William James:The Varieties of Religious Experience-Original Edition

I wanted to like this classic book, but I can't do it: too many things are wrong. A shame, because I completely approve of the idea. William James, writing around the end of the 19th century, sets out to take a cool look at how people experience religious feeling, basing his investigation on state-of-the-art psychological theory. What do we discover, and what do the findings tell us about the nature of religion? For the first two or three chapters, I enjoyed it and thought it was going in a good direction. James is evidently intelligent and well-read, and he's capable of writing excellent prose. Unfortunately, it rapidly started going off the rails in several ways.<br /><br />First, the style. Yes, James is able to write wonderfully, but a lot of the time he seems to have lost all sense of self-criticism. Above all, he just won't cut anything: the book could comfortably have been shortened to half its length. Looking around, I see many editions which have far fewer pages, so I'm guessing that some editors have done just that. In the original version, which I read, he has endless, repetitious quotations, often stuffed into footnotes which can go on (literally) for two or three pages. It's worse than <i>Infinite Jest</i>, where at least the footnotes are intentionally annoying and often funny. These are anything but.<br /><br />Next, the science. All well and good to say you'll use up-to-date psychological theory: but psychology at that time was barely a science at all, and it shows. The "scientific" explanations are in most cases not much more than hand-waving and fanciful ideas with Latin names. There are no experiments, no statistics, no falsifiable claims. It's just a mass of case studies, selected and reported according to criteria that are never in any way made clear. Just: oh, this is interesting, let's stick it in. When you cherry-pick your data this way, you can prove anything. <br /><br />To be fair, James does have an informal plan for selecting his examples, but it's one that I feel very dubious about. He says he will focus on the most extreme examples of religious feeling, since it is in such cases that we will see it in its purest form. We are thus treated to hundreds of pages of quotations from born-again converts, saints and mystics. The greater part of these passages are tedious in the extreme: few of the people in question write well. And, more important, I am not at all sure I agree that religious feeling is best studied in these extreme cases. There's an analogy which suggested itself to me more than once. Imagine that most people never experienced sexual desire, and you wanted to investigate the minority who claimed that they knew it from their own experience. I would definitely not start by reading accounts of people who were into extreme BDSM; <i>The Story of O</i> is interesting in its perverse way, but it would probably give you all sorts of odd ideas about what sex was like. I hate to say this, but some of the saints James discusses rather reminded me of O. <br /><br />At the end, I was surprised to see James unequivocally claiming that he thought religious feeling was a good thing, and that its object was some definite spiritual reality. I do wonder if he truly believed this. If he did, why pick such bizarre and unconvincing examples? I am quite capable of being moved by religious authors: for example, I love <i>The Divine Comedy</i>, <i>Ash Wednesday</i>, Jan Kjærstad's Jonas Wergeland trilogy, Flaubert's <i>La tentation de saint Antoine</i> and Selma Lagerlöf's <i>Jerusalem</i>, to name just a few. If James had actually wanted to convince his readers, I think he could have done better. He says himself that he was a person who never experienced religious feeling much at first hand; you often get the impression that he was rather sceptical about it. He is certainly quite willing to poke fun at many of the subjects he quotes.<br /><br />All in all, then, an annoying and frustrating book. If you're interested in these matters, I'd instead recommend reading Gide's <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/146661.La_porte_troite" rel="nofollow noopener"> <i>La porte étroite</i> </a> and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/770669.L_immoraliste" rel="nofollow noopener"> <i>L'immoraliste</i> </a>, and Smullyan's <a href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/smullyan.html" rel="nofollow noopener"> <i>Planet Without Laughter</i> </a>. They're shorter, better written, and, in my humble opinion, considerably more insightful.<br />

