up the 20th, gave American thought to the world. And the form of that thought was psychology. Because before there was any Jung or any Freud, there was a William James. It is the same relationship that Lafayette had to Napoleon. The vary same relationship. And if you recall that story, Lafayette was around after Napoleon was finished.

James is being rediscovered today, the last five or 10 years. And the people who are rediscovering him are in the vanguard of European thought. There are the phenomenologists and the existentialists. They're the individuals who are discovering that when James talks about fields of consciousness, he's talking very much in the way in the 1980’s that phenomenologists would talk. When the idea of the stream of consciousness it bore immediate fruit in Europe. And the European artistic and literary experience of the early decades of the 20th century is all fruit of the tremendous development that William James gave to human thought. He is being rediscovered today.

And probably one of the more interesting volumes that has come out, it's called William James Unexceptional Mental States [William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures] published by the University of Massachusetts Press. And another book called The Radical Empiricism of William James by John Wilde published by Anchor Books. These two books I would suggest to you. And there is a selection of The Essential Writings of William James [William James: The Essential Writings] and Harper and Row paperback. And these three together would give you a good introduction to James.

My cassette of three and a half years ago, we'll make these available to you.

What we're going to do tonight is we're going to look at one of James’ most influential volumes called titled The Varieties of Religious Experience. And in this volume, which was actually a series of lectures James establishes probably conclusively in human history that there are many, many paths to the top of the mountain. And that the top of the mountain is not available to be described with specific exactness but knowing man he will never give up. And in his continuing efforts to try to specifically understand what it is that he believes in and why he believes in it. This is the whole dynamic, which William James prizes.

And we'll see in the third lecture that towards the end of his life, he began talking about pluralistic universes. And this is a very up to date and accurate scientific way to discourse.

I mentioned in the lecture of three and a half years ago, that James was a prodigy. That he and his brother, the famous novelist, Henry James. And incidentally, to a lesser extent, their sister Alice, were purposely raised by their father to be geniuses. When they were in the cribs. He began teaching them Greek and Latin by reading to them so that they would learn subconsciously. And he never let up. But because of Henry James Sr. religious experiences. He had an experience with other panic in his life and had to come to terms with it in some way. And found through Swedenborgianism religion, an experiential matrix out of which he could finally live. And he was independently wealthy. And so, he wanted to see what human beings were like if they were raised from birth with the best quality intellectual background available. The two sons became world famous, and the daughter ended up in an institution.

If there are any screenwriters here, a screenplay on Alice James would be a winner.

William James in his own life was always precocious. And he was Magna cum laude from the word go until he was about 20 years of age. And he went to the Amazon jungles with Louis Agassiz is a great natural scientist. And when he got to Rio de Janeiro for some reason life smashed in mind and he spent three months not knowing whether he was going to survive or not. Not knowing, probably not caring, who he had been. He was trying to figure out what he was. He recovered almost miraculously and ended up spending five months in the Amazon jungles. And he didn't stay with the scientific collecting groups. He made friends with the native Indians and would go off for weeks and sometimes a month at a time by himself with just the natives through the Amazon jungles. It's the old shamanistic way of confronting death by exposing yourself to the universe. If it's going to eat me up to better eat me up now. And if it doesn't, then I have good reason to believe that I'm worth saving. And this is what James did. He committed himself as a young man of 20 years of age to the Amazon jungle completely.

And when he came back, he had a kind of a secret charisma about him. Not the flashy charisma that we're used to with video personalities. But that kind of quiet insightfulness which scintillates. And he was spotted by the new president of Harvard University. A man named Elliot. And Elliot picked him out to be the star of Harvard University, which at that time was just beginning to really grow. This is the 1870’s. And so, he prepared the way for William James to succeed. He created a chair for him. He first lectured in physiology and then shifted over to psychology. And then finally they wanted to make him both the head of the departments of philosophy and psychology.

But all through his life, William James refused to be an image of a single personality. He was always alert to the fact that his psyche was permeable. And that his real nature might be [inaudible] at any time and that might be different from what he had thought. And so, James, all his life prepared himself to grow continuously without stop and to a never identify himself.

