Adding reason to faith :: Review of Philip Clayton’s God and Contemporary Science

My Path to Panentheism and Wm. James Varieties of Religious Experience

by Dale Gillette on Thu 19 Jul 2007 10:43 PM EDT

My Path to Panentheism and William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience



Dale A. Gillette                                                                19 July 2007

Abstract:



My personal religious experiences have led me to a kind of panentheism. References to Wm. James classic work, Varieties of Religious Experience, show that my experiences are similar to those of others. I first interpreted the religious experience in the light of the pantheistic philosophy of Spinoza, and later with liberal Christian philosophies which developed into a kind of panentheism.



1. Introduction

I am writing this essay as part of a meditation on my path leading to panentheism. I feel that the most important step on that path was a religious experience I had during the summer of 1959 in Lincoln, Nebraska.   I wrote a short description of that experience on Nov. 27, 2001 (Gillette, 2001):

       “……When I was about 16 years old I had what I consider to be a mystical experience. While lying on my back one summer night and looking at the stars, I suddenly had the feeling that I became part of the stars and part of the universe. During that approximately half-hour period, I had no fear and I had a certainty that I was part of everything and that everything was part of me—there was no exterior and interior—only oneness. The other certainty was the feeling of love for everything and everyone.   Although I have forgotten many things in my life, I have never forgotten that experience; its power has colored the existence of my life since that time. No other second-hand teaching or expression of an outside authority could ever approach the power and glory of that experience; no other authority-based teaching can ever have a small fraction of the impact that that experience had in my life.

         After high school, I was trained as a professional scientist. I consider science as the most powerful engine for finding truth known to man.   As part of this scientific training, I feel an obligation to question every proposition that is put before me. If someone tells me something is true, then I feel that tests must be made to confirm or deny this claim.

         A summary of my faith, given my mysticism and my preference for scientific verification, is:

·                    God exists as love and as unity of all being.

·                    Expression of this is in love towards others and the knowledge that “You are in me and I am in you.”

·                    Authenticity is essential in all relationships and claims of knowledge. This authenticity is expressed (among other ways) in not stating what we do not really know. What we really know is brought to us by direct experience, reason, and scientific method.

Although this summary of faith does not furnish me with specific answers to detailed questions, it does provide me the surety that I am part of everything and that the love of God is real and palpable. What is in store for me in detail, I do not know. I only know that the love of God and the reality of being will be with me and all others.”

In the years following the mystical experience, I searched for its meaning. My childhood religious training was Roman Catholic.   As a high school student, however, I began reading philosophy and my favorite philosopher became Spinoza.   During my 10 years at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor when I was requested to write in my religion on various forms, I wrote “Spinozist.”   As a student at the University of Michigan, I became convinced that my practical talents lay in the physical sciences and I eventually earned a PhD in the Department of Meteorology and Oceanography.

In my adult years I was a member for several years of the Unity Church.   For the last several years, my wife Jane and I have associated ourselves with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. During my years of professional employment in Boulder, Colorado, and Raleigh, North Carolina, I read many of the books of Ken Wilber, Maurice Nichol, Philip Clayton, and Daniel Shepard. I subscribe to the Zygon and Metanexus magazines where my favorite articles have been by people like Philip Clayton, Arthur Peacocke, Paul Davies, and David Nikkel. It is because of the influence of these authors and the fellowship in the liberal religious congregations mentioned above that my stated religion has changed from “Spinozism” (i.e., the pantheism of B. Spinoza) to “panentheism.”

During the past year I have read the William James’ 1902 classicVarieties of Religious Experience (abbreviated as Varieties henceforward).   As my first attempt at writing in a philosophical-theological subject, I would like to express my great astonishment of how a great author can anticipate many of the questions and problems concerning a religious sentiment of someone living a century after his death.

It is my desire to list those religious experiences described by William James in his Varieties that have some similarity to mine. These similarities show that my experience is possibly not unusual and may be just part of a normal religious path. I hope that my interpretations of the experience may possibly be of interest to others having similar experiences.

I will quote relevant material from James’ Varieties as they relate to my experiences and understanding of panentheism.   The following sections cover relevant questions such as authority of an individual’s private mystical experience, justifications for interpretations following the mystical experience and other subjects covered in the Varieties.   The individual sections are titled:

·        James’ differentiation of private and public religious experiences and how authenticity is far stronger in private religious experience.

·        Mysticism and the Reality of the Unseen.

·        The authority of Personal Experience and Mysticism.

·        Does mystical experience lead one to James’ “healthy minded” or “sick-minded” classification?

·        Interpretation of the mystical experience: possible alternate interpretations for similar experiences.

