Continued from chapter (G) “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James – Part II
http://miraclesforall.com/the-variet...ames-part-iii/
Lectures XI, XII and XIII – The Value of Saintliness (continued)
The author here points out that as ascetic saints have grown older they usually have shown a tendency to lay less importance on bodily mortifications. Catholic teachers have always professed that, since health is needed for efficiency in God’s service, health must not be sacrificed to mortifications. Today, the general optimism of Protestants and healthy-minded sects consider mortification for mortification’s sake repugnant.
Yet, James continues, he believes that upon a more careful consideration of the whole of the matter, distinguishing between the general good intentions of asceticism and the uselessness of some of the particular acts, of which it may be guilty, may improve it in our esteem. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in the world which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul’s heroic resources and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in the higher religious excitement, or else their sting remains unbroken.
If one has ever taken in the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this world’s history: freezing, drowning, wild beasts, worse men, hideous diseases, etc., one can with difficulty, continue in their own career of worldly prosperity suspecting that they are somehow outside the game and thus, may then lack the “great initiation.” This is exactly what the ascetic thinks anyway, James alleges, and it therefore voluntarily takes on the initiation. And, healthy-mindedness with its sentimental optimism can hardly be regarded as a serious solution. Phrases of neatness, coziness, and comfort can never give the answer to the sphinx’s riddle [“What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs at night?”].
James states that here he is leaning only upon mankind’s common instinct for reality which has always held that the world is a theater for heroism. For, in heroism we confront life’s supreme mystery [death] and, we tolerate no one who has no capacity for heroism in any way whatsoever. If on the other hand, regardless of what a man’s frailties may otherwise be, he be willing to risk death, and still more so if he suffers it heroically in the service he has chosen, this fact consecrates him forever. The metaphysical mystery we can logically suppose, says James, of he who feeds on [the] death that feeds upon men possesses life super eminently [exceptionally] and thus best meets with the secret demands of the universe. Asceticism faithfully champions this as a legitimate truth.
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The older monastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic futilities or terminated in the mere egotism of the individual increasing his own perfection. But, James inquires, is it not possible for us to discard most of these older forms of mortification and yet find saner channels for the heroism which inspired them?
In a footnote at the bottom of page 357 of his book James adds a quote from the book “Ramakrishna, His Life and Sayings”: “The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint in regards to his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.”
Does not, James questions, the worship of material luxury and wealth which constitutes so large a portion of the “spirit” of our age [quite true today 100 years later] make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the commiserating and facetious [frivolous] way in which most children are brought up today – so different from the education of a hundred years ago – in danger, despite its many advantages, of developing a certain trashiness of fiber? [Prophetic perhaps? As is exemplified during sleazy NFL Super Bowl half-time performances, repulsive pornography, tawdry movies, music videos, etc.]. Are there not some points of application for a renovated and revised form of ascetic training the author wonders?
Here James takes us in another direction yet, along the same lines: War and adventure assuredly keeps all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, both in degree and in duration, such that the whole scale of motivation alters.
Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent effect whatsoever. Death turns into the commonplace and its usual power to check [unscrupulous] actions vanish. The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature, James contends. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors so that the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility. Yet, when the military type of self-severity is compared with that of the ascetic saint, we find a world of differences in their spiritual attributes. James here gives us an example:
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“To live and let live,” writes an Austrian officer, “is no devise for an army. Contempt for one’s own comrades, for the troops of the enemy and, above all, fierce contempt for one’s own person, are what war demands of everyone. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. War, and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions of which he must immediately seek to get rid of. For him, victory, success, must be everything. The most barbaric tendencies in men again come to life in war, and for war’s uses they are incommensurably good.”
The fact is, James professes, that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of the savage instinct, it is the only school that, as of yet, is universally available. Therefore, when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought and think more kindly of ascetic religion.
L.T. – What’s wrong with effeminacy? I think we should somehow infuse estrogen into the brutes’ bodies at the very first signs of their chest-thumping and war bellowing.
Poverty, James suggests, is the strenuous life – without the brass bands or uniforms or hysterical popular applause.
L.T. – Next, wipe out their bank accounts leaving them to sleep in sleeping bags in tents in the park and stand in soup kitchen lines; just as they would in the military. Once the estrogen kicks in, believe me, they will want nothing to do with sleeping outside on the ground in the cold and will soon become sensible and act civilized.
