The Varieties of Religious Experience (William James)

Explore the deep insights of William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience." In this Beyond the Book episode, we get into James' groundbreaking work, examining the intersection of religion, spirituality and psychology. 

Join us as we uncover the timeless wisdom and relevance of James' perspectives in our modern world. James, often hailed as the father of American psychology, explores the diverse landscapes of religious thought and experience. 

Through our discussion, we bring to light James' unique approach to spirituality, touching on themes such as the power of belief, the role of consciousness, and the personal nature of spiritual experience. We also examine his perspective on New Age spirituality and its place within the broader religious context. 

This video is not just an exploration of James' philosophy but also an invitation to reflect on your own spiritual journey and beliefs. Whether you're a spiritual seeker, a student of psychology, or simply curious about the different facets of religious experience, this video offers valuable insights and thought-provoking discussions.

Join our spiritual community at https://Kishar.org

Follow our journey on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kisharspiritual

Explore more with us: https://bit.ly/m/Kishar

#WilliamJames #TheVarietiesOfReligiousExperience #Spirituality #NewAge #Philosophy #SpiritualJourney

Transcript

0:34

Even today, it's hard to take an objective look at religion and spirituality, because when you do that, when you when you go and you try to take this perspective and give your perspective to other people, you're judged or criticized by the religious crowd. You're judged by spiritualists and you're judged by atheists. And so you're judged by all these different groups of people who are super invested in what they believe is right or wrong. We talk a lot in this channel about being open to the universe and having an open mind and how being open to things changes the way that you see the world and changes your reality, It’s this huge thing. And this book we're going to talk about today really goes into that idea of being open minded. And I think anyone interested in spirituality or religion would greatly benefit from reading this book. William James coined the phrase stream of consciousness. His work, the Varieties of Religious Experience, was derived from its presentation as part of the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. I've never heard of the Gifford lectures, but they're actually pretty famous. They're held at several famous Scottish universities, and each lecture covers the study of theology and is given over the course of a full year. Carl Sagan would be invited to lecture in 1985 and he named his lecture The Varieties of Scientific Experience in honor of William James and his landmark work. James was a philosopher, but he was considered the father of American psychology. So he was also a scientist. And I think we have to look at the context of the era that William James lived in to fully understand his work that we're going to talk about today. He delivered his lectures in the very early part of the 20th century. this was a time when the world was undergoing massive change in terms of pace of thought and variety of thought. We were starting to see people really challenge the status quo. And I think that if you watch something like Downton Abbey, it really shows how much the world was changing during this time in the early 1900s. It is really something that is hard for us to probably really conceptualize where people were going from living in a very isolated manner to being connected with the world. As a psychologist who spent a number of years of teaching at Harvard, James would bring this unique perspective into his analysis of religion and spirituality. He was one of the philosophers who brought the term pragmatism into the collective consciousness of philosophical thought. His approach in applying reason to attempt a fair view of religion from this detached perspective was actually really refreshing. It was really brave. Given the pitfalls of challenging mainstream Christian theology back in the early 1900s. Even today, it's hard to take an objective look at religion and spirituality, because when you do that, when you when you go and you try to take this perspective and then give your perspective to other people, you're judged or criticized by the religious crowd. You're judged by spiritualists and you're judged by atheists. And so you're judged by all these different groups of people who are super invested in what they believe is right or wrong. I think it's a good reminder for us to approach each other with open mind, an open heart, and then we can all have a much better conversation about our own unique spiritual path. James was highly educated and really well traveled. This led him to have contact with a diverse set of religions and spiritual philosophies. So it wasn't just the Abrahamic faiths that he knew, but he was exposed to religions and spiritual ideas from South and Eastern Asia as well. And based on what I've read from him, he had a really good understanding of Buddhism and Hinduism. And he tends to gravitate more towards Buddhism than Hinduism, in my opinion. And that's interesting because as I've read through books on religion and philosophy, this is a trend that I've noticed among Christian or Christian adjacent scholars. They tend to have this affinity for Buddhism. I'm not sure what exactly to say about that, but I find it really interesting and compelling. And I also will note that he didn't really mention Daoism at all as far as the eastern faiths go, so maybe he didn't have exposure to it or he didn't find it important enough to include in his work. James does speak at length about New Age spirituality. He identifies the movement as a religion, and I think this might rub some people the wrong way, and I can definitely understand why, but I can also understand why James would label it as its own religion for theological purposes and for study and discussion. He calls New age, spirituality, mind cure, and he associate it with his healthy mindedness, school of religious thought and belief. And this is contrasted with his sick soul school of thought. Basically, think of it in a way that he classifies various religions and spiritual philosophies and either healthy minded, which are concepts taken from a more optimistic worldview or a universal view or sick soul, which kind of take a negative or pessimistic view of