And eventually in his maturity. And we're getting to his maturity with The Varieties of Religious Experience. William James had made this a code of life. And this code of life included speaking for the millions of people who could not speak for themselves. That they have a right to be human in whatever way they are trying to discover themselves in their own lives.

James, at the time of writing The Varieties of Religious Experience was probably one of the most famous men in the world. Probably the only man in the world more famous than William James was Leo Tolstoy. They were household words. They were figures of international report. And James in The Varieties of Religious Experience was invited to Scotland, which in 1901 was still the bastion of English British Empire culture. Not London, but Edinburgh. The Scots will always tell you it's they who built the British Empire and not the English. How could the English build an empire? It was the Scotsman who built it. with his kill kit kilt and his caboodle.

So, James lectured at the University of Edinburgh to this gathering of world professionals. And the lectures were the Gifford Lectures, and they were supposed to be about religion. And almost all the Gifford Lectures had been about standard religion, theology, doctrine stuff. James tore to shreds the whole comforting theme And with his lecture series absolutely startled the world at that time. It was like the most famous intellectual in the world saying we don't know, nobody knows the real shape of religion. Whatever you're doing that makes sense to you is probably a good thing to continue with. Keep your integrity and enjoy the journey. This was a real beacon, a real herald, at the time. And it did a lot to clear away the intellectual cobwebs.

The first of the 20 lectures was entitled Religion And Neurology. And James remember now was the expert in the world on what we would today call clinical and empirical psychology. His huge two volume tone The Principles of Psychology was the basic resource for psychologists in the world. And his shorter excerpt of its Psychology The Briefer Course was the textbook everywhere in the world that psychology was taught. It was translated in all the major languages.

So he began from a point that he was considered expert on religion and neurology. And he writes here. He says, “I make these general remarks about two sorts of judgment,” the spiritual judgment and the existential judgment. Two kinds of judgment, which are distinct.

I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment because there are many religious persons. Some of you now present possibly among them, who do not yet making working years of the distinction. And who may therefore feel at first a little startled at the purely existential point of view from which in the following lectures the phenomena of religious experience must be considered.

In other words, whatever we happen to believe individually or collectively or traditionally is a spiritual judgment. And that has its place. Indeed, it has a major place. In fact, probably the major place in human affairs. But distinct from that is that the existential judgment, which has made visa vie the not about what we really believe deep down. Or what collectively we happen to decide upon. Or collectively happened to enjoy it in terms of a tradition. But that there is an existential judgment, which directs itself towards religious objects. And you can think first of religious objects like little statues or religious symbols or of church buildings. But eventually James will say that we must extend the existential judgment and our field of consciousness to include among religious objects the practices of religion. The words which we use. The approaches which we use. And that with this extension everything in religious experience becomes available to an existential judgment.

The question at this time that was asked what is going to be left if you do this? Are you not shredding religious experience into purely existential diced up objective phenomena? And James’ reply is yes, indeed. That is exactly what we're going to do. And we are going to discover that it doesn't make one bit of difference that we do that. We still are going to believe. And we're still going to have spiritual judgments. And they are going to be even more effective than ever. Because we are going to clear away a subliminal nightmare that has been encroaching upon man and now has become epidemic. And that's the feeling that we better not think too clearly about God, he may not be there. And James is going to say, let's think really clearly about him. And we will discover that the tradition world around for all time is that spiritual judgments are precisely true and they're not guesswork at all. And they are precisely true because when we analyze every single thing intelligently, existentially, we're faced with the monumental task that life actually works. It actually goes on. That all of this does in fact that together, and it's more mysterious than ever. There's not less mystery but there's more mystery. And James will leave the subject roughly in that shape. And it will be incumbent on those who come later to try and juggle around and say, well, maybe if we just go partway and put the analysis of existential judgments together in certain arrays, we can find some medium way to dice up reality. And of course, we have found in our own time that even when you approach it this way, it creates even more mystery than ever.

So, he writes in here, he says,

When I handle these religious objects biologically and psychologically as if they were mirror curious facts of individual history some of you may think of that degradation of so sublime a subject. And may even suspect me until my purpose gets more fully expressed of deliberately seeking to discredit the religious side of life. Such a result of course, is absolutely alien to my intention. And sends such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effort of much of what I have to relate. I will devote a few more point words to this point.