I had an unusually long conversation with my daughter Georgia (also now a Goodreader) once when she was seven years old (she's now 16 going on 17, just like in the song) and the matter of eschatology came up, so I asked her directly - well, what does happen when you die? So she laid out what she thinks happens, and I was so taken by the stuff she came out with that I wrote it down. As it's a variety of religious experience I thought it appropriate to include here.<br /><br /><b> WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE </b><br /><br />Heaven has different parts to it. In one part there are monsters, but they're good. In another part they're like orcs but they're good. In the third part there are dinosaurs, and they're bad. <br /> Jesus is not in heaven. He is above heaven. He was a normal man but he went on the cross and died and he became magic. He was alive again and turned into an angel. Now he can listen to anyone on the earth just by thinking of their name.<br /> When people die they all go to heaven. It could be the good part or the bad part. When you die you turn into a zombie, but then quite quickly you turn into a skeleton and that's when you go to heaven. The<br />skeletons in heaven can't see the Earth at all, but to the good orcs Earth appears like the brightest star in the sky. But they have to look down to see it, because they are all upside down.<br /> If you are cremated your ashes float up and turn into your soul. It goes up into a purple porthole. It meets a sorter who asks you what age you want to be and that's what you stay at from then on. In this world everything is slightly see-through. You only spend 1000 years here and then you go to the graveyard and sleep. But one day in each 10 years you come alive again. But this world is not heaven so jesus is not there. The bad people who die become good. For five years out of 1000 they are punished in a house sized prison cell by having to eat all the food they really hate and listen to all the music they really hate. <br /> There is a feather of truth and a catch up course, but I can't remember what they are for.<br /> People have gone into space in rockets but they haven't seen heaven because it is very small. <br /> When animals die, if it's on concrete they fade away and become invisible. If it's on soil, they sink bit by bit into the earth and they become animal zombies. Our hamster Lucy became an animal zombie, but all animal zombies are good, not bad. <br /> <br />Note : don't blame me for any of this, I never allowed her to watch any zombie films intil she was 12! I don't know where she's got any of this stuff apart from orcs.

<i>“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”</i> <br>― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1426934416i/14126875._SX540_.jpg" width="400" height="259" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> <br><br>The amazing thing about James is he can write with precision and humility about something so completely intrinsic and fraught with pit falls. Most writers run at the subject with some large bias of the mystical, the absolute. You have thousand of books written every year proclaiming their strain of Christianity, Judaism, Vegetarianism, Atheism, Mormonism, Buddhism, as being the only true and living way to view the divine AND the only mirror to view and judge ourselves. James is different. He artfully and carefully presents a measured approach to religion. He picks it apart with affection. He looks at it normatively and then he tries to look at each speck and piece through a value lens. <br><br>I think the magic is James isn't selling a belief. He isn't pimping a lifestyle. He is just curious and very very smart. And it isn't a clinical curiosity either (although his precision could be called clinical). It is a joyful curiosity. A drive to discover how we work and what really makes us tick. He wants to know and explain his hypothesis. God **ahem** bless William James. He wasn't just describing the transcendental condition of mankind, he was establishing and building a framework for others to follow for over 100 years.

Most people seem to think this book is important for the light it sheds on religion, or perhaps as an advancement in the field of religious studies. However, I would argue that this book's real significance lies in James' respect for our conscious experiences of things as the origin of real truth, insight, and significance. James is one of those rare thinkers who values the subjective more highly than the objective: "The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed." James' emphasis on conscious experience is a radical departure from the orthodoxy of our age, which is one reason that James' arguments in this book will challenge at least one fundamental belief of nearly every reader. Only those readers who are ready to think and to learn need apply here.<br /><br />These days, most people have adopted a rationalist mindset that values definite facts above all things, that uplifts truths derived strictly from material phenomena. In <i>The Varieties of Religious Experience</i>, James declares his allegiance to the truth as it is experienced, and he argues persuasively that the truth as it is experienced by singular, subjective human beings like you and I ends up being more significant, and having a greater impact on life as it is actually lived, than "universal" scientific truths. He investigates religious experiences as they were felt and encountered by the individuals who had them. His primary method for this is to review many, many first-hand accounts of religious experiences, looking for commonalities and patterns between the accounts. A consummate analyst, James identifies several of these commonalities and patterns, and he organizes a series of lectures around them. Each lecture investigates a different aspect of religious experience, such as "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness," "Conversion," "Saintliness," and "Mysticism." Each lecture takes readers through the various first-hand accounts of the religious experience being focused upon, and James goes on to make observations and quite persuasive arguments about what can be concluded