Compiled by:
By Professor Jim Roane, Ph.D.
Empiricism we have already discussed previously under
"World Religions and the Christian Witness," so I shall not belabor
that procedure. Let us, however, consider the psychology of religion for a
moment to better understand the nature of what we are about to discover in the
Psychology of Religion
The Psychology of Religion
William James is an excellent starting point in
understanding the psychology of religion, and we start with the mind because
this is where religious belief begins and ends. James, known as the father of
modern psychology, prepared a series of lectures which he delivered at the
prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh
in 1901-1902.[i]
The Varieties of Religious Experience:
A Study in Human Nature was first presented as a series of lectures at the
University of Edinburgh in 1901. To prepare for the talks, Harvard
psychologist William James had read widely in the religious classics, including
the personal accounts of various saints and mystics.
His decision to look at spiritual
experience from a psychological point of view seemed very new at the time, even
blasphemous. Mountains of books were still being churned out on the finer
points of dogma and theology, but James was more interested in individual
experience. His purpose in writing the book was to convince the reader that
although religion itself often seemed absurd, the spiritual impulse was what
made us human. James wanted to know why man was a religious animal, and what
practical benefits spirituality brought us, assuming that we would not engage
in it if it did not do us some good.
The book's insights are wrapped in
prose as elegant and forceful as anything written by his novelist brother Henry
James, and it was recognized as a classic virtually from the day of
publication. The book's great service was to make the religious reader see
spiritual matters from a more rational, objective perspective, and to persuade
the scientifically-minded that religious experience had its value and was a
'fact'.
The
Science of Spirituality
James wrote The Varieties of
Religious Experience at the end of a century of scientific advance that
reacted against the unthinking faith of earlier times. In this milieu, the
Bible was newly appreciated as just a collection of stories, and in the new
science of psychology, religious experience could be explained away as a
creation of the mind. Yet James was skeptical of the idea that all religious
experience could be reduced to states of the brain, what he calls the
'Nothing-but' view of spirituality.
James wrote that spiritual ideas should
be judged on three criteria: 1) Immediate luminousness; 2) Philosophical
reasonableness; and 3) Moral helpfulness. Put simply, do they enlighten us, do
they make sense, and are they a good guide to living?
He quotes a passage from St Teresa of
Avila's autobiography in which she talks about her visions. At the time some
suspected she was seeing the devil, not God, but she protested that what she
saw could not be just the work of the imagination, since it had made her a much
better person ("uprooting my vices, and filling me with a masculine
courage") - and her confessors confirmed it. Teresa also made a distinction
between imaginings and spiritual reality, pointing out that while pure
imagination weakens the mind and soul, 'genuine heavenly vision' revitalizes
and strengthens the subject. In Teresa's case, she felt that her visitations
guided her towards the reform of the Carmelite order, of which she was a
member.
This was the practical effect of
religious experience that James was so fascinated by. These 'visitations' may
have come from inside a saint's own mind, or they may indeed have been from
God. But as the cases such as St Paul's, St Augustine's or Teresa's
demonstrated, what was sure was that they could transform a life.
The
Motivation of the Convert
Both psychology and religion, James
observes, agree that a person can be transformed by forces apparently beyond
their normal consciousness. But while psychology defines these forces as
'unconscious' i.e. within the self, in religion redemption comes from outside
the person, is a gift from God.
To the rational or scientific frame of
mind, the 'born again' person or garden-variety religious convert may seem
imbalanced, a nut even. Conversion can be sudden, James points out, but it does
not mean it is pathological. To the onlooker, it may look like the patching on
of a holy outlook to a person's existing life, but to him or her experiencing
it, it is a total transformation. Suddenly, it is other people who are in the
dark.
James recognized a pattern in
conversion experiences. It tended to happen when people were so low that they
just 'gave up', the vacuum of hope providing space for revelation. The
religious literature is full of stories along these lines, in which the
constrictions and negative aspects of the ego are finally discarded; one begins
to live only for others or for some higher goal. The compensation for becoming
dependent upon God is a letting go of fear, and it is this that makes
conversion such a liberating experience. It is the fearlessness and sense of
absolute security in God that gives the convert their breathtaking motivation.
An apparently perfectly normal person will give up everything and become a
missionary in the jungle, or found a monastery in the desert, because of a
belief. Yet this invisible thing will drastically change their outward
circumstances, which led James to the unavoidable conclusion that for such a
person, their conversion or spiritual experience was a fact, indeed more real
than anything which had so far happened in their lives.