In other words, James, by 1901 had brought the American tradition to a kind of a climax of resolution, which was now a worldwide concern. And we have seen in this particular lecture series that that whole movement was exacerbated in the American experience by the Civil War. That the Civil War was not just an issue of economic and military might but was an issue of the spiritual bifurcation within the American psyche, within the American spirit. And how at that time two different split off visions came out of this. One was the totally positive vision of Walt Whitman. And the other was the totally pessimistic vision of Herman Melville. And those two visions had plunged into the depths, the profound depths of human nature. And William James now was trying to bring back together these two views. And he will talk in here towards the middle of the lecture series about the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of sickly mindedness. And how both of these aspects of human nature need to be addressed with honesty and courage. And that the only way that we can address them both with honesty and courage is to have a methodology to follow which we keep exactly the same in both cases. So that our prejudices, our predilections, both conscious and subconscious. And James would stress that we need to keep track of all of these levels. Only by keeping a consistency of approach will we be able to learn something. And what we will learn we must not shirk from.

So, he writes in here, “There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life exclusively pursued does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.” And many of you have discovered that if you, if you pursue these issues, you will soon have fewer people to talk to about this. And if you chat about this publicly in the open at a ball game, you will be stared at. You'll become eccentric in the eyes of others.

He says, “Usually, religion for human beings is something which was made by others. Some founder long ago developed by many, many, many people into doctrines, into comfortable traditions. And for most people, that's it.” And this institutionalized religion, he says, is very interesting and very important. He's not going to talk about it at all. He's going to talk about the individual's experience in religion. He says, this is what is fascinating, but more than fascinating, or in fact fascinating because of a very particular reason, but the very essential nature of the individual is discoverable in this field of consciousness called religious experience. It's about the only place in human experience where our real individual self is discernible. That the whole spectrum of human life, rather like the electromagnetic spectrum, has many avenues and spreads over a wide range of capacity. But just like in the electromagnetic spectrum, only the narrow band of visible light allows us to see in a material way, in a perceptual way, to see a human being and see the features of their face and recognize who that is. Anywhere else on the electromagnetic spectrum they are not recognizable. If you could see with x-ray eyes, you would not see a person. You would see the heat like waves of the x-ray. If you could see in the cosmic ray spectrum, you wouldn't see a person there at all. You would see an approximate interchange of wave blur. It is only invisible light.

So, to religious experience for the stream of human consciousness is the only place where the comprehensive individual exists. So that the purpose of extending the methodology of existential judgment has an ulterior strategic reason behind it. We wish after all to discover the biggest game of all. We wish to understand and to see, to capture who it is that we are. And this is why religion is of permanent interest to individuals. That the institutional religion is something else again. That's a question of habit, of upbringing, of taste, but individual religion is a matter of experience in consciousness. And the individual who was able to have experience and consciousness once discovering that he or she had that capacity almost never gives up that quest. Almost never.

So, James, in, towards the end of Religion And Neurology. He writes,

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the two simple minded system of thought, which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex.

The occipital cortex is up here. And that's a medical description of up epileptic fit.

He says,

It's snuffs out Saint Teresa as a heretic because she was hysterical and unstable. Saint Francis of Assisi was a hereditary degenerate. George Fox is discontent with the shams of his age and his pining for spiritual veracity as treats as a symptom of a disordered colon.

And he goes on.

So, he says that “Medical materialism is more ridiculous than any other known human perspective.” And he's speaking now as a medical psychologist. He's saying we cannot pursue this avenue at all. And so, we're moving in another way. He says,

In fact, medical materialism thinks that the spiritual authority of all such persons is, is thus successfully undermined by demonstrating that they were suffering from this, that, and the other. Let us ourselves look at the matter. And they largest possible way. Modern psychology finding definite psychophysical connections to hold good assumes a convenient hypothesis. That the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete.

Remember, he's delivering this lecture 85 years ago.

