The Varieties of Religious Experience

"This exploration of individual religious experiences and their psychological underpinnings fits Mark Zuckerberg's stated interest in understanding human nature and community. It aligns with his broader reading challenge focused on diverse perspectives."

"Exactly. James, like Thoreau and Emerson, was interested in the unseen or in the almost unseen. The contemporary American philosopher John McDermott said that he was interested in ‘every sensorial nuance.’ In other words, he was interested in the very slightest perturbation in our perceptions. He thought that the spiritual realm was a real possibility. He believed that people think that this is a real thing. In fact, James himself was interested in séances and the spiritual realm, from the time that he was thirty right through to his death. That’s right. He was one of the founding members of the American Society for Psychical Research, which consisted of the most elaborate ghost-hunters you’ve ever imagined. It was a bunch of scientists trying to figure out what was going on with paranormal phenomena. James dedicated a large part of his time and life to this. In The Principles of Psychology , he wrote about the self in a number of different ways. He said there was the individual self, the social self, but there was also the spiritual self. James was very serious about looking at the spiritual self in as careful a scientific way as possible. That’s what he did in his psychical research. The Varieties of Religious Experience can be viewed in a couple of different ways. One is that James was taking a first step towards a move that became quite clear in John Dewey’s A Common Faith . This was that religion and the religious are two separate entities. Or, rather, they’re not two completely separate entities, but you can be religious or interested in religious experience—even have religious experience—outside of institutionalised religion. This is why the issue of varieties of religious experience comes up. James is a pluralist when it comes to spiritual experiences. He’s interested in those people who have absolutely no contact with the spiritual realm. And then, he’s interested in mystics, the deep hard core mystics. That’s one way of reading the Varieties of Religious Experience: as James’ defence of belief, and study of a whole range of spiritual experiences. That’s one aspect. It is an anthropology of religious experience. What I will say, though, is that it’s not just an anthropology. James set out at the beginning of the Varieties that there are those who are healthy-minded and there are those of us who are sick-souled. James was the perennially sick-souled one. Despite his occasional ebullience, my position is that James was a sick soul. James was a depressive throughout his life. He struggled with suicide throughout his life. In the last months of his life, he wrote to his friend Benjamin Blood—related to Thaddeus Blood, whom Emerson interviewed—saying that no person is truly educated until he confronts the prospect of suicide. He found a kindred spirit in Blood, who was accompanied by suicidal thoughts through his life. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In terms of the Varieties of Religious Experience , James was trying to counterbalance the will to believe. In other words, just as Emerson was counterbalancing ‘Self-Reliance’ with ‘Compensation’, James was counterbalancing this promethean will—I’m going to will myself to believe something—with what Richard Gale calls the ‘Poo-bah’ which is simply the mystic—the openness to the divine that you see in the Varieties of Religious Experience . It’s a receptivity, a passivity, that James is trying to think through. In the Varieties , he says what is it to “be as nothing in the waterspouts of God”? It’s a good question for our culture. To be as nothing? Don’t be this instrumental, pragmatist ‘go-work-it out’ type of strong person, but what is to experience and be receptive to the natural world and to others? That’s what I think he’s trying to push us to think through when it comes to these mystical experiences. James, himself, had these mystical experiences and thought that their power was very much real. Yes. My choices reflect a still marginalised view of American Pragmatism. Just being interested in Transcendentalism reflects a marginal view, I think. This is because the mainstream view is non-metaphysical. Each one of these authors has a very real metaphysical picture. And each of these authors, especially James, is treated by contemporary philosophers as having a minimal metaphysics or that their metaphysics is secondary to the epistemology. But I didn’t pick James’ Pragmatism as a book and I didn’t pick Charles Peirce’s essays such as ‘The Fixation of Belief’ or ‘Architecture of Theories.’ I didn’t pick those. The reason is because each of the books I’ve chosen reflects a strain of Idealism that is typically overlooked in mainstream philosophy when it goes back and plumbs American Pragmatism. I mean the philosophical sense of Idealism, coming out of German Idealism. I think that idealism is important. I think the idealism is oftentimes what captures students and captures readers. It’s the beauty of these writings and it’s the interest in beauty in these writing that draws readers in."

