The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesbusiness, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown inphilanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not objects.I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmlessand good at the time, and are pursued because many acceptthem—I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in theirvarious development, these being mostly approved by the masses,although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy superfluities.”Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I readyou these cases without comment—they express so many varietiesof the state of mind we are studying.“I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year.[Details of ill-health are given which I omit.] I had been in Vermontseveral months hoping for good from the change of air, but steadilygrowing weaker, when one day during the latter part of October,while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it were thesewords: ‘You will be healed and do a work you never dreamed of.’These words were impressed upon my mind with such power I saidat once that only God could have put them there. I believed themin spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness, which continueduntil Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within two days ayoung friend offered to take me to a mental healer (this was January7, 1881). The healer said: ‘There is nothing but Mind; we are expressionsof the One Mind; body is only a mortal belief; as a manthinketh so is he.’ I could not accept all she said, but I translated allthat was there for me in this way: ‘There is nothing but God; I amcreated by Him, and am absolutely dependent upon Him; mind isgiven me to use; and by just so much of it as I will put upon thethought of right action in body I shall be lifted out of bondage tomy ignorance and fear and past experience.’ That day I commencedaccordingly to take a little of every food provided for the family,constantly saying to myself: ‘The Power that created the stomachmust take care of what I have eaten.’ By holding these suggestionsthrough the evening I went to bed and fell asleep, saying: ‘I am soul,spirit, just one with God’s Thought of me,’ and slept all night withoutwaking, for the first time in several years [the distress-turns hadusually recurred about two o’clock in the night]. I felt the next daylike an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that99