William James' A Pluralistic Universe

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 9 of 13

William James’ A Pluralistic Universe
Consciousness Expressed As a Matrix of Unbounded Ratios
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 29, 1985

Transcript:
The date is August 29th, 1985. This is the ninth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Transformational America. Tonight's lecture is entitled William James A Pluralistic Universe Consciousness Expressed As a Matrix 0f Unbounded Ratios.
Let's see, maybe we should recapitulate just for a moment what is strategically being said here. Because obviously it's not being appreciated in the sense of not being really understood. The P.R.S. mailing list is 30,000 strong and you can see that it's irrelevant to the P.R.S. function seemingly and this is due to misunderstanding.
It is almost incontestable wow that human life has a pattern flowing within it. And that this pattern has a wave form manifestation cycle. For instance, 3000 years ago, mankind is a species encountered around the planet at isentropic rise in creative perception, which culminated in cultural archetypes and prototypes. And that era receded and those images that were left worked in control for about 600 years the development of man on this planet.
About 3000 years ago in China, you have the sudden rise of philosophic and religious insight that produced The I-Ching. At the very same time in India, you had the similar occurrence that produced The Rigveda. In Greece at the very same time, you had the same kind of a rise that produced the Homeric epics. And then the new world the Olmec civilization is contemporaneous with this. All around 1100 B.C. The evidence is there.
And about 600 years after that individual human beings encapsulated those wisdom manifestations in themselves. In China you had the Lao-Tzu. In India you had the Buddha. In Greece, you had Pythagoras. There was a kind of a one, two punch. There was a cultural or civilized matrix which came to maturity. And after it had leavened the culture for about 600 years, it produced Earth shaking human beings.
Now this pattern has repeated itself now several times within our recorded history. And we today are receiving a criss cross between all of these traditions, between all of the heritages. So that we live at a crossroads in history. The late 20th century, the early 21st century, is a crossroads in man's experience.
Now, there only was one time like this ever in the world in any culture matrix. And it wasn't an ancient Atlantis. It was about 1700 years ago. The Hellenistic cultures of the West and the Mahayana cultures of the East, which were interrelated, interpenetrated, were the first time that such a crossroads was achieved. The crossroads at that time did not take. There was not a world civilization that came out. It was nascently there in many different areas. And there were pockets of cosmic human beings. Mostly in Alexandria. And mostly in the Gobi desert. And mostly in Northeast India. Even in the new world with the Mayans. None of it took. All of those people perished. All of those people were absorbed again by polarized conditions which they had sought to bring together into a unity. And so, their unity was unable to obtain in their various cultures and in the world as a whole. And as a consequence, the last 1700 years have been an attempt to reformulate and come back to that crossroads again. And we are there. We are there now. We've been there probably for most of our lifetimes. And the struggle continues and goes on.
The issue is will mankind have a world. That man is too powerful now to have several worlds. That the condition of having several worlds is a polarizing event. And the tensions that would bring people together also can push them apart. The same thing. It's the same energy. It's just like in a marriage. The same elan. The same feelings and passions that bring people together also, in a negative sense, can drive them apart. We face this very practical issue. There's nothing else to talk about in our time. Everything else is entertainment. Everything else is speculation.
In this world culture, in this crossroads, the United States is the key factor. It is beyond any shadow of a doubt the place. The American people are the people that have a very important and essential character to now display at this time. And the counterpart to the American people are the Chinese people. And the Chinese and the American people in a very real way are the polarities of so-called East-West. That if that can be brought into complementation we’re going to have a world culture.

The difficulty is that the United States culture is almost completely misunderstood. It is not taught in universities. It is not taught in the homes. Almost nobody that you run across has any kind of education or background in our own tradition. People have heard of names, but they know nothing about what has gone on. Many individuals, for instance, will tell you how they somehow intuitively admire Abraham Lincoln, but they can't tell you really why. Oh, well he's an honest man. Oh, he was, he held the union together. And all of these are childish approximations. And one would be quite surprised to find anyone who could go beyond that at all.

And we have seen over this whole year that the United States culture that developed, developed around individual human beings who were no longer able to have a single tradition. That from the very first American Benjamin Franklin, the American character was one that had no face. No real nationality. One could be a citizen of the universe and that was about it. Or one could be an individual and that was in a complimentary relationship to the universal being. And we have been left with this tradition. And because this can only be taught in a comprehensive strategic pattern, which our educational system has not had now since about 1919. No one has talked about this. No one has presented this for three going on four generations now. So that this is Terra incognito. This is the kind of thing now when it's advertised in the paper maybe one person out of 10 million will become curious to come in here.

This in itself is an indication of the failure of the culture. If this country fails, this crossroads time also will fail. And the dark ages that came before are nothing compared to what the dark ages that could come now, because it can be reinforced by polarized power groups. It's difficult to fight against warlords who have 500 swordsman and horses. What are you going to do against corporations that have laser space stations and mind control? So, it's very important to, at this time, have at least a few individuals who have some notion, some idea of the flow of American civilization in its peculiarity.

And we have gotten now in this course to the 20th century. We have come up finally with William James at this time. And we come to a conclusion of the 19th century because James, in a very real way, summarizes the entire experience of the 19th century. He is the, what the, what you would call in musical composition the coda to the symphony of the orchestration of the 19th century play of ideas. He is the last restatement of that. And the first indication that one is going to leave behind this form forever. That the form of mentality that was displayed in the 19th century proved to be a dead end. And it proved to be a dead-end philosophy in philosophy and in psychology, both at the same time. It was also a dead end in art. In religion.