Why
Religion Has a Transforming Power
James offered the idea that religion
does not have to be worship of a God. It can be simply the belief in an unseen
order, to which our task was to 'harmoniously adjust ourselves'. He notes that,
"Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not
say that any total reaction upon life is a religion?" Under this
appreciation, atheism could be a religion. The fervor with which some atheists
attack Christianity, he noted, is religious in nature. People take on religion
for personal reasons, James argues - it must serve them in some way. He quotes
J H Leuba, an early psychologist of religion: "God is not known, he is not
understood; he is used."
The religious attitude, though, is
normally associated with a willingness to leave the self behind in the cause of
something greater e.g. God, country. This denial of the self is what makes the
religious impulse different from all other types of happiness, and so uniquely
uplifting. A religious feeling can be distinguished from other feelings because
it ennobles the feeler, giving them the sense that they live according to
larger forces, laws or designs.
We all want to connect with something
'more', whether that is something great inside us or an external Higher Power,
and religion provides a framework for people to experience the better things
which come from living by faith instead of our more natural state of fear.
"Not God", James states, "but life, more life, a larger, richer,
more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion."
The
Final Word
Inserted into the text of The
Varieties of Religious Experience is the mention of a man who managed to
save himself from insanity by anchoring his mind to powerful statements from
the Bible. It so happens that this person, referred to as a 'French
correspondent', was the author himself.
James' conclusion was that a state of
faith could transform a life utterly, even though what is believed strictly
speaking may not exist. Religion can genuinely heal a person, integrating what
before was fragmented. For the author, who fell in and out of depression and
endured a sense of alienation for many of his years, this alone justified
religious activity. While he admitted to being far from spiritually advanced
himself, it was clear to him that belief in the Unseen had unleashed in many
the great forces of individuality and purpose.
James acknowledged that science would
be forever trying to blow away the obscuring mists of religion, but in doing so
it would totally miss the point. Science could only ever talk in the abstract,
but personal spiritual experience was the more powerful precisely because it is
subjective. Spirituality is about the emotions and the imagination and the soul
- and to a human being these are everything.[ii]
In essence James does a very good job, indeed, of
demonstrating the commonalities in all religions. [iii]
[iv]We
can note for instance that each of the major religions has a guru or prophet
that shares his or her enlightenment with others, disciples or the public in
general or both.
So, it is clear to any serious student of the theology of
religions that we are dealing with man’s opinion of what most of us consider to
be our ultimate concern; namely, God.
Now, in this regard let us take a closer look at what James
taught and thereby help us to understand the commonality of religious phenomenon.[v]
Salient Points
The Ineffability of Mystical Experience
Ineffability is meant to convey
the fact that the individual of the experience “says that it defies expression,
[and] that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”
Consequently, a mystical experience must be experienced for anyone to
understand the reasons for ineffability. It is not enough to attempt a
description of the experience, because all descriptions fall short of their
goal.
A jazz musician, for example, cannot
explain precisely how it feels to get lost in spontaneous improvisation. He
will hint by way of pseudo-description, paradox or poetry, but he will most
emphatically exclaim that you must experience it to understand it. In a like
manner James argues that the mystic feels herself to be in the same position,
and often feels “that most of us accord to [her] experiences an …incompetent
treatment.”
The Noetic Quality of Mystical
Experience
The noetic quality of a mystical
experience is the fact that the mystic feels the experience to impute a kind of
knowledge by way of “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the
discursive intellect.” This claim emphasizes James’ insistent appeal to
mystical states being the source of an intuitive, non-conceptual knowledge that
does not require concepts in order to ‘know’ the knowledge it instills.
This complex idea can be understood as
such: non-mystical knowledge of a tree can be thought of as “this tree is
tall,” where concepts and their connections are a web of knowledge that support
the experience. Mystical states, on the other hand, cannot be articulated in a
conceptual manner. These states, James contends, are “inarticulate, [although]
they remain,” and they always leave a lingering feeling that they did in fact
mean something.
In an essay titled "The Tigers of
India," James discusses conceptual knowledge and immediate knowledge,
distinguishing the latter from the former in this way: “Thought-stuff and
thing-stuff are here indistinguishably the same in nature…and there is no
context of intermediaries…to stand between and separate the thought and thing.”
This notion of “no context of intermediaries” is important for James’ concern
with the noetic quality of mystical experiences because it focuses on the
central problem of understanding knowledge as it relates to the mystic.