If we adopt the assumption, then of course, what medical materialism insist on must be true in a general way if not in every detail. Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid, if not an epileptic seizure. George Fox certainly fits the category. Carlisle and the rest. But now I ask you how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance. According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are. And if we only knew the facts independently enough, we should doubtless see the liver determining the diet of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does the Methodist under whose conviction anxious about his soul so that his blood percolates one way and not another. But it is needless to say that none of medical materialism draws in point of fact any conclusions. It is sure just as every simple man is sure that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others and revealed to us more truth. And then this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these of its favorite states by which it may accredit them in its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction is all together, illogical and inconsistent.

This whole process of making a correlation between body and experience has its illogical structure to it. So, he says, we're going to have to play fair with his whole region.

And he says,

You can see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles by which the empirical philosophy has always contended. That we must be guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for truth, which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct mark by noting, which we can be protected immediately and absolutely now and forever against all mistake. Such has been the darling dream of philosophical dogmatists for all time and everywhere. It is clear that the origin of truth would be an admirable criteria of the sort but that we cannot find any permanent real origins.

That the more finally we grind, the more there is to see. The further we go in this way, the more exceeds our grasp. That in fact, we cannot find any place to begin from to have an empirical medical materialism. We don't have any real basis for it anywhere. It is not discoverable.

It is just like in the lecture on Tuesday and Wednesday night and Clement of Alexandria, where he pointed out that is very wonderful to be logical, but that one cannot be logical about the whole person. Because any logical system, any logical methodology, cannot reflect back upon its own axiomatic origins. It cannot define its own basis. And therefore, in terms of wholes, any logic becomes in terms of its own definitional process an irrational procedure. It is only temporarily rational on small narrow parts. As soon as you start to widen the scope, it becomes more and more irrational. Perfect example of this in our time is the complex computers which have lists of errors that come out. The glitches that go with the system. And the larger the computer, the longer the glitch list. And when you get a really complex computer in really fine working order, you have to be an almost an artist to keep it working. But the human brain of it is a logical computer is several million times more complex and has been running continuously for close to a billion years. And its glitch system is longer than we could even measure. So that we have to face the irrationality of that whole procedure. And James courageously in 1901 is saying let's really be radically empirical about it and set aside these impossible dreams. And let's do what we can in fact do. Let's look at it as human beings. As individuals who really do have experience. We really do think about this experience. And we'd like to talk to other human beings straight out in as plain language as possible and complicated if it needs to be, only if it needs to be. And let's discuss what are we experiencing. What is happening? What is this religious experience that we seem to have? And so, he concludes with Psychology And Neurology.

And lecture two was A Circumspection of The Topic. And what he's tried to do is maintain himself at one position and to look completely round in a circumspect circle, as it were to see what are the ranges in the limits for this. And in doing so James reveals, discovers and reveals his discovery that the self of the experiential, all of our selves does not have any defined edges. We more or less know where we are, but we don't have any real defined edges. We're like a blur in the middle of an extensive field whose ends go off into the distance everywhere. And this blur shapes itself more or less in different compartments. And it changes not only in different ages, we're quite different at 50 than we were at 14. But we're also different at six in the morning than we were at 12 o'clock last night. So that the human self is a very malleable focus. And in fact, does not inhabit the box called the brain, but its experiential being in a field of consciousness whose extent is massive and whose dimensionality is as yet unplugged.

But further than that James will disclose that even outside of these infinitudes there are experiences which come into our field of consciousness from without. And sometimes they not only penetrate our field of consciousness, but they come into our very personal experience. And he says, we know that this happens. It's not some crazy guy locked up in Paris who thinks that this is happening. This in fact happens, and anybody can prove this to himself honesty. So, he says the true extent of the universe for human beings is awesome and largely unknown. And all that that we can go on is honest about what really has happened to us. And to expect that the other person is going to be as honest as they can be and to learn, to listen to each other. And that this is in fact, a very interesting process once one introduces a methodology of honesty into the dialogue, into the process of reflection. This raises it up them away from the daydreaming away, from the wondering and quandering into what James will call finally philosophy.