And the First World War was the final period on that whole mentality from the Congress of Vienna to the First World War is a hundred years of lies and labyrinthian dissemination that ended up nowhere. And where the Congress of Vienna sought to stabilize a world after Napoleon the First World War prepared the world for a hitler.

So that we have now in the 1980’s, a very curious kind of a condition. We're not looking at this just out of entertainment. We're not looking at this out of a kind of a nationalistic chauvinism. And we're also not looking at this just to have representative great figures. We're looking at a specific pattern which has been unfolding itself continuously from Benjamin Franklin through Jefferson and through all of the individuals that we had gone to. And now in William James tonight with his great lecture series at the end of his life, which he delivered at Oxford University in England and Harvard University in the United States in 1908 called The Pluralistic Universe. And the path that led up to that and the content of that lecture series was the perfect coda to the 19th century.

Now James, as some of you will remember, was raised from birth, he and his genius brother Henry the great novelist, were raised from birth by their father to be prodigies. They were read to while they were still in the cribs in Greek, in German, in English and French and Latin. And he tried to inculcate in them as babies already the responsiveness to a whole range of intellectual accomplishments. And he and his brother both responded to this. But the responded to this in the way in which it was fed to them. They responded mentally. And their physical human selves could not keep up with their intellectual pace. They could run intellectually, but they could only stumble emotionally. And this differential produced a tragic flaw in their personalities. For Henry James, the novelist, consciousness was an ordeal. It was excruciating to be able to grind so fine that every single moment of awareness was a labyrinth of possible relations. And that the ordeal of it was trying to decide and choose what was real. One had so many possibilities that all had credibility, how do you know what is real? And the longer one lives in life like this, just the normal complications of life begin then to produce an oceanic monumental traffic jam in ethical decision making. And because the traffic jam is based upon perception, it produces an ever more convoluted aesthetic until one becomes Byzantine raised to an exponential level. And this is what Henry James is like. Read a page of any of his novels and you’ll see what I mean.

William James was terrified by nature. He felt that nature was demonic. He felt that primitive man had been driven into a gibbering horror by his inability to understand the world. And that man had just barely escaped from this primitive jungle of demonic terror by taking little baby steps away from being immersed in that world and coming into the clarity of mind. And so, for James what was important was keeping the mind clear. And that this was both a strategic keeping the mind clear in a spiritual sense. He was very religious about this. But it also had a practical compliment in keeping the mind clear by objectifying, existentially, whatever one knew. And one knows if taken to an ideational level has fundamental ambiguity to it. And so, one has to keep one's conceptions hooked onto experience. Because with experience the existential judgment can be founded.

And thus, James more and more led to what became phenomenology. That the elements of consciousness are not things in material world that there are phenomenon from the experiential matrix. And that the clarity of the phenomenon can only be ensured by the clarity of the awareness of the whole. So that the pureness of the spirit and the pureness of the existential experience went together in William James. But because life conditions and the mind and cultural behavior are forever getting in the way and scrambling these together, he became the first great psychologist to try and unravel how does this go about? And how can we get out of this confusion? And A Pluralistic Universe is his final statement on this overall condition, and we'll work our way up to them.

James was selected in 1893 to become the president of The Society For Psychical Research. James was one of the early pioneers in psychical research. He was born in 1842 and at that time in Europe the phenomenon was still known as mesmerism. Animal magnetism. Which became eventually a hypnotism or automatic writing. All of these kinds of phenomenon. Telepathy. Clairvoyance. In our day J.B. Ryan and his associates are still carrying on William James is work in this area. Trying to amass the physical experimental evidence of what actually happens in hopes that at some time in the future, some way for accounting of this will come along. And that this would be the basic data foundation for a science of the para psychological.

Now, James’ concern with psychical phenomena was both of the mysterious variety and this was due to his wife. And due to his family and his brothers. And also, to certain mystical experiences, which he had for himself. So that was the mysterious element. But coupled with that was the experimental work of a man named Fechner. Theodor Fechner [Gustav Theodor Fechner], who died in 1887 at about 70 years of age. In fact, there had been in fact, in fact a very interesting physicist early in the 19th century. He held the chair of physics at the university of Leipzig in the 1830’s. He had done experimental work with images on the retina, and he had stared at the sun a little bit too often and so, he suffered, suffered partial blindness. But because of the partial blindness he also acquired the ability to retain in his inner sight after images for a long time. And became quite interested in them. After he was too blind to go on teaching he became interested in how does the mind actually register physical reality. How can this be that the mind actually interfaces with the material world. And he finally came to you understand that the only way that this can be accounted for is that mind and body are two sides of the same reality. And that psychical, psycho physics, must be the permeability between these two sides. That it's not another world that is coming into this world, but they are two sides of the same world. And that what separates them is the mental structure of belief. And the only one that mental structure of belief is permeable by suspension, by a shock to its validity or veracity, by training, by a number of ways, do we plan as individual human beings without any prompting experience the paranormal. That the ordinary so-called person has experiences of the paranormal all the time but writes it off. In fact, writes it off so quickly that very frequently, it doesn't even reach consciousness. It's a coincidence. It's a chance. It's an insight. It's a hunch. But anyone who has enough honesty to review themselves will find that the paranormal actually is going on all the time.

So, James was influenced by Fechner. And in his Pluralistic Universe devoted a whole lecture to Fechner’s work. And I'll just mention it in a little bit.

But for James, when he was nominated president of the society for psychical research, which was largely based in London. F.W.H. Meyers and the Sedgwick's and those individuals. He had first refused. And part of the refusal was the inability to commit himself wholly and publicly to aligning himself with the psychical material. His decision to go public on this was largely due to personal experiences which he had. He in 1893-1894 was giving lectures at Harvard. And in December he gave him a lecture called On The Knowing Of Things Together, which was later reprinted and republished as his work as The Tigers In India, which began with a paragraph, “There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively and knowing them conceptually or representatively.” Intuition and representation.
All though such things as the white paper, before our eyes can be known intuitively. Most of the things we know the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy are known only representatively or symbolically.

