The Varieties of Religious Experience

Mm-hmm.

It's, and it's also based on something that the founder of American psychology and a branch of American philosophy called pragmatism, a guy named William James, who wrote a fantastic book among o- you know, several books, but one of his, uh, more popular books, uh, was c- is called The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is him writing about, um, the mystical tradition in many, many cultures throughout history.

Yeah.

But he came up with this idea called the as if principle, which fast-forward a hundred years became the foundational principle for cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the, the most, the sort of the premier form of modern psychotherapy.

Oh, there's been so much.

I would say for me, the best advice I ever got is when I read the William James book, Varieties of Religious Experience.

That cracked the whole thing open for me.

And that's why I wrote a book about it.

But psychologists, busily engaged in chasing their tails, leave them unanswered and in most cases even unasked.

The late William James, more acute than the general, saw how precious little was known about the psychological inwardness of religion, and to the illumination of this darkness he addressed himself in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience.

But life being short and science long, he got little beyond the statement of the problem and the marshalling of the grosser evidence, and even at this business he allowed himself to be constantly interrupted by spooks, hobgoblins, seventh sons of seventh sons, and other such characteristic pets of psychologists.

In the same way one Gustave Le Bon, a Frenchman, undertook a psychological study of the crowd mind, and then blew up.

And that book is this book, only mine is not a leather-bound copy.

This book is called The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

It's very hard to read this book.

In Scotland, in 1901, 1902, there was a conference of psychologists.

And at this conference, they discussed and had speakers, people saying what they were like, what happened to them, and what they're like now.

Does that sound familiar? This book is one of the four books that were very instrumental in the writing of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

This book is The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

And the Oxford groupers held great stock with this book.

Just for today, common denominators from On the Bridge Back to Life.

As Bill read on in The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, his own powers of reasoning helped him extract some important ideas from the weighty and intricate text.

he saw that all the cases described by James had certain common denominators, despite the diverse ways in which they manifested themselves.

These insights became important to Bill in his thinking about the plight of the alcoholic and his need for spiritual help.

But and you start to realize that it's a lot harder than we think to answer the apparently simple question, what am I thinking? So my first question is, what did you discover in James's writing that you hadn't known was there as you began to engage with the idea of thought and your own thinking?

So I started my engagement with James back when I was writing How to Change Your Mind, because he wrote a brilliant book called The Varieties of Religious Experience that has a chapter on mystical experience.

And mystical experience, these are these sometimes spontaneous, sometimes caused by near-death experience, sometimes caused by psychedelics, these experience of unitive consciousness.

I mean, there are other characteristics where the ego just melts away and you feel you're part of this oceanic boundlessness.

That the genuine background, where do you wanna look? How do you wanna coordinate this thing? We wanna look back to the foundations of an American philosophy of experience.

William James's book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which has often been taken to be the conversations starter in religious studies.

Well, what's the difference here? I know we can get in the we can be up high in this disciplinary conversation, but what's the difference here? And what is William James really trying to do? He's trying to evaluate the transformative potential of religion.

religious experience of spiritual experience.

But now the other two figures, these are the early American pragmatists, are Josiah Royce and Charles Sanders Peirce.

And they're in direct conversation with William James.

In fact, Royce's book, The Sources of Religious Insight, he wrote the book, delivered these lectures as a rejoinder the varieties of religious experience and okay there's a lot of good in there but what william james is doing is basically interpreting religious experience as the experience of an individual, right? In their solitude, he even uses that kind of language, an individual in a space of solitude, that's the epitome.

So mystical experience is the sort of apotheosis, we can see it as an apotheosis of religious experience, but in some ways it's a kind of mystical foundationalism Um, that, that James can, can rest upon, which also, by the way, ties into the worst sort of instincts or worst, uh, cultural phenomenon in, in the United

It was not a problem for William James at the turn of the 19th century.

His most famous book is Varieties of Religious Experience.

Wonderful, interesting book, by the way.

And for him as a philosopher and a really early psychologist, It was just perfectly natural to be interested in what's going on with this and what's really happening with religious belief and how does that affect people.