(THREAD) Thoughts and observations, in no particular arrangement, on The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James, Lectures 4 & 5: The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness. Tagging @imjasondiamond and @johnwilliamsnyt for visibility.

2/ One of the accusations I feel acutely while reading this book is that there is sin in feeling depressed. James doesn’t state it in that way, but he goes on at length about morbid, mopey whiners, and clearly has little patience for them. Maybe this is self-criticism?

3/ The “once-born” vs “twice-born” (born again) dichotomy seems to presuppose that a cheerful, accepting, optimistic temperament is preferable. But there’s another word for that temperament: naive. Is that what we want? I find happy go lucky people intolerable.

4/ Oh my god, James considers Walt Whitman the prime contemporary example of this cheerful “inability to feel evil”! Is it true? I suppose I always read Whitman’s ecstasy as momentary relief from internal states of gloom. A bipolar man who wrote under the influence of mania.

5/ “Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements.” Well. One might also argue that he wrote good poems. Nb: James does admit that Whitman’s positivity seems strained.

6/ Healthy-mindedness is here defined as looking on all things and seeing that they are good. Who here is healthy?

7/ For the first time in this book, I’m finding it difficult to distinguish WJ’s description from prescription. Or maybe it’s that this is the first area he seems to be prescriptive, e.g. “we ought to scout [unhappiness] in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.”

8/ WJ speaks of the “mind cure” movement, which takes inspiration from popular science, and it sounds a lot like contempo self-help groups like est, Landmark Forum and NXIVM, with their “technologies” of self-improvement. It’s remarkable how similar they are to what WJ describes.

9/ James might not be surprised to learn what a huge, money-gobbling industry self-help has become, with all its positive attitude and power mantras. He’d call it proof that the human mind fundamentally seeks out healthy-mindedness however it can.

10/ Landmark has at times gotten their hooks in people close to me. It's hard to argue that fear can undermine our potential. I recall one friend, highly intelligent and well-read, being impressed that Landmark used Hegelian dialectics as a base for its “technology.”

11/ “It is but giving your little private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there.” I can’t deny the allure of giving my “little private convulsive self” a rest. Where’s the switch?!