PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION AND ASIAN STUDIES: THE WILLIAM JAMES

A consideration of the life of William James may help us to see more clearly the pattern and direction of developments emerging in our own cultural form of psychology, and also reveal the import of religious experience both for us and for other cultures different from our own. For present purposes James's story begins with an idea which he put forth as the primary tbeme of the Gifford Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1901. It was not a new idea to him, for in the halls of this very Divinity School, Ralph Waldo Emerson, nearly seventy years previous to James, stated somewhat the same truth. James's notion was essentially this: that the core of religious life is to be found primarily within the inner recesses of the individual; and that in each one of us the essential link between our normal every-day waking awareness and mystical states of religious awak-ening lay through a direct encounter with our own subliminal unconscious life. But, James claimed, the truth or veracity of such tremendously powerful inner experiences must be tested in the world at large by their practical results. When James said that the true essence of religion lay within, he was speaking from the standpoint of a psychologist who takes as his basic data the life of the individual-ian individual who has many selves-biological, material, social, and spiri