And he will say that this philosophy in fact has the name, which was given to it by a friend of his named Charles Sanders Pierce taken from the Greek, called pragmatism. From the Greek word for action. That even though we cannot plumb to the origins of something we can see what it is that we're actually doing. And in our experience we can come to judgments about what we are doing. And that these existential judgments have a tendency in our integrity to translate themselves, to extend themselves, out of the personal into the transpersonal, into the whole field of consciousness. And the existential judgment then becomes a spiritual judgment in just this way.

So that the religious person is someone for whom they becoming very real to themselves and they realize the reality of themselves extends quite really and practically to the realm of others. And if they need to do a lot of interchanging. He says, what gets in the way of realizing this of coming to terms with this, of being honest about this is that there is a lot of obscurity aneurysm that passes under the title, and he calls it religious sentiment. Religious sentiment.

He says,

Religious sentiment we see referred to in so many books as if it were a single sort of mental entity. In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion we find authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man aligns it to the feeling of dependence. One makes it a derivative from fear. Others connect it with the sexual life. Still others identify it with the feeling of the infinite. And so, on and on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific thing. And the moment we are willing to treat the term religious sentiment as a collective name for the many sentiments, which religious objects arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature.

This is why James’ method is called radical empiricism. Radical empiricism. Because it is based upon an individuals actual practical assessment of what is happening in terms of what is actually going on. Not in speculative terms of what you would like to believe are the origins of this, that, or the other, but what actually is happening. What is happening to me as an existential being that's really affecting me so that I'm either feeling pretty good about something morning or now for three weeks [inaudible] because it's getting to me. Those things are concerned. And they're not things but they are in fact, qualities of undulation in a field of consciousness, which has as its focus on existential awareness, which in itself seems to change its shape hourly and sometimes minute by minute. And yet has a recognizable matrix, which we call ourselves.

And James would like to talk about this. And he says, this is the, this is the topic that I really wish to discuss. So that,

Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that underlies such expressions of faith is this and impel the writer to their utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences. The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism on the one hand and Buddhistic pessimism on the other hand make to the individual. And the sort of response which he makes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from and in many respects identical with the best Christian appeal and response. We must therefore from the experiential point of view call Godless or quasi-Godless creeds religions.

That we can just put a definition of saying religion means that we're understanding that there is a God of such and such dimension. That in fact, we're not at all sure that that is absolutely essential. What we do know is that there are many varieties and many ways to experience presence without conjuring it up into a shape of an image of a person. Or an idol. Or an abstract principle. That there are many other ways in which this can be done just as well, but that the other ways do not differ methodologically in terms of an existential judgment. In terms of pragmatically, how they really do affect us. So that whether somebody is a Buddhist, or a Christian makes absolutely no difference to William James.

We are going to talk about religion. And accordingly, when in our definition of religion, we speak of the individual's relation to what he considers divine we must interpret divine very broadly as denoting, any object that has God, like whether it be a concrete divinity or not. But the term God-like, if thus treated as a floating general quality becomes exceedingly vague. For many gods have flourished in religious history and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then is that essential God-like quality? Be embodied in the concrete deity or not. Our relation to which determines our character as religious man. It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we proceed further. For one thing, God's are conceived to be first things in the way of being in power. They overarch and envelop and from them there is no escape. What relates to them as the first and last word in the way of truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and truly deeply felt by at this rate be treated as God-like. And a man's religion might just be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be towards what he felt to be the primal truth.

END OF SIDE ONE

[inaudible] I outlined the whole book for her, and I can't do it. I don’t have time. So, the problem is what to throw out. You’ll just have to read it for yourself.

The third lecture was on the Reality of The Unseen. And James when he's talking about the unseen begin talking about the unconscious, but he began to talking about abstraction. Because for William James if you talk about the odd unconscious it’s a metaphysical speculation, it's not empirical at all. Much less radically empirical. Because these elements come into the field of consciousness and sometimes peer into the stream of consciousness James with his existential judgment refuses to label them with any kind of [inaudible] and simply says that these are for us abstractions. And he brings this out in the chapter in the lecture called Reality of The Unseen. He says,

We also have to consider time, space, [inaudible]. All of his abstracts. Essential goodness. Essential beauty. Strength. Significance. Justice. Such ideas and others equally abstract forms of background for all our facts.