James continues, we despise anyone one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join in on the general scramble and pant along money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying of our way by what we are or what we do rather than by what we have.
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It is true, that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But, wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear of losing it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of ways in which a wealth bound man must be a slave whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a free man. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues for fear of economic consequences (loss of job, promotion, stocks tumble, club doors shut in our faces). Yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit and our example would help to set free our generation. Causes, of course, need funding but as its servants, we would be potent in proportion [perhaps far more so] to any opposing well financed opposition.
L.T. – Due to the above paragraph and my remarks about brutes and their hormonal imbalances that could easily be remedied by giving them estrogen supplements I am here inspired to further inform of the circumstances I found myself in involving organized crime:
But first: For a review of circumstances of that which I am about to here refer to go to: chapter (A) MIRACLES and scroll down to the posts titled Divine Message – A Most Difficult time, page 22, then Downtown Art Studio, page 23, and next Paranormal Visions of Menacing Entities, page 23. Following having read these posts, the reader should next go to chapter (C) MIRACLES and read the first post titled A Most Difficult Time (organized crime and pornography) pages 53 & 54. Then on chapter (F) “The Varieties of Religious Experience” – Part I, page 27 and 42 (above), and from there chapter (G) “The Varieties of Religious Experience” – Part II, pages 71 and 72 and continuing here below on chapter (H) “The Varieties of Religious Experience” Part III, on pages 93, 111 & 112, and 142 & 143 .
After the therapist had convinced me that the mafia was not going to murder me I was initially, albeit briefly, greatly relieved, almost ecstatic. (see Chapter (F) page 27, regarding having purchased a gun to kill myself believing it was the least worst of two dire outcomes). This was then followed by a state of severe depression. Nearly catatonic, I would spend whole days just sitting on the couch staring into space for, even though I had not shot myself, I was still in the same dire situation. My property had been on the market for some time and I rarely, if at all, heard from the real estate agent. The ‘For Sale’ sign posted outside the building was regularly vandalized. On several nights I could hear one of my neighbors repeatedly kicking the metal sign; it was very loud. Perhaps four days or so after the gun incident, I received a letter from a real estate agent, whom I knew not and had never contacted. I deduced that this letter did not come at this time by chance alone. Regardless, I wanted out of the property and telephoned the realtor who sent the letter and we made an appointment for an early evening visit a few days hence. He did not show up and I figured it was just more of the same sort of ‘jerking me around’ that I had been, at this point, used to experiencing, and I did not expect I would at all meet with the relator. However, he showed up unexpectedly early the next morning. Once I had invited him inside the studio he made a comment regarding my early morning appearance.
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I could tell right away that he was a member of, or affiliated somehow, with this criminal organization. (You get so you recognize many of them fairly quickly – they sometimes, not always, possess similar subtle characteristics). During our first meeting that morning he told me that the previous realtor was too frightened to work with the property. He also stated that my neighbors were mafia. He casually mentioned that, “A good friend is someone who will help you bury a body,” and asked me out for a date. I desperately wanted out of the neighborhood, out of the condominium, and I wanted to live, so I agreed to go out with him signed his real estate sales contract.
During our first date, over dinner, he told me of a community he lived in outside of Chicago that was a community of recreational, private airplane pilots. The community had a small runway and hangers to park the home owners’ airplanes in. He mentioned that he sold a neighbor, a doctor, a parachute of his. Later, as the doctor was flying, his plane malfunctioned and he had to eject himself from the airplane. The realtor then told me that the first parachute did not release and the second backup parachute had a tear in a seam resulting in the doctor’s plummeting to the ground and to his death. He then stated that the doctor was an a$$hole.
On another occasion, during a time when he was grieving over having to put his dog to sleep, I asked him if he planned on getting another pet. He said, “No, I’m tired of putting people down.” On another day when he took me to a commercial gold mining property for a hike, and just after we parked but had not yet gotten out of the car, I asked him if he was going to kill me (meaning out in the wilderness). I wasn’t hysterical at all, I had come to expect to be killed at some point and felt an ongoing malaise about it. He responded, “He would not hurt a hair on my head.” After hiking a bit and stopping for lunch he pulled out a knife, with about a seven inch long blade, and went on describing in detail its sharpness. The realtor then told of a scene in the movie “Ryan’s Song,” a war movie where, as a German soldier in hand-to-hand combat with an American soldier was sinking a knife into the chest of the American, the German was saying “There, you go to sleep now.” The relator said, even when one is killing another the killer can feel compassion for his victim.