life. And so that's how he classifies different religions or parts of different religions. and I think William James adding this to the healthy mindedness school of thought shows how much he respected it and that it had power as its own religion or spiritual philosophy. I knew that New Age spiritual beliefs went back a long way. But up until reading this work from William James, I didn't realize they went this far back. And we're talking like, well, back into the mid to late 1800s and probably even earlier than that. If you really go back and start to look at the origins of the New Age spiritual and James was quite familiar with the genre and he describes it in great detail in his book and he honestly seems to just get it, for lack of a better way to say it. And he, he, I think, saw the beauty in it, even if he does have some criticism of New Age spirituality, he says it often ignores evil and only sees an optimistic side of the universe. And I can understand where he would come from and think that. I think there are people who do ignore darkness within ourselves and in the universal nature of everything. But I think William James misunderstood the viewpoint here. It's not about ignoring evil or the negative. It's about realizing you only have dominion or power over yourself. So of course, evil exists. Negativity is going to present itself in the universe in our lives. But you have a real choice about how to proceed once you meet it. It's not about ignoring evil as much as about acceptance and so I think he's a brilliant man, and I think he made some great points, but I think he might have misunderstood that it isn't just a focus on positivity or optimism. It's just deciding that, yes, there's darkness in the world, yes, there's light in the world, but in the true essence of New Age spirituality, you can choose to walk that balance in between and be that balance. And you can either choose to look in the darkness or you can look over to the light. And if you choose to look over the light, it doesn't mean that you're ignoring the darkness. So I just kind of wanted to note that contrast. I think it's really important. as I progress through the book, a lot of it gets down into the dogma of things and what you see behind the dogma. And as to him classifying New Age or mind cure as a religion, let me elaborate a bit. What James is driving at is that he he's not really concerned with institutional religion, not the buildings or the priest, all the rules that dogma that surrounds everything. He wasn't interested in that. He didn't even cover that in his lectures. What he's really concerned with, especially when studying religion and spirituality, was the religion of the individual, which I think very much in a modern definition, especially in our age today, is is called spirituality. That individual core belief. And so spirituality very much fits this definition for us. And it gets into what he's interested in is that divine thing that people believe in, you know, God with a capital G or God with a little G, the Brahman of the of Hinduism, Nirvana, enlightenment, nature, you know, all the names that we know know it by. And James is able to do what many people have issues doing. He's able to separate the individual person from all this dogmatic B.S. and he can simultaneously separate religion from faith, from all this manmade induced horrors that have been carried out in the name of religion throughout human history. And those are that's really critical thinking on his part. It's important to do that. If you want to have a free and fair conversation about faith and about belief. before we move on, please subscribe by hitting the watermark in the lower right hand corner of this video. And if you think anyone else might benefit from this, please share it out with them. James very much understands religion and science can sometimes be at odds. He's able to wrap his head around this because as a psychologist, he is a scientist and yet he's also a philosopher and familiar with the metaphysical and esoteric. But even as a psychologist, I would venture to say he seems to understand there's something about this human consciousness that's ineffable. He spent some time getting into this throughout his lectures. He says that we can't accurately examine faith, belief, spirituality or religion in someone. If, as an external observer, we don't know whether that person themselves actually believes what they say, they believe it. And that's worth looking back and looking at again, while we're talking. Whether or not someone actually or truly believes will impact the outcome of the study. So just really stop us, stop for a second and think about that. You know, it's hard for a scientist to study a religion because they can't say for sure whether or not the person they're studying believes. And belief is this really, truly powerful thing. And that's something that I really want to get into. He had great insight into the power of belief and positivity. James points out the power of belief and how this belief can manifest in these unexplainable and positive ways and affect the outcomes in a human who believes that they're going to overcome some great obstacle. He looks at New Age spirituality and sees the healing and therapeutic power of what would later be termed mindfulness and these other modalities. it's more complicated than what I just said. And he gets into it more eloquently and with more examples. But hopefully you understand what he was getting at. He actually spent quite a bit of time in multiple parts of his lectures recounting these extraordinary events and phenomena where people were healed or transformed, harmed just through the power of positive thinking or going back to that idea of belief or faith. It was you can say that that was positive thinking or mindfulness, but you could also describe that same thing as faith or belief. And I think when we're studying religions, when we're studying spirituality, we have to look at that idea of not the rules that they're following, not the tenets of the religion, but does the person believe in it, and how does that impact the outcome of their reality in the life that they're living? This is spirituality. This is that deep conversation about what spirituality is. He discussed the role of mindful healing and intention throughout this process. And, you know, we know scientifically now that mindfulness can change the makeup of the brain, and we know that how we think impacts our physical and mental state and it obviously impacts our spiritual state as well. So just consider the impact of