It is very profound.

Let’s use a word from [inaudible] here, the texture of the background determines the angle of vision from which the form is seen. It's not simply that what has to have a background in order to see a form. That is so. But it's more uncannily specific than that even. The texture of the background determines the vantage, the perceptual thesis from which we must see that form. And thus, the texture of reality is fundamentally for human experience [inaudible] abstract. That it is an abstract. Not because we want to make it so, but that in its pragmatic functioning that it is so. The naive person, the naive mind, encountering such abstractness themselves for the first time, fear this and think it some alien presence. They think their life is flapping out. All kinds of reactions to this. And the normal happening that abstract backgrounds are there for all of our factuality and that specific abstract shapes come into our field of processes and loom there significantly. We have to take this into consideration.

This absolute determined ability of our mind by abstractions is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them. We seek them, hold them, hate them, bore them just as if they were so many concrete beings. Because we're [inaudible] them all the time with expectation, with habitual imagery. So that we don't experience them as they are. We don't have the existential judgment to experience their abstractness per say. We think that there some somebody angelic or demonic. And none of that is applicable. None of that can be admitted to in radical empiricism because it [inaudible]. You may make it so later on, and that's your prerogative he’ll say. Whatever you want to do is fine. But to think that this is primordial that's the jungle. That’s the nightmare. That’s where we don't ever have real experience. And that is why we're here religiously at home with our consciousness until we come down to basics. Until we stop clothing them with the expectations. [inaudible] the institutionalized are [inaudible]. This is why institutionalized religion imprisons are our consciousness into habit. And that to free ourselves from this is the basic religious impulse to experience reality as it is. He says,

Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human field. And it seems as if they are beings. Beings as real and the realm, which they inhabit of the changing things of sense in the realm of space. But that it just not so.

So, he says,

The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere articulate reason, articulate reasons, are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of some conclusion. Then indeed our intuitions and are reasons work together in great world ruined systems like the Buddhist, or the Catholic philosophy [inaudible]. Our impulsive belief is here always. What sets up the original body of truth and our articulately verbalized philosophy is that it’s showy translation into formulas.

And we're all the time putting our [inaudible] mentally non-belief into the formula. And the formulas all the time are translation from feelings. And feeling is the substrate of the flow of consciousness and doesn't have any definite [inaudible] to it. There's no specificity there at all. But the desire, the urge, the impulse to make it be even against its own will or its own nature looms very strong when people are habitually comported towards reality. And in this way institutions make us lie to ourselves. But that the individual cannot get away with lying to himself forever. Because when he has real religious experience he knows that all of this is simply icing on the cake. That it isn't the real thing at all. And this produces the divided self.

And the last lectures that we've had here, the last seven lectures, show that this is exactly what happened to the American character in the middle of the 19th century. That it's led into a divided self because it tried to force an alien doctrinaire understanding of life upon a primordial wilderness. A feeling substrate that was very pure and very wide open, like the virgin landscape, which we came to inhabit. And the fact that that did not take is what broke and became manifest as the Civil War. That whole doctrinaire approach broke. And Whitman and Melville are like the spinning nuclear particles and opposites that came out of that.

And so, James is trying to in some way reinstate if not a reconciliation of this at least the conditions under which a reconciliation would be reasonably possible. And he understands quite clearly as a very courageous man would, that this is a religious concern. This is not a political concern at all. Very serious concern. And so, he says, what happened? What happened to the United States? And what is happening now in the world 1901. He says, we have a sudden inundation of mind pure religions springing into being. All kinds of mind pure religion. Trying to circumvent the operations of the mind and go back directly to feeling, this universal feeling quality. But this is simply ignores the real root of the problem, which is the experience of these abstractions coming into our field of consciousness. Which evidently is a universal phenomenon. And because consciousness is not wanting to receive them, they are unwelcoming guests. They're unwelcome even if they are helping us. It isn't just that we're exiling the demons, we’re exiled only the angels also. The spirit helpers of any nature whatsoever all being exiled. And where are they being exiled to? They're being exiled to the peripheries of the field of consciousness. And there they gain energy and come back stronger than ever. And he says, we have a real problem with this. And he says, we're going to have a problem in the future with this.

