The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesmountebanks than of sane men inspiring us with respect. If theinner dispositions are right, we ask, what need of all this torment,this violation of the outer nature? It keeps the outer nature too important.Any one who is genuinely emancipated from the flesh willlook on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation, as alike irrelevantand indifferent. He can engage in actions and experience enjoymentswithout fear of corruption or enslavement. As theBhagavad-Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions whoare still inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to thefruits of action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quotedin a former lecture Saint Augustine’s antinomian saying: If you onlylove God enough, you may safely follow all your inclinations. “Heneeds no devotional practices,” is one of Ramakrishna’s maxims,“whose heart is moved to tears at the mere mention of the name ofHari.”217 And the Buddha, in pointing out what he called “themiddle way” to his disciples, told them to abstain from both extremes,excessive mortification being as unreal and unworthy as meredesire and pleasure. The only perfect life, he said, is that of innerhe closed them and resumed the mantle—his way, as he told us, of warminghimself, and making his body feel a better temperature. It was a frequentthing with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressedmy surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired thehabit. One of his companions has assured me that he has gone sometimeseight days without food… . His poverty was extreme; and his mortification,even in his youth, was such that he told me he had passed three yearsin a house of his order without knowing any of the monks otherwise thanby the sound of their voice, for he never raised his eyes, and only found hisway about by following the others. He showed this same modesty on publichighways. He spent many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman;but he confessed to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent tohim whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I firstcame to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed ofnothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this sanctity he wasvery affable. He never spoke unless he was questioned, but his intellectualright-mindedness and grace gave to all his words an irresistible charm.”217 F. Max Muller: Ramakrishna, his Life and sayings, 1899, p. 180.323