Typically, knowledge is understood as
an intermediate function where, as in the tree example, ideas of “tree” and
“brown” act as intermediaries that allow one to say “this tree is brown.” But
in the unmediated knowledge of the mystic James is trying to emphasize that the
thought of “what is experienced” and the “thing that is experienced,” come
together as a singularity that instills knowledge.
Since no intermediate function takes
place, conceptualizing the experience forces separateness onto an experience
that in its original state was non-mediated. As a singularity the experienced
thing and the experiencing of the thing “are only two names for one indivisible
fact which, properly named, is…the phenomenon, or the experience.”
The Transiency of Mystical Experience
The notion of transiency emphasizes the
quality of mystical experiences being short and difficult to sustain.
Importantly, though, the qualities of the experience can be brought back to the
mind afterwards.
As James says, “when they recur it is recognized,” and the
significance of such qualities are prone to being developed and built up. In
short, the experiences are brief, but they when they recur they mystic knows
indubitably that it is the same type of experience, and so implants a deepening
of its significance.
The Passivity of Mystical Experience
The notion of passivity is meant to
convey that when in a mystical state “[the] mystic feels as if [her] own will
were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if [she] were grasped and held by a
superior power.” Even when the mystic induces this state through meditative,
intentional acts, it remains that when she enters the state she in effect loses
self-control.
James parallels this loss of
self-control with prophetic speech or automatic writing, in which the
individual feels compelled to act by a force other than him or herself. These
moments of passivity are meant to communicate the important fact that the
mystic feels as if something else moves her, has a hold of her, and guides her
actions, making the deterioration of the self-crucial to the significance of
the experience.
Thus, as we see the theology of religion must include the
commonality of psychological processes which leads into the formation of religious
concepts.
[i]
“The Varieties of Religious Experience” is considered the seminal work in the
field of religious psychology. As such, it is, in my opinion, a must read [yes
all 500 plus pages] for any serious student of religious thought.
[ii]
Source: 50 Spiritual Classics: 50 Great Books of Inner Discovery, Enlightenment
and Purpose, Tom Butler-Bowdon (London & Boston: Nicholas Brealey)
[iii]
50 SPIRITUAL CLASSICS FROM VARIOUS RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES
·
Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)
·
St Augustine Confessions (400)
·
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull
(1970)
·
Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)
·
Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness
(1901)
·
Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)
·
Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)
·
GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)
·
Pema Chödrön - The Places That Scare You (2001)
·
Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century
BCE)
·
Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)
·
Epictetus - The Enchiridion (1st century)
·
Mohandas Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of
My Experiments With Truth (1927)
·
Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)
·
Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)
·
GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men
(1960)
·
Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)
·
Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)
·
Herman Hesse - Siddartha (1922)
·
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)
·
William James - The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902)
·
Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
(1955)
·
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)
·
J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)
·
CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)
·
Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
(1964)
·
Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)
·
Dan Millman The Way of the Peaceful Warrior
(1989)
·
W Somerset Maugham The Razor's Edge (1944)
·
Thich Nhat Hanh The Miracle of Mindfulness
(1975)
·
Michael Newton Journey of Souls (1994)
·
John O'Donohue Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic
Wisdom (1998)
·
Robert M Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance (1974)
·
James Redfield The Celestine Prophecy (1994)
·
Miguel Ruiz The Four Agreements (1997)
·
Helen Schucman & William Thetford A Course
in Miracles (1976)
·
Idries Shah The Way of the Sufi (1968)
·
Starhawk The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the
Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)
·
Shunryu Suzuki Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)
·
Emanuel Swedenborg Heaven and Hell (1758)
·
Teresa of Avila Interior Castle (1570)
·
Mother Teresa A Simple Path (1994)
·
Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1998)
·
Chögyam Trungpa Cutting Through Spiritual
Materialism (1973)
·
Neale Donald Walsch Conversations With God
(1998)
·
Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)
·
Simone Weil Waiting For God (1979)
·
Ken Wilber A Theory of Everything (2000)
·
Paramahansa Yogananda Autobiography of a Yogi
(1974)
Gary Zukav The Seat of the Soul (1990)
·
[iv]
Note the following commonalities of a:
·
Prophet Figure/Religion/Body Of Sacred Text,
etc.:
·
Buddha—Buddhism--Tipitaka--the 3 baskets
·
Jesus—Christianity—Old and New Testament
·
Moses—Judaism—Old Testament
·
Muhammad—Islam—Koran
·
Bahá'u'lláh-- Bahá'í— The Kitáb-I-Aqdas
[v] Sources:
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, (New York: Simon and
Schuster: 1997).