from these experiences about the value, significance, and role of religion in human life. The whole time, James honors the feelings experienced by these people. He analyzes and discusses these feelings with a probing intellect and a sympathetic sensibility. James understands fully that "Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd." Despite these hazards, James explores the world of private, individualized feelings because he knows that is the world where most of us actually reside, day by day, and that is the world where religion is actually experienced. James happily tours where science fears to tread. <br /><br />It helps that James is a good writer and an insightful psychoanalyst. While reading this book, I repeatedly had the feeling that James was discussing experiences I'd had privately, without ever reporting to anyone, and that James understood those experiences better than I who had lived them. Like all great literature, this book opens us to the shared experiences that unite so many human beings across time and space. James treats even the most extreme emotional states with an even-handed finesse, a literary grace that honors the furor of the moment while laying bare what sense the intellect can make of it. Consider his description of anger: "Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistably as anger does it. [...] The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves. [...] Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation, and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist in the aptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softness must often be the targets and the victims." Who among us, at one time or another, hasn't destroyed something valuable or important in a fit of rage?<br /><br />Those looking to understand religion generally will learn plenty about why so many religions tend toward strictness, or withdrawing from pleasure, or asceticism; why the newly converted behave that way; why some people seem to walk through life intoxicated by Jesus, smiling their way from sunrise to sunset, and frowning only when someone dwells upon sickness or uses bad language; why saints behave that way, and what it takes to be a saint; why mystical experiences mean everything to the mystic and almost nothing to anyone else, and what that has to do with a good, stiff drink. <br /><br />Lest potential readers fear that James is trying to convert atheists into the faithful, let me be clear that James is studying how people experience religion, not arguing that we need to experience it. His attitude seems to be that, for anyone who feels, who travels an ongoing interior emotional landscape, sooner or later an experience will arise that human culture has traditionally named "religious," whether we prefer to use that label or not. The experience, not the label, is what's important. And I would bet that every reader will identify with many of the experiences James discusses. To varying degrees, every reader will find himself or herself reflected in James' pages. And every reader stands to learn how these experiences, which so often feel remote and isolated from the other humans surrounding us, actually connect to the vaster experience, to the infinite. James gives us reassurance that we're not alone in these experiences; he gives us a vocabulary to discuss them; he gives us insights into how we can better understand and contextualize these experiences.<br /><br />A recent Pew poll asked people to name their religious faith or affiliation. The results showed that the fastest-growing segment of the faithful in the USA are "nones," or people who don't adhere to any of the major religious faiths. However, the same polling data show that the majority of people refer to themselves as "spiritual" if not religious. We have not stopped needing a spiritual ground on which to experience our lives. Furthermore, some people will drift from the "none" category to a major religion, and then back to "none." Our culture appears to be entering an age of flux, or perhaps crisis, when it comes to religion. That makes James' project valuable to our age, for James takes the trouble to explain what is valuable in religion without giving us the feeling that he's selling something, or trying to force a moral code upon us. James only wants to give us insights into religion itself, and how religion has been experienced on a private, emotional level at various times throughout history. He wants us to understand why religion has been with humans throughout history and will in all likelihood be with us throughout time.

I have heard of this book for years and have meant to look into it for about as long – but earlier this year I read a book called <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/28827.Ghost_Hunters_William_James_and_the_Search_for_Scientific_Proof_of_Life_After_Death" title="Ghost Hunters William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum" rel="noopener">Ghost Hunters William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death</a> and that made me more curious about James and his philosophy. I had read some of his philosophy at University, but not really a lot.<br /><br />I had no idea this would be quite so long. I also had no idea this was based on a series of twenty lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh between 1901-02.