·        Pragmatic statements from the Varieties that resonate in my life.

2. James’ differentiation of private and public religious experiences and how authenticity is far stronger in private religious experience.

Definitions used by James:

Institutional (or public)--worship, sacrifice, procedures of working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization.

Personal----the inner dispositions of man---helplessness, incompleteness.   Acts are personal—not ritual. The individual performs the acts alone---the ecclesiastical organization sinks to a secondary place.

James considers only personal, not institutional religious experiences. “…personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism.   Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.   Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case---so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete.”

“Religion…..shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”

“Buddhism and Emersonianism are experientially equivalent to religions even though neither positively assumes a God.”

“ The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on one hand, and Buddhist pessimism, on the other, make to the individual and the sort of response he makes to them in his life are in fact indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with the best Christian appeal and response. We therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds “religions.”

“Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life.”

“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious.”…. “For religion, the service of the highest is never felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind and a mood of welcome, which may fell any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place.”…. “If religion is to mean anything definite for us, it seems to me that we ought to take it as meaning this added dimension of emotion, this enthusiastic temper of espousal in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce....This sort of happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion.”

3.      Mysticism and the Reality of the Unseen (Lectures 3, 16 and 17 of Varieties)

Religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”……. “Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such subjects of belief as God, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter.   These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense-content to work with and as the words soul, God, immortality cover no distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking; they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our practice.   We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.   Our faith that these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent ….from the point of view of our action, for knowledge of what they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them.”

“The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that…can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.   It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty, whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies.”

“It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally observed.”

James testifies as to the reality to one’s life of non-ordinary experiences: “…the feeling of reality may be something more like a sensation than an intellectual operation properly so-called…. I now recognize that I used to fall back for support upon this curious relation [with the unseen]. I felt myself to be into this fundamental cosmic it.   It was on my side, or I was on its side, however you please to term it. ….In fact is was an unfailing fountain of supporting presence.”

The strongest of these experiences is the Mystical moment:   “What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life.   It is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God…..I cannot conceive of life without its presence.”

The experiences of the unseen “are solemn…..the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy that may result in ….absolute self-surrender.”

“I think that personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of consciousness….such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light.   James restricts the classification “mystical” to experiences having the following four properties:

1.      Ineffability: the experience defies expression.

2.      Noetic quality: mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge.   They carry “ a curious sense of authority for aftertime.”

3.      Transience.   Mystical states are sustained about a half hour to at most one or two hours.

4.      Passivity:   The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.

The Inner State

·        “….the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one.”

·        The inner state is:

“A conscious field

plus its object as felt or thought of

plus an attitude towards the object

plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs.

---such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts.”

·        “not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience as the “object” is when taken all alone”

James says that the general traits of the mystic range of consciousness are “on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic.”

My own [DAG] mystical state was amazingly well described by James’ four rules of mystical experience. The experience was at the same time unexplainable, rock-solid in my feeling that I was in a different and wonderful state of consciousness, accompanied by an almost total passivity.

“Mystical states are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance.” James gave several examples, all of which possess the above four properties.   One of the quoted examples is from the memoirs of Malwida von Meysenbug: “ ‘I now know what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation to the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and seas resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony.   It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them. And it appeared as if I heard their greeting: ‘Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.’”

4.   The Authority of Personal Religion and Mysticism

James’ states his opinion on the authority of the mystical experience in lectures 3, 16, and 17.

“Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.”

“No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.”

“They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone.

The mystic is, in short invulnerable, and must be left whether we relish it or not in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. “Faith”, says Tolstoy, “is that by which men live, and faith-state and mystic state are practically convertible terms.”

·        The experience is first person and does not have third person authority. “But….mystics have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences…”

·        Mystical experiences are usually interpreted as pantheistic. Although James at one point notes an almost unanimity of the mystical experience later being interpreted as pantheistic, he later moderates that statement with “we find that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. …… I called …pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical minds, for whom the “category of personality” is absolute.”

“Yet,” says James, “I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.”

“Mystical states…wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical men incline.   They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest.   They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset.   The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.”

My own feeling about mystical states absolutely agrees with the above writing of James and includes the preference of pantheism (or panentheism) in interpreting the experience.   Although my experience lasted less than an hour, I have no doubt that it was the most influential experience of my life.   I have no doubt about the feeling of one-ness with all being. This feeling is the founding rock of my life.   None-the-less, I agree that the noetic quality of complete confidence in the experience can come only to the person experiencing it.