And this is very pregnant observation. Those who were coming to the Saturday lecture series that I have realize what a potent observation in this is that all representation has a symbolical naval, which holds it together. It's like at the bottom of every feeling is an image. And if you get to the image, you get to the controlling of the matrix of the feeling. And every idea has at the bottom a symbol in just the same way. And if you can get to the symbol, the whole ideational matrix becomes visible. It comes understandable. Very important. Idea and image. And the interplay of those two is the yin yang of consciousness.

James’s wrote then that this distinction in the different ways of knowing, which is extremely complicated when one becomes analytical about it was an indication that they naive or common-sense realism that was in the American character would eventually culminate in what James called a philosophy of pragmatism. A common-sense realism culminating in pragmatism, which at the same time would be a pluralistic view of the universe. And have for its operating conception, what he called radical empiricism. And that it's better to have experience as the basis of one's consciousness than to have the fault knowing about something representatively. This of course expresses itself in the well-known American pension for personal democracy. It's all right to have representatives who represent you, but if they represent themselves, then you were left out. And so politically the representatives are valid only so long as they represent the people. When they represent themselves out of office, it's better for us not to be represented and only to present ourselves as individuals than to have false representation. Or to have representation on a mental basis, which has no bearing in fact in the very lives that we live. It becomes a simple and everyday as that. And this very profound. And incidentally it's extremely American in its outlook. Very, very distinctive.

James then wrote a book the following year, 1894, called The Will To Believe. And he said in The Will To Believe that his major objective was to combat the growing agnosticism among scientists. That if one takes experience as the basic platform upon which one is going to build an understanding of the world. And if one is going to take an empirical approach to this experience, you've got to guard against bringing in a conception of agnosticism, which will completely obviate any kind of discoveries in the spiritual realm. They will be obviated by definition. They will be left out by definition. And James was one of the first individuals who was sensitive psychologically to the fact that if we have an agnosticism in our science it will be just as prejudicial as if we had some kind of enforced belief system. And that in fact, agnosticism, as it was coming out in the 1890’s was an enforced belief system in a negative sense.
And James we'll go into the reason why this was happening because he was a master psychologist. And he would in his lectures on The Pluralistic Universe, not point a finger, but take both hands and say the reason for this is the predominance in the 19th century of the Hegelian dialectic model, which posited as much reality to the negative as to the positive. And that every positive idea had within itself the seeds of the negative, which was just as real and always went with it. And James said that this subtly massively in a strategic way crept into scientific endeavor late in the 19th century and produced a negative non-Godlike view. Automatically. That it was a flaw of the times and not a character of the human mind and its universality.

And James was one of the real champions at this time to raise both hands and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's something in this. Don't ignore it. Don't just argue against it. There's something here which we need to learn. And if we don't learn this, the generations who are going to come after us are going to inherit this as a problem which will sink out of consciousness. It will become an unconscious or subconscious part of the culture. And the very process that would free us from ignorance, scientific empiricism, will carry it with it this kind of distorted agnostic mentality. And we will be frozen out of the spiritual realms by definition.

So, James in The Will to Believe, and he probably could have called it the right to believe, emphasized in that book that willful believing can be misunderstood just as willful not believing. They work together. And agnosticism is a willful non-believing.

Emerson had declared in his essay on nature that everyone had to build their own world. That they had the right as an individual to build their own world. And that in believing this the structures of a wholesome and healthy life that come up and one will increasingly be able to detect the rightfulness of the world that one had come to believe for oneself. And that if something needed changing you, you would do this.

James went further than this. He said that the, the truth of any belief or any proposition, what you could state, need not be judged in terms of the world, either physical or social, as it exists at any given time. That in fact, this may not be the most desirable world for human life. And the mind of man would be capable of changing this world. And that if one began to look at history this would become self-evident. That if we adjust ourselves to this social world or to this physical world, we are locking ourselves into a short circuit. Into a logical conundrum. Because it becomes more and more impossible than to actually change this world. And the basis upon which change, much less to say radical transformation, become suspect as being irrational. And so, the individual who is faced with spiritual penetration of his consciousness and knows that he has to change or in fact recognizes that he or she has in fact changed is not the person you were last year is someone. It is extremely sensitive now to religious realities. They're not figments of somebody’s imagination. It's that very person who by definition then is called irrational. And if the individual were to accept that, then there would have to go into a therapy to get rid of their delusions. That they were spiritual. And readjust themselves to the way things were. To the social order. To the physical world.

And James in The Will to Believe was pointing out as strenuously as he could in a kind of a popularizing mode that this was a real danger for Western man. And in fact, there's a real danger for the American psyche, which was more prone to this than any of the other European nationalities. Because the American psyche had no basic traditional foundation. In a traditional matrix and structure that went down into the very farming, peasant origins of tribal life. Those tribal origins in the United States belong to the American Indians. And the American Indians had been called irrational savages, primitive peoples who were in the way of progress and had to be gotten rid of. And the American psyche had completely decimated its fundamental basis for traditional sanity. And the only way to keep the American personality viable was to keep it dynamically moving towards a future. The ongoing frontier had to keep ongoing because if it doesn't keep on going, if one has to stop, one is nowhere. Because if one discovers where one is one discovers that you have dispossessed the very foundation for any kind of a traditional order. That they'd been killed off. They’d been put in cages on the land. This is a very real problem for the American psychic.