<br /><br />This isn’t quite what we would today expect from a book entitled Varieties of Religious Experience. This is a book that even finds Catholic systems of belief a bit ‘out-there’. The treatment of any non-Christian belief systems is, to be incredibly generous, cursory. However, my limited knowledge of these other belief systems is not much more extensive than James’ so, in taking this book for what it is, it was an interesting discussion.<br /><br />Let’s cut to the chaise – after twenty lectures that must have lasted for at least an hour or so each I think the point he comes to is that prayer is the key religious activity and the main reason anyone would be religious. This is an interesting notion given the long route taken in getting here. Earlier he has said that rationalism is only able to account for a small part of our lives, (“Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial.” And “This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it.”)<br /><br />In confirmation of the second quote above he says, “proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for.” This is terribly interesting, particularly given that in a later lecture he makes a point of going over the things that must be true about God if God exists and one of the essentials is that God must be unchanging. Naturally, this says nothing about our notions of God – they can change with the wind and have no affect on the unchanging nature of God. It quickly becomes clear that James is not going to fall into the trap of seeking to provide a proof for the existence of God that would satisfy his mostly scientific audience. <br /><br />James seems content to make religion of practical relevance to humanity and for this to be its main justification. The echoes of Kant are everywhere as are echoes of Aristotle, ‘If we were to ask the question: "What is human life's chief concern?" one of the answers we should receive would be: "It is happiness."’<br /><br />Part of what he is doing here is to present the extremes of religious experience and then to see if these can be shown to have an ability to make our lives better. He constantly acknowledges that he will not please everyone with this method – that some will see the people he has chosen to display excessive religious feeling as being freaks and that other religious people will object that their more moderate religion is grotesquely exaggerated in the examples presented, but in the main I can see where he is coming from. He is wanting to show that religious experience is different from more secular experiences and to do that looking at the extreme examples of these experiences ought to show in greater relief the essence of these experiences.<br /><br />He spends quite a lot of time discussing ‘mind-curers’ – people like the followers of Baker-Eddy of Christian Science fame. He also divides much of religion into those who are once born and those who are twice born. Those who have been born again do tend to pay for the compliment Bush gave in his belief and in his being an adherent. The mind-curers tend to have been twice born too and even likely to believe they have been resurrected in the flesh (something I might have believed to be a heresy and that the only one truly resurrected being Jesus). Anyway, there are many interesting bits along the way here – particularly about Methodism, which I knew virtually nothing. The idea that one must have a conversion experience, and therefore that these experiences are much more frequent among believers of Methodism than other Christian sects, was particularly interesting. You find what you are seeking after, seems to be a rather common 'religious' experience.<br /><br />Some of the twice born see all evil as a lie and therefore reject its existence outright and pretend it simply isn’t there. This really corresponds to my view of the New Age movement and is presented here as being just as naïve as one would expect a psychologist of religion to approach such beliefs. <br /><br />The long and far too detailed descriptions of sufferings for God’s sake were the sorts of things you might expect the Marquis De Sade to get off on. I mean, honestly. The tales of one of these loonies sleeping effectively on a bed of nails and making up increasingly horrible ways to torture himself even while asleep made that guy in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/85266.The_Da_Vinci_Code__Robert_Langdon___2_" title="The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2) by Dan Brown" rel="noopener">The Da Vinci Code</a> look like a complete wimp.<br /><br />He does say some daft things – like “Mind-cure uses experiment of sorts and so is similar to science - uses science against science.” – oh yeah, right. <br /><br />There are also sad reflections on what it is to be human, like “But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.”<br /><br />There are some amusing stories of people being able to quit smoking by their belief in God (as someone who has quit smoking I can see how this might fit into the 'miraculous cure' category) – what I found most interesting in this was that in both cases he quoted the person who gave up smoking (or drinking) was due mostly to social pressure (in one case a sister burst into tears on seeing him drunk) applied after a conversion event and the quitting was therefore almost incidental to their belief in God. There was also a long section on cleanliness and dyeing cloth to hide dirt and how some religious people find that something quite repugnant. I found all of this utterly fascinating and amongst the most interesting parts of the book.