William James (1842 to 1910), the American psychologist and philosopher, studied hundreds of first-hand accounts of religious and mystical experience and published his findings as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). He concluded that religion lives first in personal experience rather than doctrine, that such experiences should be judged by their fruits in a life and not by where they come from, that ordinary waking consciousness is only one kind of consciousness among many, and that what the experiences testify to is union with something larger than ourselves, not necessarily one infinite God. His trust in experience over belief, and his openness to other states of consciousness, sit close to Therapeutic Shamanism.
Who was William James? #
He was born in New York City in 1842, the elder brother of the novelist Henry James. He trained in medicine at Harvard, qualifying in 1869, though he never practised, and went on to teach physiology, then psychology, then philosophy there, setting up the first psychology laboratory in America. His Principles of Psychology (1890) made his name. In later life he became one of the founders of pragmatism, the view that the meaning and truth of an idea show in the difference it makes in experience, and developed what he called radical empiricism, in which experience itself is the stuff of reality. A Pluralistic Universe (1909) made the case for a world of many centres rather than one absolute. He died in 1910 at his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire.1
What was The Varieties of Religious Experience? #
The book of the Gifford Lectures he gave in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. He set aside churches, theology and ritual and asked about religion at its source, in the lives of people who had experienced it. For the purpose of the lectures, he took religion to mean “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitudeSolitude. Chosen aloneness from other humans: a healthy, essential Adult capacity, the opposite of loneliness (which is about the quality of relationship, not the quantity). Relational solitude is time away from the humans in the company of everything else. More about this, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”2 His material was autobiography, diaries, saints’ lives and questionnaires, and he chose the most intense cases on purpose, because they show the thing most clearly.
He described two temperaments, the ‘healthy-minded’, who find the world good, and the ‘sick soul’, for whom suffering and evil are real and who must be ‘twice-born’. The lectures go on to conversion, saintliness and its excesses, and prayer, and treat all of it as data about human nature, to be described carefully before anything was decided about its truth.2
What did he mean by judging experiences by their fruits, not their roots? #
That where an experience comes from does not settle its value. In his day it was common to dismiss a saint’s visions as ‘nothing but’ a disordered nervous system, a habit he called medical materialism. James answered that every state of mind, the scientist’s as much as the mystic’s, has bodily conditions, so pointing to them proves nothing either way. What matters is what the experience does in a person’s life, whether it brings insight, steadiness, kindness and strength. He took the old test and made it his own, “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.”3
What did he find about mystical states and other kinds of consciousness? #
He gave mystical states four marks. They cannot be put fully into words; they carry a sense of knowing, of “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect”; they do not last long, usually half an hour or an hour or two; and they tend to come over a person rather than being made.4
From his own experiments, and from the accounts he collected, he drew a wider conclusion, that our normal waking consciousness “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” Any account of the universe that leaves those other forms out cannot be final. They may not give us a map, but they open a region.4
What did the experiences point to, in the end? #
To something more. On one side, James held, the experiences meet the hidden depths of a person’s own mind, what was then newly called the subconscious; beyond that the evidence runs out and each of us adds our own ‘over-beliefs’.5 What the experiences unequivocally testify to, in the Postscript’s words, is that “we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.”6
He was careful about how far this goes. The experiences do not prove one infinite, all-inclusive God. All they need is a power larger than our conscious selves and friendly to us. The universe might even be a collection of larger selves “of different degrees of inclusiveness”, so that “a sort of polytheism” returns, and polytheism, on his account, has always been the real religion of ordinary people.7
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
First, in putting experience before belief. The words of the psychotherapist Carl Rogers, “Experience is, for me, the highest authority”, stand at the opening of The Shamanic Journey.8 Therapeutic Shamanism is not a religion and asks nobody to believe anything; it is a set of principles and practices to try out, and can be approached as an agnostic or even an atheist. Without experience, ideas stay ideas, a head-trip; embodying and experiencing them is what changes a person.9 James’s method, setting doctrine aside to look at what people actually live through, is a close cousin of that stance. See Is Therapeutic Shamanism a religion or belief system?
Second, in the other forms of consciousness. A shamanic journey is a deliberate step through James’s ‘filmiest of screens’. For hunter-gatherer peoples, being aware of ordinary reality and shamanic reality at once was a natural state, described as having one foot in this world and one in the other, and being able to move between the two at will.10
Third, in the fruits. In Therapeutic Shamanism what matters about a peak experience is not its thrill but its message. It shows what happens when someone is true to their Soul. The more a life is shaped around Soul, the less the peaks matter, and what grows instead is a quieter, more constant and grounded feeling of rightness.11 That is very nearly James’s test, applied over a whole life. See What are moments of awakening?
And James’s picture of selves of different degrees of inclusiveness has a counterpart in the shamanic map. Each individual is like the tip of a twig, which goes back to a branch, Dog or Human, and those branches go back to larger ones, Mammal, Animal, and finally to Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, so that we are individuals and also parts of a larger whole.12
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On solitude. James defined religion as the experience of individuals in their solitude. Animism is much more relational and much more about community, and for original shamans personal spiritual development was never the point, because the work was done in service of the community.
On animism itself. James argued against what he called the ‘survival theory’, the view that religion is a leftover from primitive, animistic thinking that humanity should outgrow, and he defended the “richer animistic aspects of Nature”, the voice of the thunder and the gentleness of rain, as what the religious mind still responds to. Yet his own pages speak, in the language of his day, of “savages” and their “mumbo-jumbos of deities”.13 Therapeutic Shamanism holds the opposite view of history. Animist hunter-gatherer peoples are not an early stage to grow out of but the healthiest template humans have had.
And on telling experiences apart. James refused to dismiss an experience because of its bodily causes. In Therapeutic Shamanism shamanic awakening can sometimes feel like a form of madness, largely because people in the modern world rarely understand what is happening to them, but the claim often heard in the West that all madness is shamanic awakening is not true. Shamanic cultures clearly told the two apart, and the line is the foot kept firmly in this world, because having both feet in shamanic reality all the time is not shamanism.14 See How is shamanic journeying different from psychosis?
What have critics said about James’s account? #
The best-known challenge is that there is no such thing as raw experience. The philosopher Steven Katz, in his essay “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism” (1978), held that every mystical experience is shaped by the concepts and expectations a person brings to it, so that a Christian and a Buddhist mystic do not have the same experience described differently; the philosopher of religion Wayne Proudfoot made a related case in Religious Experience (1985).15 On the other side, the scholar Robert Forman, in The Problem of Pure Consciousness (1990), gathered accounts of states without any content at all, which, in his view, concepts cannot have shaped.16