Remember the lectures on Walt Whitman. Remember how it was Whitman who was in the Bureau of American Indian affairs at the end of the Civil War. And when the Civil War was over all of the tribes sent their best representatives to Washington to talk sense now. That the country has woken up from this nightmare. And Whitman said, it was like a parade of the Gods. These fantastic human beings coming in, in colors and feathers and manly comportment and beautiful orations. And none of them were heard except by Whitman who took down their words and they were filed in the drawers of the Bureau of American affairs, American Indian affairs, 1866. And the door was closed. And the era of the carpet baggers came down in. And whatever Indians were left were dispossessed almost 99%.

These are some of the real problems in this country. They're here. They are here. And they do not just register in somebody's speculative consciousness they're there in the land. You can feel it in the American land if you go out in it. And James had that kind of an experience.

James went out into the Adirondacks, and he had an experience climbing one of the tall mountains at that time, Mount Marcy. And while he was there climbing Mount Marcy, he strained his heart. He had carried an 18-pound pack for many, many hours on end. And he was not always in vigorous health at all. And from this time on James suffered from an increasing heart condition, which when it occurred to him produced a sense of personal panic. And because he was able through a very strong ego to suppress this panic, it occurred to him then in a differentiated subliminal form as depression. And in order to handle this depression like an intelligent person, you realize he couldn't do it for himself. Because the depression is subconscious, and you have to be a pretty accomplished yogi to handle your own subconscious. So, he had to go to someone else. And he didn't quite know who to go to him because he knew more about psychology than anybody else. He didn't know a psychologist who could handle him.

And so, James decided on the basis of his psychological experience to go to a Christian science practitioner. And that Christian science practitioner helped him out of his depression. Brought him back out. And James was very alert into the way in which this actually happened to him. Alert to the way in which he has despondency did not so much go away but was reworked into the very fabric of his life. James very intelligent and pioneer looking at this realize that mind cure was an integral part of human capacity and that this had to be explored. Why was this not being explored in general? Why would this be shunted off so that these were like little cult movements rather than part of the normal flow of the culture. Why was Mary Baker Eddy, or any of the other mind cure people at that time, why were they supposed to be fringe people and not a part of normal pattern of the life of the time.

And so, James thinking about this again, and again, literally came through the end of the 1890’s to realize that there was a prejudicial structure in the conscious mind of Western man, that by definition called these procedures irrational. And it was this realization that led him up to his great lecture series that we talked about last week, The Varieties of Religious Experience. That there are whole varieties of approach to religious experience and not any one of them is true in the sense that all the other ones are not true. That they all have their credibility in their own way. And if you follow any one of them, follow it as far as you can. And if you have to transform it, then transform it. But that the human possibilities are almost infinite. And this was what James was constantly emphasizing, the infinite possibilities of human nature. But the infinite possibilities were only infinite if we opened ourselves up. And the opening of ourselves up was stopped because the structure of the mind, which we had almost by definition and automatically outlawed certain approaches as irrational. They could not be conceived. They could not be entertained at all.

He wrote to a friend of his, that a mystical experience while he was climbing. And just for James was a high-water mark in his life. I told you about how as a young man, he had gone down to the Amazon jungles and that he would become psychologically unstable. And for three months was what we would call today a basket case in a hospital in Rio de Janeiro. And that after three months of complete psychological breakdown and isolation, he came out and plunged back into the Amazon jungle with the collecting team and often would go off for months alone with only one native, one Indian. And for about five- or six-months James was wild and loose in the Amazon jungle collecting specimens. He had this capacity to become almost a superhuman pioneer of the natural when he could see it as the paranormal. The only way that he could have an affinity with nature was to raise himself up to paranormal levels. Because then the demonic of nature was balanced by the angelic of himself. And these two together then produced an affinity. If he could not raise himself up to the mystical angelic inside nature then the demonical nature would lorded over him. Swallow him up. But when he was elevated, mystically, he was able then to be at one with nature.

And this was his own words is a description. And then we'll have a break of an experience like that.
I was in a wrathful mood before starting up Mount Marcy having been awake since three in the morning. And I may have slept a little during the night, but I was not aware of sleeping at all. My companions, except for Waldo Adler, were all motionless.
See they were all sound asleep.

The guide had got a magnificent provision of firewood. The sky swept itself clear of every trace of cloud or vapor. The wind entirely ceased so that the fire smoke rose straight up to heaven. The temperature was perfect either inside or outside the cabin. The moon rose and hung about the scene before midnight leaving only a few of the larger stars visible. And I got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me. Dear Harry, my son, out on the waves of the ocean going to England. The problem of my upcoming Edinburgh lectures and The Varieties of Religious Experience. All fermented within me until it became a regular [inaudible] night. I spent a good deal of it then having gone out into the woods where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a magic checker play. And it seemed as if the Gods of all the nature mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of my inner life.

Let's take a break.

James’ lectures in Edinburgh, The Gifford Lectures, which were two years in a row. He was paid 550 pounds for each of the lecture series, which is a lot of money at that time. And he was away from the United States for two years there. He loved traveling on the continent. He had gone maybe 30-40 times in his life. He spoke perfect German. He spoke French. He was at home and continental culture. He was that home in England.

When The Varieties of Religious Experience was published it was a best seller. And you have to understand that this was an age where the kind of fiction that passes for fiction now [inaudible] Gary's paperback that you see and all that the chain stores. All of a sudden William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience dominated conversation around the world. He became a household name. It's sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It had touched a real chord. People would come up to James and say that they put his picture up with a little quotation and put a nice ribbon around it and this was a personal shrine in their house.