<br /><br />But then comes a long section on giving everything over to God and I found this section particularly distressing - the idea that to love God you must keep nothing for yourself is clearly appealing and I can see how, to a religious temperament, this idea would make lots of sense, but I also think the guiding maxim here should be 'moderation in all things'. There is an example given (and this book is virtually an endless series of examples) where a husband is at his wife’s death-bed holding her hand in his hand and knowing she does not have long to live, so he offers her hand to God and promises never to touch her again. Oh humanity – what sicknesses we are capable of. I had Nietzsche ringing in my ears at these parts about Christianity's rejection of life. This was even referred to as 'mortification' so the link to Nietzsche wasn't exactly a difficult leap to make.<br /><br />Around the corner from where I live there is a school for the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart – I’m not totally sure if this is the same as the Sacred Heart Order, but if it is then it is no wonder such schools have always been associated with child abuse. As James quotes: “Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that "Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable. . . . She said that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day without suffering would be intolerable.”<br /><br />There are many interesting examples given of people choosing the life of true poverty and literally following Christ. The interesting thing here is that when they seek to reserve something for themselves – a penny in case they need to buy bread, for example - a voice comes to them saying, ‘Don’t you trust that I will provide?’ The point being that even if He doesn’t provide – there is a lesson in that too that He clearly wants you to learn, although, obviously, not the lesson an atheist might draw.<br /><br />There are also fascinating discussions of comparisons of religious experiences and drug induced states of altered consciousness. The entire section on mysticism was very interesting.<br /><br />But I need to end soon and haven’t spoken about his main conclusion that prayer is the key religious experience. <br /><br />“The religious phenomenon … has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is realized at the time as being both active and mutual. If it be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense that SOMETHING IS TRANSACTING, is of course a feeling of what is illusory, and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements of delusion.”<br /><br />His point becomes, I think, that whether or not religion is a delusion is ultimately not the right question, but rather, does this standing in communion with the absolute (a position that only religion can offer) allow us something otherwise missing and unobtainable by any other means of what it means to be human? His answer is an emphatic yes and this is his apology for religion. <br /><br />My problem with prayer would be, if God existed, my infinite unworthiness to chat with Him and my complete unworthiness to ask Him to do something for me. There is a wonderful scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Marvin (the paranoid android) says, “Brain the size of a planet and they ask me to open a door.” There was one guy discussed in this book who spent lots of his life asking God to help him do the most incredibly mundane things, to find his door keys for him or to hurry along friends who appeared to be running a bit late. That the infinite creator of everything could really give a stuff about where you left your door keys simply makes my head spin. And given most religious people would probably see asking such petty questions of God a bit stupid, it does beg the question of what question we could ask that wouldn't seem so to God? The problem is that all of our prayers must sound equally absurd to Him. <br /><br />This was an interesting book and the first I’ve read on my new Kindle – all praise be to the Kindle…<br />

بعد رحلة ممتعة وطويلة، انتهيت أخيرًا من كتاب (تنويعات التجربة الدينية)، لوليام جيمس. قرأته في ترجمته العربية الصادرة حديثًا لإسلام سعد وعلي رضا. والكتاب الحقيقة واحد من أهم الكتب في مجاله على الإطلاق، وتأخر ترجمته للعربية بشكل مُخجل، خاصة مع ثقله وأهميته.<br /><br />في التنويعات، وليام جيمس، ولأول مرة، يستبعد الجوانب الثيولوجية والمؤسسات الدينية من محاولة البحث، ويُركز بشكل أساسي وحصري على التجربة الدينية نفسها التي يختبرها الإنسان. ولو بدا هذا المبحث معتادًا، فالفكرة إن وليام جيمس هو من بدأه. الكتاب صادر في عام 1902، واعتمد بالكامل على مجموعة من المحاضرات التي ألقاها جيمس في جامعة إدنبره. بعدها بحوالي 7 سنوات، سيصدر كتاب جيمس الأهم، البراجماتية.<br /><br />كنت عرفت وليام جيمس سابقًا، وهو شقيق الروائي المشهور هنري جيمس، من زاوية علم النفس، تحديدًا كتابه الأهم (مباديء علم النفس) الصادر في 1890. الكتاب يعتبر من الكتب المؤسسة في مجال علم النفس، عالم ما قبل فرويد. وكثير من مؤرخي الطب يرون أن تصورات فرويد كانت مستحيلة بالكامل من دون كتابات وليام جيمس وملاحظاته ورصده للتجربة الإنسانية. مش بمعنى تأثير فرويد على جيمس، لأن الاثنين اختلفا في المفاهيم والأساليب والأفكار الأساسية، ولكن فيما يتعلق بأهمية جيمس، وما قدمه لهذا التخصص ككل في هذا الوقت المبكر. وإضافة إلى ذلك، فجيمس نفسه انتقد فرويد بوضوح في أكثر من موضع.