stress or anxiety on our body and also look at the placebo effect and how just someone taking a pill that they believe does something will actually do that thing. And science can't really explain why that happens. And that goes back into the the power of intentional thinking, the power of positive thinking, and that goes back into the idea of faith and belief. And this is a truly powerful thing, even though he does spend a good deal of time on non-Christian viewpoints in these lectures, which was pretty radical at the time. He also spends time talking about the Christian faith and the Christian view of everything. I mean, he lived in this huge Judeo Christian world that controlled the power, politics and information at the time. So this natural that he's going to talk about Christianity and this does get a bit tedious at times in the middle part of the book I don't want that to take away from anything in this book. This is a great book. I think it's one that you would really enjoy reading and get something out of, and I think it's forgivable given his position as an American philosopher and psychologist during that time frame. It also gives an idea of where he was back in the 1900s and who his audience was, not just the audience who would read this book, this collection of lectures that he gave, but the people that he was actually lecturing to in Scotland. But even in Christianity, there's an engaging and wide cross-section of subjects from George Fox and the Quakers to the Catholic Saints and even the Catholic Mystics and everything in between. And I really do love the Quakers. If you've never read or watched anything on the Quakers, give it a shot. I think that as far as Christians go, you'll find them fairly enlightening and go back and look at the history of George Fox and William Penn and what the Quakers actually believed in and what they brought to this world. They were very progressive and very forward thinking and very open minded. Religion is diverse and complicated, and there's a beauty there. James understands that you can't pin religions down to this neat single volume. It doesn't fit in the same box. And he celebrates it. He believes that there's this vastness of the subject and that it's probably applicable in different ways to different people. He seems to very much understand the universal nature of religion and I'm an Omnist. I believe in the sum of great human thought from around the world and across time. And so I can appreciate this belief that he has and we should all look across the world and think what what draws us together? What are the commonalities? As I've read all these philosophical, spiritual and religious works, you know, we're all saying the same thing. It's different, there's different rules, there are different guidelines or different bases and tenants. But at the end of the day, there's so much overlap. And James seems to see that there is something to the human connection with the Divine. Again, he sees something that is connected between humans and the individual, and that divine thing out there that we're all aware of or searching for or have some essence of, and that that connection between us as an individual and the Divine, that there's something on the other side of our consciousness and that it's a different world. He talks about this in the lectures and in this book, and he sees it that someday that that might be scientifically relevant. So we're talking about a man in the early 1900s, so over 100 years ago, and we can still say that same thing today, that that there's something on the other side of our consciousness. If you look at the father of quantum physics and Max Planck, you know, he talked about how science understands that consciousness exists, that everything that the quantum physicists see postulates the existence of consciousness, they can't define it. They don't know exactly what it is, but that it's likely that matter itself sits on top of consciousness. And I think that's where the discussion between spiritualist and scientists really comes to a head is the idea of consciousness. Ask a scientist to define consciousness. They cannot do that, and neither can a spiritualist necessarily. So that conversation about what consciousness is, is where a lot of stuff in the realms of art, science, philosophy, religion, spirituality all come to a head. And so ponder that as you walk down your own spiritual path. What is consciousness? William James was very forward thinking and fairly accurate for someone in the early 20th century. He sees that connection again that people have to something just beyond everything. He sees this as scientifically relevant, even if it isn't really scientifically provable and from a spiritual perspective, James saw religion as this fiercely personal thing. The fact that James excludes institutional religion from his lectures speaks volumes. He appears to really understand that religion lies within and that everything without is extraneous. So all this other stuff that's happening around us, everything beyond us, is is not something that we control or relevant to the discussion of what our spiritual being really is. And I think if we were all open as William James is about religion and spirituality, the world would be a much better place. How do you view his work and what are your own spiritual or religious beliefs? I'm really interested in what your own personal beliefs are and how you see the world. How do you see the universe around us and how we fit in it? We don't have to be so solemn about religion and spirituality. It can be serious on one hand, sure, but it can really be joyous and an interesting experience. So let that joy flow and fill you up. You get to choose what you're filled up with. That's your choice. At one point, as I was reading this, it struck me that you can embrace your enlightenment or cast it aside. So if you had this moment of understanding or clarity or thought, maybe you think I'm crazy or I did, or what's happening, so we can choose to cast that thought aside, or we can kind of accept it and see what it's all about. So if you're struck with the truth of the universe, if you have an idea or essence of it, what do you do with it? I think that's a great question to answer for yourself. And we ask questions like this and have conversations like this. And so if you're interested in a peaceful community that has open minded conversations just like this, please check us out at Kishar.org And please like this video if you want us to keep making content just like this and until next time, I wish you peace on your journey.