⩩ 16
To live well we must orient ourselves, and for purposes of orientation I have found nothing as helpful as this book by William James. It speaks about the worthiest things in the worthiest way, — with imagination and humility, in the tone of a friend, in words you can understand. It has no agenda for you, no narrow conceptions; doesn’t try to shuffle you into any squeezed stall. It points you only towards life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life.
There are many doors into this large topic — orientation in the widest sense — but the one I find most useful is Varieties of Religious Experience. What is religion? This study of it turns away completely from institutions. It sets aside theologies, dogmatic philosophies and ecclesiastical organizations, or rather they come in for consideration only indirectly. The focus of this book is on experience, individuals’ experience of what is most important to them, firsthand religious experience.
Behind this turn lies an understanding of the relation between experience and institution. At the origin of all religious institutions are religious experiences, namely the experiences of the founders of those traditions. These are experiences of immediate communication with God. These are sparks. When they land in religious tinder, when they catch on and grow into organized movements, these experiences leave religious traditions in their wake, but they need not and usually don’t. Totally separable from them, the experiences can be looked at in their own right. The material of the book is therefore firsthand experiences of this kind – the human feelings, impulses and needs that are at play in them, and their nature, satisfaction and significance.
What, then, is religious experience? We put ourselves in the ballpark by saying that each person has an ongoing conversation with the whole. Religion is the total reaction of the soul on the world. Apart from the shuffle of the surface, beneath the din of the day to day, there is a reckoning going on in each of us, a weighing and tallying up. Past our social surfaces, our diversions and protective gestures, we keep careful accounts with reality. Some flame of hope, some faith flickers vulnerably in a quiet, tender shrine. It is there that life comes home to us.
Since we part ways from each other and each exist in our own skin and context, this accounting is by necessity individual. James defines the domain of inquiry as “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude” insofar as they stand in relation to the divine, and the phrase “in their solitude” is telling, first of all because it is redundant and thus emphatic, underlining that these are the experiences of individuals as individuals, the experiences of individuals precisely in their individuality. But more than that, the phrase calls back to Emerson and to his essay “Self-Reliance.” Emerson speaks there of the voices we hear “in solitude,” voices that grow faint and inaudible as we enter the world, voices we must struggle to hear. He gives a kind of ideal image, a thumb-nail of the sage. “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
The significance of solitude aside, this accounting comes down to a question of acceptance, whether and how a person accepts the universe. Though you can reject it — a rejection we must consider and respect — you can’t reject it while still living, since to live is to accept it. The question for the living is therefore not whether but how you accept it: as James says, “in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether?”
The answer we give flows out of what we think the universe is like, what our experience has taught us, so that, at bottom, the religious question is: what is the nature of the universe I live in? However, this is not a detached inquiry but equally a question about our own fate. Living things care for their fate — that’s what life is: self-maintenance and self-care — and in some deep recess in each of us there is an ongoing conversation between us and the world about it. There is something saying, “I am a part; what is the whole I am part of? What is this power above me, around me, through me, by which I live and breathe? Friendly or unfriendly? Where am I really and what is my destiny?” This conversation is about our will to live and act and be. Its outcome is the fact and manner of our acceptance of existence.
What, then, is a religious experience? A religious experience is a turning point, a moment of particular significance in the unfolding of the total reaction on the world. Here one must speak about conversion, the turning-around of the soul. There is a force, a power previously unsuspected in the universe, and in these moments it rushes in and is present and speaks to you. It is experienced as a sudden entry in your most intimate and real space. It is always somehow unexpected, as if by the backdoor. The stagestranger is an image of this.
Who, then, has religious experiences? We all have religious experiences — the execution of this conversation, full as it is with twists and turns, dark corners and wide open vistas, is our most important function, I am with James in believing, and is played out in all of us to some degree of explicitness: no one can totally avoid it. His book is an attempt to understand its overall shape, the recognizable patterns that emerge across people and traditions, the humanly possible ways it can play out.
But to this end James leaves aside the ordinary religious believer who follows the conventional observances of his country. “His religion,” James says, “has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this secondhand religious life.” This is because the ordinary religious believer is a mixture, a combination of conflicting, interfering tendencies, and it is difficult or impossible to understand a tendency when it is mixed together with many others.
The tempered and therefore mild impulses of the ordinary believer, however, are isolated and come to full expression elsewhere. Those are the places in the human fabric, the folds where sparks appear. “We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.” In other words, James goes for the most intense and colorful instances of religious feeling, the full grown and exaggerated examples, where the impulse is one-sided, immoderate, uncompromising, even maniacal, as in our good Ahab. He selects those who have this conversation out face-to-face, who suffer the crises of their fate, who wrestle God one-on-one, — who chase the whale. He chooses to follow the tracks of the experiences of prophets and heretics and madmen. They are more helpful and more interesting.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 16. Next week, we’ll begin the third chapter, on Retreating. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Firsthand
⩩ 14 Yourself
⩩ 12 Learning
⩩10 Habit
⩩ 9 Firsthand
Stagestranger
⩩ 7 Mistake
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 1 Headsup
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A shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.
If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.
Interesting how important spirituality can be to human mental health - whether in the form of ritual or chanting or meditation/prayer. Even in the secular world, there is a sort of movement that accepts religion despite its lack of consistent explanation for what we perceive in the world. I like this podcast and this particular episode that discusses about the 'creation of God' in human society: https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/creating-god/