<br /><br />واحد من أهم اسهامات جيمس، بشكل مشترك مع عالم الفسيولوجيا كارل لانج، كانت في تطويرهما، بشكل منفصل، ما نعرفه الآن بنظرية جيمس لانج. التي ترى أن للعواطف أصولًا فسيولوجية واضحة، لا يمكن فصلها عن ظاهرة الشعور نفسه. وهي بالمناسبة نظرية تؤيدها كثير من الملاحظات الإكلينيكية المباشرة في الوقت الحالي. باختصار، ترى هذه النظرية أننا نرى الدب، فنهرب منه تلقائيًا، ثم نشعر بالخوف نتيجة لظهور الأعراض الجسدية. لا العكس. وبالتالي يصبح لإدراك الحالة الجسدية، والانتباه لها، دور حقيقي ومهم في التعامل مع الأعراض النفسية والمشاعر. يعني باختصار مفيش "شيء" اسمه خوف، بشكل حيادي منفصل عن ادراكه. وكل ذلك يحدث في طبيعة استقبال المخ البشري للمؤثرات الفسيولوجية وتأويلها في الدماغ.<br /><br />كان من اللطيف إن الواحد يشوف بذور هذه الافكار في كتاب التنويعات، حتى وبشكل غير مباشر. واضح إن الراجل كان على قدر من تماسك الأفكار، إنه يقارب أفكاره من أماكن وتخصصات مختلفة، ويقدر في كل مرة يطلع بنتائج تستحق الانتباه لها.<br /><br />الحقيقة إن الترجمة للعربية كانت في غاية الجمال، وباتقان قليل ما الواحد بيشوفه. ونتيجة ذلك كانت واضحة في المنتج النهائي.<br /><br />

This book is a compilation of twenty lectures delivered by William James at the University of Edinburg, Scotland between 1901 and 1902. William James is speaking as a psychologist in these lectures so his focus is on examples of human feelings and behavior in response to religious experiences. Much of the text consists of quoting from previously published accounts and his own data collection of these experiences. He connects these accounts with his own commentary and uses this range of examples to identify commonalities shared by different religious traditions. <br /><br />This book does not address theology, dogma, and institutional history of religious organizations. William James’ method does not allow him to address the existence of God. However he acknowledges that most people who have religious experiences do so under the impression that there is an existence of a “higher power.” Some descriptive terms used to refer to religious experience that I noticed were the following: spiritual excitement, religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, and cosmic emotion.<br /> <br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience" rel="nofollow noopener">Wikipedia has a summary of all the lectures</a>, and I recommend reference to it for a more thorough description of the book’s contents. The things mentioned in this review are simply the several items that caught my attention.<br /><br />William James makes a distinction between religion and philosophical systems because he argues that religion also has the presence of a positive sentiment that causes the adherent to gladly assents to it. (ref. Lecture II) Another way of describing this is that religion has an emotional dimension not found in moral systems, thus leading to the focus of these lectures which examine manifestations of these emotions.<br /><br />However, not all of the manifestations of this emotion are very positive when judged from a modern perspective. Some of the reported behaviors of corporeal mortification (a.k.a self torture) to my mind are signs of morbid mental illness. But the author reminds the reader that these reports should be judged within the context of the culture and time they occurred. <br /><br />Of course not all religious experience is demented. There are several lectures on saintliness and mysticism which tend to be more positive. James suggests that the merits of religious experiences can be judged by their fruits.<br /><br />The following are some terms used by William James that caught my attention.<blockquote><u>Healthy-minded religion</u>—characterized by contentment untroubled by the existence of evil and confident of salvation.<br /><br /><u>Sick souled religion</u>—considers evil to be unavoidable and an essential part of human existence and must be dealt with through a conversion experience.<br /><br /><u>Mind-cure movement</u>—believes in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes and their efficacy of courage, hope, and trust.<br /><br /><u>Once-born religion</u>—is an alternative term referencing healthy-minded religion that does not require a conversion experience.<br /><br /><u>Twice-born</u>—is an alternative term referencing sick souled religion that requires a conversion experience.</blockquote>The book finishes with Conclusion and a Postscript which suggests commonalities among the varieties of religious experience. All religious experiences are a consequence of striving toward a relationship with a perceived higher power or system that transcends the physical world. This mental striving creates the variety of psychological symptoms examined and discussed by this book. The emotions thus generated include the full gamut of possibilities including happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. <br /><br />The following is an excerpt that addresses the commonalities of saintliness (a.k.a. spiritual excitement) found in various religions. It is also an example of the nature of James' writing.<blockquote>One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to one's self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual excitement, as results of the all-leveling character of theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they <u>harmonize</u> with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on general causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but coördinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faith-state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence. Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are self-forgetful and kindly so long as they endure. <br /><i>(from Lectures XI, XII, And XIII. Saintliness)</i></blockquote>This book may have merit as a record of the state of psychological studies at the beginning of the twentieth century for those interested in the subject. For others it’s a waste of time.<br /><br /><u>Link to Spoiler No. 1</u>:<br /><input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="fd0b66b5-ad36-472e-b68b-c87b4c4a98a4" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="fd0b66b5-ad36-472e-b68b-c87b4c4a98a4">I have read several books on this subject which in my opinion are more informative than James' book because they include results from recent scientific findings. The following links are to my reviews:<br /><i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/483126839" rel="nofollow noopener">The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience </a></i> (Great Courses), by Andrew B. Newberg <br /><i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/478392020" rel="nofollow noopener">God and the Brain: The Physiology of Spiritual Experience</a>,</i> by Andrew B. Newberg <br /><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/490722009" rel="nofollow noopener">When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God</a>, by T.M. Luhrmann <br /></label><br /><br /><u>Link to Spoiler No. 2</u>:<br /><input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="8b9fe62d-8ec0-4d17-af65-ab94f9a6d670" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="8b9fe62d-8ec0-4d17-af65-ab94f9a6d670">It you are interested in a satirical parity of <i>Varieties of Religious Experience,</i> I recommend the book, <i><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/880975019" rel="nofollow noopener">36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction</a>,</i> by Rebecca Goldstein (link is to my review). In this novel there is a character who writes a scholarly book titled, <i>Varieties of Religious Illusion</i> which contains thirty-six arguments for the existence of God. The allusion to William James' book is obvious.<br /></label>

I have translated this book, into Arabic, with my dear friend/ brother Ali Reda.<br /><br />Three years of systematic work, frustration and despair. <br /><br />Finally, we made it! <br /><br />I am looking forward to seeing it published soon.<br /><br />Update: <br /><br />The translation has been published, and it was well-received in the Middle East. It is our attempt to contribute to my culture in providing a significantly rich foundation for religious pluralism through asserting the centrality of individual religious experience. <br /><br />This is a classical book that transcends its time of publication (in 1902) ... well, as classical books ought to be! <br /><br />Read the translators' introduction in Arabic:<br /><br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.academia.edu/41906104/%D8%AA%D9%86%D9%88%D9%8A%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%AA_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AC%D8%B1%D8%A8%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%A9_%D8%A5%D8%B3%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85_%D8%B3%D8%B9%D8%AF_%D9%88%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%8A_%D8%B1%D8%B6%D8%A7">https://www.academia.edu/41906104/%D8...</a>

You will not wait for me to remind you that William James is a great writer, a man in absolute possession of the art of expressing ideas. You will not wait for me to remind you that William James is a great professor, a scholar and an influencing thinker who contributed to founding an important school of thought. This I assume you already know.<br /><br /> Now these skills, and on the scale of which William James was in complete mastery of them, is what you need to treat a subject as difficult to grasp as the private and deep religious experience in its very varied form, across different system of religious thoughts, historical epochs, and the most intimate subjective ways of humans to think and feel about their existence. William James treats the subject in a very scientific sober method, but works entirely with examples of the most extreme forms of religious practices and feelings. It makes you get closer to some people, usually saints and ascetics, whom you always found as simply very far and distant, simply out of this world. It is indeed an invitation to understand these sorts of things, to clarify the mist surrounding them. <br /><br />Now to what I think I learned from this book, and this is totally subjective and personal. As quit the religiously unorthodox modern skeptical person that I am, who happens to live among devout people (devout for all sorts of reasons, not necessarily because of honest religious feelings….), the book in this regard was a tolerance lesson for me, specially with its description of extreme religious behavior, and the way he puts different hypothesis to explain such behaviors, ideas and practices. I was so unable to understand some forms of devoutness, but now I think at least I can speculate in other ways about what drives people to do certain things which I may find absurd and meaningless.  