There’s more, much more, I could report, including drugging (I believe he was slipping antidepressants into my bottled drinking water) and a certain and specific incident of hypnosis. Also, I was sexually entertaining him to stay alive. Eventually, another realtor from another firm altogether managed to sell my condominium and get me out of that dreadful neighborhood.
This is the part that is quite shocking. This realtor told me he knew my ex-husband’s attorney (I never told the realtor who my husband’s attorney was) and that he was good friends with her and her husband who was a home builder. And, that he had, as one of his real estate listings, a very expensive home that the attorney’s husband had built on spec. He also told me of a female that the attorney had introduced him to as a possible romantic connection (here underscoring that the real estate agent and the attorney were good friends). On one occasion he told me not to contact my ex-husband for he was under extreme stress and not at all well. Adam’s circumstances were as stressful as mine, maybe more so but, I would rather not, for his and his new family’s sake, go into detail here. I should add however, that our divorce was not contentious and for a while, early on, Adam helped me out a good deal. The realtor’s comment cost me several nights sleep worrying that Adam too was being menaced as I was by these thugs. I then deduced (wrongly unfortunately) that the realtor was just being manipulative and decided that Adam was probably fine. Obviously my ex-husband’s attorney had stepped outside proper, perhaps legal even, bounds of professional conduct. I suspect that it was she who sent him in my direction initially. She is now a judge.
This has all been officially reported. Back to the book:
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James concludes that whoever possesses strongly a sense of the divine, instead of placing happiness where common men place it (in comfort) the saintly places it in a higher kind of inner excitement which converts discomforts into sources of cheer thus annulling unhappiness. He turns his back upon no duty, however thankless, and when we are in need of assistance we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble-mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse and, his purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Exhilaration, purity, charity, patience, self-severity – these are splendid excellencies and the saint, above all men, shows them in the most completely possible measure.
But, as we have seen, all these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility and a morbid inability to meet the world. In fact, says James, in some circumstances a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than the superficial carnal man. Therefore we must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards when estimating his total function. James states that the most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom he knows of is Friedrich Nietzsche. He contrasts the saints with the worldly; such as we find them embodied in the predaceous military character, and to the advantage of the latter.
In fact, says James, the saint does appeal to a different faculty as enacted in the fable about the wind, the sun, and the traveler.
L.T. – Which here I shall include:
The 6th century B.C. Aesop Fable “The Wind and the Sun”
The Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger. Suddenly, they saw a traveler coming down the road and the Sun said, “I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveler to take off his cloak shall be regarded as the stronger.” “You go first,” the Sun said to the Wind then retired behind a cloud and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveler. But, the harder he blew the more closely did the traveler wrap his cloak around him until, at last, the Wind had to give up. Then, the Sun came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveler who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on. Moral of the story: Kindness affects more than severity.
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James continues: For Nietzsche, the saint represents little more than slavishness and his prevalence would put humankind in danger. Here the author quotes Nietzsche [much abridged]:
“The sick are the greatest danger for the well. The weaker, not the stronger, are the strong’s undoing. The morbid are our greatest peril – not the bad men, not the predatory beings. Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken – those who are the weakest are undermining the vitality of the race, poisoning our trust in life and putting humanity in question. And here swarm the worms of sensitiveness; here is woven endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies: the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious. For there [the saintly conspirators] the very aspect of the victorious is hated as if health, success, strength and pride and the sense of power were in themselves things vicious and for which one ought to make bitter expiation [atonement].”
Poor Nietzsche’s antipathy is itself sickly enough laments James. Yet, he well expresses the clash between the two ideals: The carnivorous-minded strongman, the adult and cannibal male who can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint’s gentleness and self-severity and, regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud essentially revolves upon two pivots: Shall the seen world, or the unseen world, be our chief sphere of adaptation? And, in the seen, the empirical world, must our means of adaptation be aggressiveness or non-resistance? The debate is serious, James insists, and both worlds must be taken into account.