And in his section on the sixth soul, he turns to the case of Tolstoy. And he says, this problem is not limited to people who don't understand life. Who are ignorant. Who are unlettered. Who are simple. He says, nobody has exempt. Who was more developed consciously and artistically and personally, and socially than Leo Tolstoy. And he had an utter complete breakdown, and he wrote about it in a book called My Confession. Not very long. It's about 90 pages. He went through a year of his life where he had every gun in the house because he had an overwhelming impulse to get one out and end it. And he sat down, and he wrote down four different alternatives that were available for him, including ignoring the whole thing and including suicide. And he realized that the only thing that he could do given his background was suicide and yet he couldn't do it. Because there was some kind of a presence within him that forbade this. And he was brave enough as an artist that he struggled mightily to try and imagine what this image is and nothing would come out. And this is what drove him into panic. The psychological dry heave because he couldn't come up with anything. The world's greatest novelists can't come up with an image then you're really in trouble, aren't you?

But James says, it's just this point that finally cleared itself up in Tolstoy. That there's no image there. That whole approach is wrong. It’s trying to force something from the external world, from the material world, upon the spirit and the spirit works in different way. It's different. And the only interchange point, the only fulcrum that we can really stand on and really do something is the existential one. We have to be ourselves. It's the only place in the universe that is safe. And it is safe because it's the only place where the energies can interchange. And if we're not there, here where we are then we're a moving target from both sides. And that's why we're in trouble. And that's why the divided self and the sixth soul keeps asking again and again, why. Why? What for? And there's no response. Because until we're present to ourselves here as individuals, there can be no response. Because the response has to come from us, not from out there and not from in here, but from us. And the only way that that response can come out is if we are present to ourselves courageously. And that's the one thing we don't want to be because we think if we get there to ourselves, then we're done for aren’t we because we're going to be crushed by all that pressure. And so, this becomes a real complete problem.

What happens in this kind of a situation, James says, more often than not is that there's a conversion. We realized that the very thing that we didn't want to get to, ourselves, is in fact, the very thing that we have to get to. And that's a conversion. And we suddenly wake up to the fact that we can do this in two beautiful effortless ways. One, we can give up struggling. The way of surrender. And the other, we can coordinate for ourselves, intellectually by old pragmatic methodology that this is in fact the place where resolution can happen. And only under those conditions of being an individual actively alert and present to himself, can this happen. Either way, he says it really doesn't make any difference. And when you look at human history and all the different religions. You take your pick of religion and time and place. Either of these two ways work equally well. The one is the way of the mind, and the other is the way of feeling. And they work perfectly well. And he sees no choice between one or the other.

He says then, what seems to be different is that when one gives up in a surrender way the conversion seems to be rather instantaneous. One has a sudden revelation that a burden is gone. But when one works at out in terms of consciousness, in terms of philosophy, in terms of the psychology it's gradual, and one has to develop patience. If one's going to take that way, then you have to be patient about it and work at it continuously. That the continuity then becomes the most important thing because your continuous gradual movement has to be sort of uninterrupted because you're not trying to get to some place, but you're trying to see the wholeness of a durational movement. And only by going through the whole durational movement can you get the sense of what it is. And this is where the mind is always stymied because it's used to locating classically in terms of place and focus. It wants to get the dot. Or cross the line. And there's no line and no dot there. But the individual isn't the dot. It isn't the line. Isn't a set shape and identity which the individual can then come back to in some sort of a geometric kind of grew up and say, well, I'm home because there's nothing like that there. And that expectation is what keeps forbidding one and throwing one out because you're getting into the blur, which is you. And he keeps saying, no, it's not me. That's what I'm afraid of. So, he say this is a real problem until we start to think, he says, in terms of the field of consciousness. This is a phrase that James really made world famous at this time. He says, once we understand the phrase field of consciousness, then we've got some language which expresses real experience which does some work for us.

So, in the chapter on conversion about midway through Varieties of Religious Experience, he writes,

The expression field of consciousness has but recently come into vogue in psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which figured most was the single idea that [inaudible] supposed to be a definitely outlined thing. But at present psychologists are attending first to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness, or field of objects present of the thought at any time. And second, to see that it's impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness.