190619 later later addition: reading chapter on James in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/84344.The_American_Evasion_of_Philosophy_A_Genealogy_of_Pragmatism" title="The American Evasion of Philosophy A Genealogy of Pragmatism by Cornel West" rel="noopener">The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism</a> on american pragmatism, certainly inspires more reading of his work. does not directly mention much of this text, but reveals his and others, pierce, emerson, dewey, all influenced by, all noted, christianity as baseline to their attitudes, their ideas, of idealism embodied in empirical and abstract ideologies of truth, effect, value- so maybe i should pay more attention to this book...<br /><br />171215 later addition: note to readers of this review, reason you might discount my judgement- i am not religious in any manner. friend just recently felt urge to correct my interpretation, say it is all about faith, of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, but i could not follow the argument. i do not start, nor end, from any religious experience. so maybe my reading of this book is always already without grounds...<br /><br />070415 first review: this is of its time, 1902, in that religious experiences in all varieties are christian, and designed, mostly, to confirm such usual monotheistic, modern, forms- not entirely avoiding catholicism but most revealing protestantism as generally practiced in the america of his time- including evangelical movements... this book reminds me not of religious texts, read or unread, but of durant's 'story of philosophy' which is almost as old (also a three)... <br /><br />and the strategies j begins with are to 1) define terms, subject, 2) insist on reality of the unseen, and to do this, from the beginning j appeals to quotes, often long, of this and that person who undergoes these varied religious experiences. for me this does not convince more than any testimonials, but does offer actuality of these moments, conviction, efficacy, on those people. after these early chapters, he does use this technique less but never stops. at first, reading these claims is something to lightly read, later to skim, later yet to skip... but with 1) assured to himself, 2) is also vouchsafed...<br /><br />i do not know what i expected- this follows the title: 'religious experiences', not philosophy, not theistic arguments, not coherence of this or that faith, not attempts to ground faith in logic but in affect, not what interests me much. so moving on, having established his subject is not to be confused with neurology, he does allow other 'altered states' (such as intoxication) as possible routes to the divine, j contrasts the healthy soul, the optimism of 'mind science', versus the sick soul, the pessimism of romans, greeks, a contrast of attitudes which will both lead to religion, the first of which reminds me too much of self-help and pop psychology texts, the next, in some examples of how life-changing conversions rescue this or that soul from destroying himself or herself, mentioning the 'twice-born' concept favoured by some ...<br /><br />this 'conversion', which is given a few testimonials, seems to be a combination of uniting oneself body and soul, then uniting with some greater soul- the world, the fellows, the enemies even- and this is where j is clearest as psychologist: he lets his 'patients' speak, he reflects on the extremity some people go to, some beyond what seems 'objectively' healthy, but it is all on a spectrum of human behaviour, human qualities, from too much intellect and too little emotion to too much emotion and too little intellect... not surprisingly, j finds protestant expressions of faith most healthy, most socially beneficial, as he will decide the worth of religious experiences pragmatically, for individuals, for groups, though he does argue eventually there is an 'aesthetic' value in faith best shown by those colourful catholics...<br /><br />j then tries to qualify saintliness, as first a sort of ideal behaviour, then as evidenced in certain saints- which in this case starts to sound almost how-to become a saint, rather than a naturally 'strong man', insisting mortification etc. is more diseased that devout, as the saint should be seen as a desired religious state, an aspiration, though not necessarily right for everyone. again j offers testimonials, offers pity at those unfortunates who never have such moments of faith, of clarity, of absolute belief... almost we are less than human...<br /><br />j comes to mysticism, which foregrounds the most immediate problem with religious experience is the fact it is 'mystical' experience, it is of incommunicable nature- for me a general problem with religion as a whole. but not j, who is confident in naming essential qualities of all mystics, asceticism, absolutism, asocial, transcendental etc., and here he wanders afield to buddhism and hinduism, though he knows little of either, and these thoughts lead to a short chapter on philosophy. which i hoped to better grasp, but after dismissing kant, valourizing scot and english empiricists- j believes the only thing is to admit philosophy of religion by which we would come to understand all world religions... and while i can agree that the 'scientific' picture of the universe is not the personal, 'human' way of the world, i tend more towards phenomenology as a 'first science' of the self, rather than deciding science should work with pre-given religious testimony, cosmology, ontology...<br /><br />this is the greatest problem i have with this historical document by j: i am not convinced that it is by human 'virtue' we have similar religious experiences that are thereby true, rather i believe it is by human 'vice' we have similar experiences that some call religious that are thereby false... or, as i am not committed against the the facts but the interpretations: simply mistaken... this book is of its era, perhaps in a philosophical way 'preaching to the choir', but i guess i will just continue not being religious in any way... this is a three. of its thought time, of its thought space, it is at the least an energetic, closely argued, example of an intellectual sort of faith...<br /><br />note: if you do decide to read this text, i would suggest another edition, as this print is small, crowded, and not clearly different in text, footnotes, or quotes.