It really got to James. He was becoming a religious leader. And he was all the more interested in being able to take his honesty back to these people and say, if you're going to have a religious leader like me understand what I'm giving to you is not my belief, but a way to find your real belief. The veracity of your real experience. Don't add me to the temple of speculative idols because I'm here to pull that plug. Because it doesn't matter how valid that was for somebody else, you have to come out of yourself.

I'm reminded of a Life Magazine that I've saved since 1948. And one of these Hindu temples in South India. They quickly carved the statue of Mahatma Gandhi and added them to the 1 million other figures on the temple. Just a part of the decoration furthering the ornamentation. And James was saying, we can no longer afford psychologically to further the ornamentation. We have to become individuals because the only way to perceive this cosmos is it really is, is individually. And when we do that individually, then we can talk with each other. And if we have a community of individuals who can talk with each other on the basis of our real experience, psychologically refined through our own radical empirical investigation, then we can have a community. Then there's no telling what human beings can do. That the indications are from history the few times there had been populations more than just a handful of people like this they have made tremendous strides forward. If they have modern science in mind, technology behind then, who knows what can happen. But nothing is going to happen until we become individuals.

And the problem in our time is that individuals are being forbidden, absolutely forbidden by all of the unconscious authoritarian habitual responses that are built into the authoritarian structures. And it doesn't matter whether they're social or theological or political or illegal. It doesn't matter. That it's there. It’s like a disease that's being carried by the structure of that mind. And the key to that structure, that mind, is an idea of an absolute thing. The symbol that holds that whole conception together is the idea that somewhere, even though I may not understand that there is an absolute. And James says, we have to pull that plug. We have to realize that we're not going to come unraveled. This world is not going to come unraveled if we think no. And so, A Pluralistic Universe was his way of saying that in eight lectures.

He got the invitation in November 1907. And he was to give these lectures at Oxford, not Edinburgh where The Varieties of Religious Experience had been. And those were The Gifford Lectures, these were The Hibbert Lectures. In those days think major universities all had lectures series that were supported by a great philanthropists. And at Oxford University in England The Hibbert Lectures were the great series. And he accepted. And the proviso was that he was able to speak openly.

Now James at this time was approaching his 66th year. This is a mature [inaudible]. It was also going to be 1908. The 20th century was really beginning to unfold itself. By 1908 it was already visible to a lot of people that were in deep trouble. That the 20th century was going to be a real nightmare at least. And we are going to be lucky if we are going to be able to get through this time period. Not because of nuclear war, nothing like that. That’s simple. But something which is not simple, not realizing that the glacial movement of a habitual archetypal structure was grinding the individual to dust. That the totalitarian pressures built into the whole social milieu were not growing just like glacial crystals growing right up out of the cultural matrix. And pushing individuals aside with inhuman strength and with impersonal momentum. And James was very conscious of this. Very, very conscious.

He did not want to lecture anymore. He had no belief whatsoever that the lecture format was viable. And he wrote to a friend of his, a man of [inaudible] named [inaudible] in England. He said,
I accepted because was ashamed to refuse [inaudible]. But [inaudible] it hadn't come to me. I actually [inaudible]. This job condemns me to [inaudible] another book written in picturesque popular style when I was settling down to [inaudible] who’s manner would be more serious, more concise and [inaudible]. My free and easy style and my pragmatism has made me enemies in academic and pedantic circles that I hate to go on increasing their number and [inaudible] to become tighter instead of looser. These new lectures will have to be even looser. The lectures must be prepared for audiences. And once prepared I have to strength to re-write them and the self [inaudible] to suppress them.

[inaudible] are very insightful psychological reasons. And once somebody understands this [inaudible]. The only way to get around these psychological problems is to write the lectures out. There are no lectures written out. There never have been. 500 lectures here. None are written out because this has [inaudible] and one has to be cautious [inaudible]. Minds that become trained are like the muscles of professional athletes. You can be wonderful things with it. They can also go the opposite way very easily. [inaudible]. You don't know. And the only way to guard against that is to keep it absolutely [inaudible]. That is the only thing holding it together. [inaudible] that’s all that’s holding it together. James was extremely conscious of this. [inaudible].

He had trouble writing. He would write three or four pages, and he would tremendous headaches. He would go a couple of days [inaudible] then he’d be able to get six pages out and depression would set in. [inaudible] he’d dribble out two or three pages a day for a week. It was like a constant struggle. Ideas are extremely difficult to work with courageously. Especially for an untrained, we should say non-yogic mind. Because the ideational structure have to come out of a whole background, which was not free. It’s intellectually [inaudible] what we would call structure and of having contours of expression [inaudible] structure, one has to have an architecture. And to have an architecture of ideas is extremely difficult. This is why someone like Plotinus or Patanjali or [inaudible] such an old genius because their architecture of ideas is unbelievable. But one can also have a [inaudible] who does not have an architecture of ideas. Who just speaks as if one was an eagle flying in the air.

So, James was trying to develop this architecture of ideas, and he realized this was going to be the last great lecture series of his life. And he had a moral duty to present the last and lowest [inaudible] from his [inaudible]. And he realized he was going to speak to a worldwide audience. His, the numbers of people who listen to him and [inaudible] were about 300, sometimes 400 people. And when he spoke at Harvard the hall held about 600 and the auxiliary held several hundred more. And they had to keep turning people away. So, these were cultural events of the highest order. The reports in the London papers at the time and the New York papers were saying this is the great man of our time speaking on the greatest issues of our time. And anyone who was at all conscientious should hear this, like it or not should hear this.