David Nikkel (2006) wrote an article comparing the epistemology of James and that of Paul Tillich. He reasoned that “James’ epistemology is the more defensible [than Tillich’s], particularly in the light of postmodern concerns.” Nonetheless, “James’ empiricism is much implicated in Romantic modernism in a liberal Protestant vein, by allowing for a rather direct infusion of a superhuman consciousness into ours.”   I interpret Nikkel’s comment to say that Tillich probably acknowledges mystical experience as being more authoritative than does William James. However, this does not constitute a similar endorsement by more skeptical philosophers.

5.      Does the Mystical Experience lead one to James’ “healthy minded” or “sick- minded” Categories? (Lectures 4 and 5 of Varieties)

“Since happiness is often expressed as the most important goal of life, some men believe that the happiness that results from a religion is a proof of its truth.   Such people see God not as harsh judge or potentate, but as an animating spirit of a beautiful harmonious world.   “Once born” people hold such a positive attitude. Examples of “once-born” people are St. Francis of Assisi, some Roman Catholics, liberal Protestants (Unitarians), and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The supreme example of “once-born” people is Walt Whitman.   However, those having mystical experiences (forming sort of a second birth) are “twice-born.”    “Once-born” and “twice born” people who have their second “birth” by mystical experience are usually found to be “healthy minded” (roughly translated into twenty-first century parlance as “optimistic and trying to see the best”) whereas many “twice born” people can be labeled by James as “sick-minded” (roughly translated as pessimistic.) James states that “This religion [of healthy mindedness] directs [a person] to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe…….., by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist.   Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.   Even repentance and remorse, afflictions which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses.   The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relationships with sin.”

Since I assess myself as having a clear bias toward “healthy mindedness,” I cannot say whether my desire to be “healthy minded” stems from the religious experience or from my character before the experience.   My guess is that the preference for healthy mindedness is something that emerged before the experience and that the above influences have probably at least strengthened my move toward panentheism. Again, it is probably that my primary panentheistic sentiment was initiated by my religious experience and my previous embrace of Spinozistic philosophy.

Finally, in interpreting whether my mystical experience led me to monism and to “healthy-mindedness”, I cannot really say, but do think that it was at least a positive enforcement in a tendency that may have already existed.

6. Interpretation of the Mystical Experience: Possible Alternative Interpretations for Similar Experiences.

I interpreted my absolute surety of being one with the universe during and following my mystical experience to be my indisputable personal proof of monism.   Accepting James’ scholarship that this is consistent with other mystical experiences, it is still possible that my monistic tendencies were only strengthened by my mystical experience and were originally formed by reading of Spinoza’s philosophy.   Thus I can only say that my mystical experience was consistent with a feeling of panentheism, but might not have been the origin of that insight.

7.            Pragmatic statements from the Varieties that resonate in my life

In summing up this essay, I would like to reprint those statements that were beautifully expressed by William James and which have resonated in my life.

“not its origin but the ways in which it works on the whole is….(the) final test of a belief.   This is our own empiricist criterion……”    “At any rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its results exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid origin will scandalize your piety no more.”

“Thought and feeling are determinants of conduct……but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives.”

“The utilitarian argument on the existence of God: ‘Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he?’ are so many irrelevant questions. God is not known, his is not understood; he is used---sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for not more than that.”

“Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.”

“The visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance.”

“The union (harmonious relation) with that higher universe is our true end.”

“Prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof (God or Law) is the process by which that is done and spiritual energy flows in and produces psychological and material effects within the phenomenal world.”

“Religion includes a new zest to life which takes the form of lyrical enchantment or appeal to earnestness and heroism.”

“Religion also includes an assurance of safety and temper of peace.”

“Not all men should have the same religion or the same mix of religion with other elements.”



“The pan(en)theistic explanation is by merging of the narrow private self into the wider or greater self, the spirit of the universe (which is your own “subconscious” self) the moment the isolating barriers of mistrust and anxiety are removed.”

References

Gillette, Dale A., 2001, unpublished statement made at the Wake County Interfaith Alliance on the subject “How my faith gives me hope.”   The statement was used by the Reverend Alan Neely of the Interfaith Alliance in November 2001 for an interfaith meeting.

James, William, 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901—1902, Modern Library, New York, 526 pp.

Nikkel, David, 2006, The Varieties of Mystical Experience: Paul Tillich and William James, Metanexus, Sophia, The Global Spiral (internet publication), 11 pages.

Spinoza, Benedict De, The Chief Works, Translated from the Latin by R. H. M. Elwes. Volume II., Dover Publications.

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Dale Gillette is a retired scientist who worked for 37 years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He was an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado and at Duke University. He wrote over 120 published scientific articles. He presently lives in Raleigh, NC.

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