This is 1901. This would translate into physics in one generation. In less than one generation. It would stop talking about atoms and start talking about energy fields. And the mind would be able to unlock atomic structure, and nuclear physics would be born. This is how profound is this thought is because once [inaudible] stop using the wrong methodology and start using the right methodology their own interior need to know and their own day not to lie to themselves, both take over and [inaudible]. Because under these conditions no one's going to lie to themselves. You don't have time to make something up. Last thing you want to have as a detour, only the truth. Nothing else will do. And it’s this primordial honesty, incidentally, that makes you strong. Everybody in that community knows that everybody else is true as they can possibly be because they don't, they fear any kind of lying. Any kind of ossification. Any kind of [inaudible] thinking. And they look upon people who do not have this direct and this honesty as others. They're not in our community.

So, he says,

As our mental field, as our mental field succeed one another each has its center of interest around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to a margin so faint that at the limits are unattainable. Some fields are narrow fields. Some fields that are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, but then we see masses of [inaudible] together and often get [inaudible] of relations, which we divine rather than see where they shoot beyond the field into something still remoter. Regions of objectivity. Regions which we see rather to be about to perceive then actually proceed.

We've all had that feeling.

At other times of drowsiness, illness or fatigue our fields that they know almost to a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed, and contracted. Different individuals present, present a constitutional differences in this matter of what the field. And your great organizing geniuses are you able to people with habitually fields of mental vision and with your whole program of future operations appear at once. The rays shooting far ahead into definite directions of advanced.

One of the great examples of this is the letter testimony from Mozart that he never wrote down a symphony until it heard it complete in his mind. Because he didn't want to fudge on the paper. He wanted to be spiritually integral. And so, until he had experienced it himself, in his spirit, he didn't commit it to profane paper. And when it was finished he just wrote it down. I think he wrote 650 works that way. The first one at the age of five or six. Like Mark Twain said some of us come into the world asking for a life. Be cautious.

“Another thing beyond and attended to the development of mind pure religions”, he says, “is the development of hypnotism.” Now, early in the 19th century, it was called mesmerism or animal magnetism. But by 1900, it was called hypnotism. And he says, this was very revealing to us. That words can shape attitudes and suggestions to the mind and leave an actual trace. That it is not simply a metaphysical speculation that words have existential and spiritual repercussions. They actually do. He says, this is a very big discovery. And that attended upon this was the development of the notion that there is a subliminal consciousness, a sub consciousness, which is real. He says, this is the most outstanding development. And he said that he dates that conception from about 1886 when people first began to think conclusively, empirically in a radical empirical viewpoint that their existential judgement was that the subliminal states are real. That they are a part of our consciousness. They dovetail into our field of consciousness and extend beyond.

So, he says the realm of modern man has suddenly widened. It's not that people did not know about this before. He does. In fact, with these understandings we now go back to the world of classics, and they make more sense to us than ever. We read them all now. And he says they are all interesting to us. We don't throw anything away anymore. [inaudible] tradition. But he says for us, the difference is, is that we're becoming conscious in terms of an existential judgment, that this is in fact the case, is in fact, the structure of our inner nature. So that it's more incumbent than ever upon 20th century human beings to be individuals. And that paradoxically, the fear of being individuals is going to rise at the same time because of their religious interrelations. And so, he looks forward.

In Varieties of Religious Experiences, he says, they're going to have a lot of problems with the future. It's going to be more and more necessary to be an individual and more and more difficult to be an individual. And that it's not a problem that we can shirk because the two of them go together and it’s here to stay. And so, he's giving these lectures and writing this book at the beginning of the 20th century to say, whatever you want to do don't narrow down the possibilities for a religious experience for somebody else. They may need to have all that space. It may not be an error to them. It may not be a misunderstanding to them. They have to find their own way for themselves because it's only in finding themselves that they could ever relate to you as yourself. And so mutual freedom is the only way in which man is ever going to be able to live from here on out.

Well, all we're about out of time and there's much more, and we'll just keep after it next week.

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