The lecture series was on the present situation of philosophy. Meaning what is the state of the world today. This is a state of the world message. Like the state of the union message. What's the state of philosophy in the world as of 1908? And James in eight lectures, this beautiful eight part [inaudible] gave an accurate picture of the world at that time. Astoundingly accurate picture.

The first lecture was called The Types of Philosophic Thinking, and when he began, he cautioned his audience to remember that if we're naive, we're not going to understand even how to begin. That you can't just enumerate isms and think that those are types of philosophic thinking. That that's already several levels beyond where there's an effective typology, where the mind really has to work in order to understand the differentiation.

So, on The Types of Philosophic Thinking he began saying,
As these lectures are meant to be public and so few I have assumed all very special problems to be excluded, and some topic of general interest required. Fortunately, our age seems to be growing philosophical again. Still in the ashes live the wanted fires. Oxford long the seed bed for the English world of the idealism inspired by Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different way of thinking. Even Non-philosophers have begun to take an interest in a controversy over what is known as pluralism or humanism. It looks a little as if the ancient English empiricism, so long put out of fashion here by nobler sounding Germanic formulas, might re plumb itself and be getting ready for a stronger flight than ever. It looks as if foundations were being sounded and examined afresh.

And then James turned the page of the sheet and laid it on the line.
Individuality outruns all classification. Yet we insist on classifying everybody we meet under the same general head. As these heads usually suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other, the life of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing and complaints of being misunderstood.
So that the whole procedure of philosophy is spinning your wheels on a complaint level. Nothing is really getting done. “But there are signs of clearing up. And on the whole, less acrimony and discussion for which everybody should be thankful.”

Now, James, then laying this on the line, comes back and he says, without making an underscore of it, because he's speaking to learned audiences in 1908. And he doesn't have the elan that we have in 1985 to curl our lip a little bit when we speak honestly, because we know how it can be misinterpreted. James says in a very gentlemanly way,
Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life and treat the universe as if it were essentially a place in which our ideals were we realize. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them brute necessities express its character better. All follow one analogy or another. And all analogies are with some one or other of the universe's subdivisions.
And he doesn't belabor this point, but the use of analogies is an addiction of the polarized mind. It is psychologically a symptom of neurotic disorder. It's just like seeing somebody limping. And it doesn't matter whether they limp with their left foot or their right, they're walking out of balance. Somebody who uses analogical thinking like this is psychologically limping because they do not have a wholesomeness operating. Only the polarized mind seeks through analogy. And the polarized mind maintains its polarity by a sense of logical identity. And that identity always assumes that somewhere there is an absolute that guarantees the validity of that identification. And keeps the polarization happening. And keeps the analogical thinking churning up. Endless. Endless.

In fact, in the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna gives all the reasons why he shouldn't fight, and Krishna keeps saying these are excellent reasons, But that isn't the reason. And this isn't the reason why you're not going in to fight. You're not going in to fight because you are afraid of death. And all of your rationalizations, no matter whether they're true or not, are secondary to the fact that you are afraid. And you are afraid because you think you will perish. Because along with your secret need to believe in the absolute is the corollary to need to believe in oblivion. And that polarity, that identity, keeps you fearful. Give it up, says Krishna. Give it up. Just go and fight or not fight. But don't be fearful about it.

So, James saying here says that when we look at the history of thought that we are speaking, James, now speaking for the Avant Garde of his time, says, we look back and we see those minds of those other individuals, even of just a generation before us, as if they were men of a different planet. Their habits of thinking are so alien to us. Our way of apprehending the world is so totally different that they could have lived on a different planet. So, he says,
Let me make a few comments here on the curious antipathies which these partialities arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the parties are human beings with the same essential interests. And no one of them is wholly perverse as a demon, which another often imagines him to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them. Neither wishes to spoil it. Neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence. Both want to keep it as a universe of some kind, and their differences are all secondary to this deep agreement.
This is one of the origins of, of the truths, the conviction of phenomenological pragmatism.

“What troubles me more than this misapprehension is the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged to talk about.” And here James is saying, part of the very problem of thought in our time is that in order to talk truthfully about the situation, we have to relegate ourselves to abstruseness. We can't just speak so that we're in a cultural disease situation where in order to talk truthfully we have to rise up to abstruse levels. This already is showing us that we're in a very sick situation.

So, he says,
Perhaps the most interesting opposition is that which results from the clash, which I lately call the sympathetic and the cynical temper. Materialistic and spiritualistic philosophies are the rival types that result. The former defining the world so as to leave man's soul upon it as a sort of outside passenger or alien. While the latter insists that it is the intimate and human that must surround and underlie the [inaudible]. This latter is the spiritual way of thinking. Now there are two very distinct types or stages in Spiritualistic philosophy. And my next purpose in this lecture is to make their contrast evident. Both types attain the sought for intimacy of view, but the one attains it somewhat less successfully than the other.
Absolute idealism will be one of them. And dualism will be the other one.

He writes,
The generic term spiritualism, which I began by using merely as the opposite of materialism, subdivides itself into two species. The more intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic. The dualistic species is the theism that reached its elaboration in the scholastic philosophy. While the monistic species is the pantheism sometimes spoken of simply as idealism. And sometimes as post-Kantian or absolute idealism. Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all Catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our British and American universities and replaced by a monistic pantheism, more or less open or disguised. Absolute idealism maintains I said to the more intimate point of view, but the statement needs some explanation. So far as theism represents the world as God's world, and God is what Matthew Arnold called a magnified nonnatural man. It would seem as if the inequality of the world remained human, and as if our relations with it might be intimate enough for what is best in ourselves appears then also outside of ourselves. And we and the universe are of the same spiritual species. So far so good then. And one might consequently ask, what more of intimacy do you require? To which the answer is that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially fused into it.
Because to be like a thing is to be trapped in an analogy which is still operating psychologically in a polarity. Which is still finding oneself subconsciously upon an identity which needs to have an absolute. Which then in a very deep way comes back and makes the whole world a prison. And it makes the mind the warden of that prison. And that the problem is that almost all of this ecology of ignorance and stupidity is outside of our control as individuals because we have given up our individuality to this system. And whether it's right or not having given up our individuality to the system is psychologically traumatic.

