The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human NatureJames, William
ReligionComparative
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
James, William
Conversion; Experience (Religion); Philosophy and religion; Psychology, Religious; Religion
“I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year.
[Details of ill‐health are given which I omit.] I had been in
Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but
steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of
October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it
were these words: ‘You will be healed and do a work you never
dreamed of.’ These words were impressed upon my mind with such
power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I
believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness,
which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within
two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer
(this was January 7, 1881). The healer said: ‘There is nothing but
Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal
belief; as a man thinketh so is he.’ I could not accept all she
said, but I translated all that was there for _me_ in this way:
‘There is nothing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely
dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use; and by just so much
of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I
shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past
experience.’ That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of
every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself:
‘The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have
eaten.’ By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to
bed and fell asleep, saying: ‘I am soul, spirit, just one with
God’s Thought of me,’ and slept all night without waking, for the
first time in several years [the distress‐turns had usually
recurred about two o’clock in the night]. I felt the next day like
an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that
would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able
to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began
to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to
me like stepping‐stones. I will note a few of them; they came
about two weeks apart.
“1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.
“2d. I am Soul, therefore I _am_ well.
“3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four‐footed beast with
a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering,
with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I
resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even
look at my old self in this form.
“4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with
faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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