The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceences play the decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just asthey do in hypnotism.[50 Suggestive therapeutics abound in recordsof cure, after a few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which thepatient, left to ordinary moral and physical influences, had struggledin vain. Both drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in thisway, action through the subliminal seeming thus in many individualsto have the prerogative of inducing relatively stable change. Ifthe grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates throughthe subliminal door, then. But just how anything operates in thisregion is still unexplained, and we shall do well now to say good-byto the process of transformation altogether—leaving it, if you like, agood deal of a psychological or theological mystery—and to turnour attention to the fruits of the religious condition, no matter inwhat way they may have been produced.151150 Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck’s book, in which a “sensoryautomatism” brought about quickly what prayers and resolves hadbeen unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:—“When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was onme, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God toquit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was fiftythree,as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to me. I did nothear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double think. It said,‘Louisa, lay down smoking.’ At once I replied. ‘Will you take the desireaway?’ But it only kept saying: ‘Louisa, lay down smoking.’ Then I got up,laid my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never smoked again or had anydesire to. The desire was gone as though I had never known it or touchedtobacco. The sight of others smoking and the smell of smoke never gaveme the least wish to touch it again.” The Psychology of Religion, p. 142.151 Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old influencesphysiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between higher andlower cerebral centres. “This condition,” he says, “in which the association-centresconnected with the spiritual life are cut off from the lower, isoften reflected in the way correspondents describe their experiences… .For example: ‘Temptations from without still assail me, but there is nothingwithin to respond to them.’ The ego [here] is wholly identified withthe higher centres whose quality of feeling is that of withinness. Anotherof the respondents says: ‘Since then, although Satan tempts me, there is asit were a wall of brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.’” —244