So, he goes on.
As we have found that spiritualism in general breaks into a more intimate and less intimate species, so the more intimate species itself breaks into two subspecies, of which the one is more monistic, and the other is more pluralistic in form. I say in form, for our vocabulary gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish between form and substance here.
And this, incidentally, is a universal logical conundrum at this particular point. In Sanskrit logic the phrase was Nama Rupa. Nama being name, Rupa being form. One has to distinguish logically at this point between name and form. If one does not then one gets into an analogical mentality through the very verbalization that one uses. If you do that logically one ends best only in silence, as Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein would show in our time. So, James, a very, very psychologically and philosophically alert here.

I say in form for our vocabulary gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish between form and substance here. The inner life of things must be substantially akin anyhow to the tenderer parts of man's nature in any spiritualistic philosophy. The word intimacy probably covers the essential difference. Materialism holds the form in things to be more primary and lasting. It sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy. The brutal aspects overlap and out wear. Refinement has the feebler and more ephemeral hold on reality. From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against the background of foreignness and one of intimacy means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
Wariness is perhaps too light a word here. The German word angst is probably, or anxiety. Ultimate jeopardy to one's self.

He end the first lecture on The Types Of Philosophic Thinking by saying,
The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, When maturely considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct from the absolute's own knowledge of itself. Nor a duplicate or a copy of it. It is a part of that very knowledge. It is numerically identical with as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just is our philosophy, along with everything else that is known in an act of knowing which, to use the words of my gifted colleague Royce, forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment.

He's saying here. That when one keeps away from the analogical traps of mind. In spirituality that one forgoes this primordial form into un-trustingness of the universality of the present moment. That if one does not have the commitment to this present moment, then one begins to build up the sense psychologically underneath that there must be some real present moment somewhere else, of which this is just an approximation of. And one begins then to spin out system after system, to try and account for this architecture. And what gets lost in this is the actual experience of the individual in his own life. And human beings wink out of existence just like that in their own estimation. And all that exists then is some approximation of some ambiguous distant reality somewhere. And this is psychologically untenable. Human beings cannot live like this.

Lecture two, which we're going to skip over, was on monastic idealism. Where James just took the task this whole tradition that supported this idea of some analogous absolute system infusing the real world somehow so that we were just elements of a system somewhere.

And then in lecture three on Hegel and his method, James takes to task the very individual who brought all of this to a fine point. That in Hegel's thought and Hegel's philosophy early in the 19th century was the culmination of this whole mentality. And James philosophically and psychologically mature, appreciates the greatness of Hegel. Saying that the man had a tremendous vision, perhaps the most powerful spiritual vision in the Western tradition, but that the method by which he delivered that, the dialectical philosophical level, in a process way committed man back absolutely to an analog system. And that he lost his individuality in the very midst of the plenitude of the cosmic vision.

James doesn't go on to draw the conclusion because it didn't happen at that time. But one can understand the nightmare of communism because it is exactly this turned upside down and it works the same way upside down. What gets lost in the cosmic vision is the individual. Every single time. By definition. Even though the definition says that the individuals will have their largest development, but only in an analogy. Only in the mentality. And the only structure that maintains its existence in that mentality is the state, not the human being. And this will become, of course, one of the great problems of the 20th century. Not a problem so much that it actually happens, but a problem because people do not understand what they are living. They do not understand what they are believing and naivete like that can get us all killed.

But James is relentless. He is psychologically mature. He's had to struggle with himself all of his life. He is philosophically alert. He's humane. He says, “Any author is easy to understand if you can catch the center of his vision. If you can look out from the pupil of someone else's eyes then you can see how they were seeing.” Black Elk says that men get lost in the dark of their eyes but they find themselves there, too.

He says, “From the center and Hegel came those towering sentences of his that are comparable only to Luther's. As we're speaking of the ontological proof of God's existence from the concept of him as the ends perfectissimum, the highest being, to which no attribute can be lacking.” He says, “It would be strange if the notion the very heart of the mind, or in a word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough to embrace so poor a category as being. The very poorest and most abstract of all. For nothing can be more insignificant than being.” Not being per se, but being as a category of mind, as some element in an analog structure. Why is that insignificant? It's just like a little thought bubble in a cartoon. It's not what is here and what is happening. It's what we say must be going on in our minds. This is a very confounding situation.

And he says that Hegel has a wonderful vision. But the difficulty is, is like all creative visionaries, and James is now beginning to bring himself in with his mystical self-experience to say, I can see how Hegel is feeling and how he is seeing. But he makes the mistake that an artist makes who doesn't train himself well enough. He uses a slipshod method of expression. He says, “Here his passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences, his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms, his dreadful vocabulary calling what completes a thing, its negation.” Whatever completes a thing is its negation.
His symptomatic refusal to let you know whether he is talking logic or physics or psychology. His whole deliberately adopted policy of ambiguity and vagueness. In short, all these things make his present day wish readers wish to tear their hair out. Or, like Byron's [inaudible] he has left a name to other times linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.