"This is quite an obvious choice. but it’s still the best book on the subject, a century after it was published. James was a genius—one of the greatest psychologists and philosophers ever. His prose is so humane, so articulate, so poetic—he’s really in the 19th-century Transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. Most modern psychologists are so narrow, so unsubtle, so clumsy, so unambitious in comparison. Reading them after him is like going into a telephone box after being in a cathedral. James used his considerable eloquence to argue that any full view of human experience needs to take account of ecstasy. And he gave researchers a way to approach this area—by collecting and analysing people’s reports. We can ask ‘what’s it like?’—and compare accounts from different people and different eras. We can see that mystical experiences often have some things in common—people report feeling one with all things, for example, or surrendering to a higher power when they’re desperate. “William James was a genius—one of the greatest psychologists and philosophers ever” Many researchers of altered states of consciousness have followed James’ footsteps and analysed ecstasy by asking people: ‘what’s it like?’ You can use surveys and questionnaires: Gallup has asked people if they’ve ever had a mystical experience—they’re actually becoming more common, from 20% in 1961 to around 50% today. In a survey I did in 2016, 84% of respondents said they’d had one or more ecstatic experiences. You can analyse how people describe their experiences—the word people most commonly use to describe moments of ecstasy is ‘connection’—they report shifting beyond their usual self-absorbed ego and feeling deeply connected to all things, to nature, to the universe, or to other people, or to God. James defined these experiences as ‘religious’, and only looked at solitary encounters with the divine. But in fact, they often happen to people when they’re in groups, and they are not always interpreted as an encounter with the divine—they could involve an ecstatic connection to nature, or other humans, or your nation, for example. The point James makes in Varieties , and it’s the main point of my book, too, is that these experiences are not only quite common, they’re often good for us. They’re healing, they’re socially-connecting, they’re inspiring. James suggests that ecstatic experiences involve an opening to the subliminal mind. Our ordinary conscious reality is just a small part of us—a great deal of our psychic activity is subliminal and embodied. In moments of ecstasy, the threshold of consciousness is lowered, and contents from the subliminal mind come into consciousness, as in a lucid dream. That can be frightening and disorientating, but it can also be profoundly healing and inspiring, at a mental and physical level. We can confront subconscious attitudes of guilt, trauma or self-loathing, and give ourselves permission to let go of these attitudes and love ourselves. James was inspired by his friend Frederic Myers, a British psychologist who developed the theory of the subliminal mind. Myers insisted the subconscious is both a rubbish-dump and a treasure house. Ecstatic influxes from the subconscious can be pathological, but they can also be inspiring and empowering. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But is ecstasy not just an influx from the subconscious, but also a connection to some genuinely transpersonal spiritual dimension? James remains agnostic, but in the Varieties he does seem to think that ecstasy sometimes really is a connection to a higher dimension, or Mind-at-Large. Myers thought the same, so did Aldous Huxley. James said, if there is a spiritual dimension to life, then we appear to access it through the subliminal mind. We have to learn to focus and expand our consciousness beyond its normal limits."

"I suppose that’s true. It’s not precisely a science book, but James is trying to understand religion in a scientific sort of way. He tries to give some insight into it. I became interested in religious experience myself and I found it a wonderful book. Although it was written over a hundred years ago, it could have been written yesterday. I doubt it. I think I partly got involved with religious experience because my youngest child became very religious at one stage. He was evangelized and became a fundamentalist Christian, and people thought that I – a bad Jewish boy from South Africa – would be upset. I never was for a single moment. I never ever tried to persuade him not to be. Instead, I began thinking about why people were religious and I even wrote a book about it, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast , which is really about the evolution of religion. So the William James book is important to me. I think that one of the most important things that he says is that when people do have a religious experience, it’s as real to them as anything that goes on in their day-to-day lives and I think that’s very important to understand. He also says that a truth experienced in the extreme of a fever is no less authentic because of the fever. Why shouldn’t fever be a state in which truth is experienced?"

"Both books were written by skeptics, with understanding and respect for the beliefs that they were questioning."

"William James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience" — for anyone curious about the emotional power of religious experience. I love this book!"