The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesand when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the Universecombine to help us heavenward.”51Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some moreconcrete accounts of experience with the mind-cure religion. I havemany answers from correspondents—the only difficulty is to choose.The first two whom I shall quote are my personal friends. One ofthem, a woman, writing as follows, expresses well the feeling of continuitywith the Infinite Power, by which all mind-cure disciples areinspired.“The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depressionis the human sense of separateness from that Divine Energy which wecall God. The soul which can feel and affirm in serene but jubilantconfidence, as did the Nazarene: ‘I and my Father are one,’ has nofurther need of healer, or of healing. This is the whole truth in anutshell, and other foundation for wholeness can no man lay thanthis fact of impregnable divine union. Disease can no longer attackone whose feet are planted on this rock, who feels hourly, momently,the influx of the Deific Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how canweariness enter the consciousness, how illness assail that indomitablespark?“This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has beenabundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a recordof many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and lowerlimbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they areto-day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was dense andunenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I have workedas a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a vacation, andcan truthfully assert that I have never known a moment of fatigueor pain, although coming in touch constantly with excessive weakness,illness, and disease of all kinds. For how can a conscious partof Deity be sick?—since ‘Greater is he that is with us than all thatcan strive against us.’”My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the followingstatement:—51 R. W. Trine: In Tune with the Infinite, 26th thousand, N.Y. 1899. Ihave strung scattered passages together.97