The difficulty in his singling out Hegel in this lecture series because he's the best of the system builders. He's the best of the system builders because he really did have the vision. He really did see mystically the all. And he really had the tremendous intellectual discipline to be able to express it. But in his expressing of it, he used a mental language form which was always based upon an analog identity conundrum, a way which leads to an impasse. And that the only way that the impasse is ever resolved is to posit some absolute encompassing the whole system. And this, of course, is psychologically the death knell. The death knell not only for the individual, for individual, but for the universe as a vibrant living reality. It will never be seen because there is no one to see it. We are, to put it in colloquial terms, magnificently honed cogs of wheels that only work because the whole system works. And as long as the whole system we imagine is working, then we're valid. But if there's any kind of a catch in the machinery, if, if it stops anywhere, everything is invalidated. None of the parts are worthwhile anymore.

And this, of course, is the psychological breakdown of the whole civilization. Which happened. It happened in our time. It happened when we were very young. James saw it in 1908.

James then in the next couple of lectures doesn't back away from this issue, but wades into it and starts parting the psychological and philosophical difficulties. In lecture five, which is on The Compounding of Consciousness, he shows how, by experimental psychology one can discover loopholes in this system building. That empirical investigation and radical empirical perception show again and again that none of this is true. That first of all, we begin to see that there are exceptions, like parapsychological phenomena that we can't account for. The better we become at looking at these exceptions the more we realize that the exceptions keep mounting up until finally we get to a point to where the structure becomes the exception, and that the real world that we actually live in is unknown. That we don't know anything about it at all. That we've been belaboring ourselves in a mental construct that has only an approximate analog position, and it has no reality whatsoever outside of the mind.

Then he has a lecture on Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism, Henri Bergson. Because James and Bergson are the great developers of the stream of consciousness. That consciousness is not a structure, it's not an architecture, but it's a stream. And in fact, consciousness is rather like a stream within an ocean. And the subconscious is the ocean, which actually does exist. And has as much reality as the stream itself has.

Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism that the problem with man's mind is that he's been believing in his mind, instead of using his mind as a part of his life he has been committing his life to the mind and has been tyrannizing him. Not because it wants to. Not because it's evil. Not because it's demonic. But because it's limited. The mind can only conceive conceptually. It can’t live a life. Only a human being can live a life. If we stuff our lives into our minds we're only going to get some analog structure. You can't have anything else because if you follow that recipe that's what you get. That's the only ingredients that are there. You can't have a viable human being who walks around with their mind as a crutch all the time. And what becomes the problem to such an individual right away is another person. Well, they don't even get to the other person. All they experience is another mind. And the problem of the other is endemic with the problem of self-alienation.

And so, James, in his seventh lecture entitled that The Continuity of Experience. The fact that psychologically and philosophically one can understand that experience has continuity. And one of the first signs of health is that one is able to live in a continuous way. One is able to do things with continuity. And not be bored by it. Not be distracted by other things. Able to keep a continuity going. That one can follow the movement of days or weeks or months and see that it is of one fabric, undivided. In The Continuity Of Experience James develops enormously the, the maturity of a human being.

And his eighth lecture, In Conclusions, which we only have time for. He writes,
Why cannot experience and reason meet on this common ground? Why cannot they compromise? May not the Godlessness usually, but needlessly associated with the philosophy of immediate experience give way to a theism now seen to follow directly from that experience more widely taken. And may not rationalism satisfied with seeing her a priori proofs of God, so effectively replaced by empirical evidence abate something of her absolutist claims. Let God but have the least infinitesimal other of any kind besides him and empiricism and rationalism might strike hands in a lasting treaty of peace. Both might then leave abstract [inaudible] behind them and seek together as scientific men seek, by using all analogies and data within reach to build up the most probable approximate idea of what the divine consciousness concretely may be like. But I venture to beg the younger Oxford idealists to consider seriously this alternative. Few men are as qualified by their intellectual gifts as certain of our present monistic philosophers to reap the harvest that seems certain to anyone who like Fechner and Bergson, will leave the thinner for the thicker part. But compromise and mediation are inseparable from the pluralistic philosophy. Only monistic dogmatism can say of any of its hypotheses. It is either that or nothing. Take it or leave it as it stands. This type of monism prevalent at Oxford has kept the steep and brittle attitude partly through the proverbial academic preference for thin and elegant logical solutions. Partly from a mistaken notion that the only solidly grounded basis for religion was along these lines. What mistrusts itself deserves mistrust. A philosophy may indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself. It may, as I said, possess and handle itself differently in consequence of us philosophers with our theories being here. It may trust itself or mistrust itself the more. And by doing the one or the other deserve more the trust or the mistrust. This is the philosophy of humanism in the widest sense. Our philosophy swelled the current of being and add their character to it. They are part of all that we have met, of all that makes us be. Our thoughts determine our acts. And our acts determine the previous nature of the world.
And James will end here.

And we're going to end here for tonight. But next week we'll carry it to his great book Pragmatism, which came right at the core of The Varieties of Religious Experience and was the foundation for The Pluralistic Universe. And in Pragmatism next week, we'll see how James develops the insight that the way to validate our lives is to put our lives into our character. And that the mistake that the mind makes conscious, consciously, is to assume that the consciousness is the form of the person when the consciousness is only the name of the person. That the form of a person is their character. And that that doesn't come out in an analogy in the mind. It only comes out in real living experience. The character of someone, your character or my character, is only there when we are real here in our lives. So that the most evanescent quality of humanness is our personal individual character. It is the most fragile of all the blossoms. And it is the essential element that sobers us up from the mental assessment of who we consciously thought we were. And that needs to be integrated into how we actually are. In this way, James’ psychology leads directly into phenomenological existentialism. And one of the great achievements of the 20th century.

Well, we'll look at that and we'll look at his notion of reality as constant changing within a unified character next week.

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