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
“High, healthful, pure thinking can be encouraged, promoted, and
strengthened. Its current can be turned upon grand ideals until it
forms a habit and wears a channel. By means of such discipline the
mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty,
wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may
at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance
will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally
delightful.
“The soul’s real world is that which it has built of its thoughts,
mental states, and imaginations. If we _will_, we can turn our
backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into
the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence.
The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will
attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as
air inclines to a vacuum.... Whenever the thought is not occupied
with one’s daily duty or profession, it should be sent aloft into
the spiritual atmosphere. There are quiet leisure moments by day,
and wakeful hours at night, when this wholesome and delightful
exercise may be engaged in to great advantage. If one who has
never made any systematic effort to lift and control the thought‐
forces will, for a single month, earnestly pursue the course here
suggested, he will be surprised and delighted at the result, and
nothing will induce him to go back to careless, aimless, and
superficial thinking. At such favorable seasons the outside world,
with all its current of daily events, is barred out, and one goes
into the silent sanctuary of the inner temple of soul to commune
and aspire. The spiritual hearing becomes delicately sensitive, so
that the ‘still, small voice’ is audible, the tumultuous waves of
external sense are hushed, and there is a great calm. The ego
gradually becomes conscious that it is face to face with the
Divine Presence; that mighty, healing, loving, Fatherly life which
is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. There is soul‐contact
with the Parent‐Soul, and an influx of life, love, virtue, health,
and happiness from the Inexhaustible Fountain.”(63)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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