An Unseen Reality

“God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or rain; and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and praise, and our communion is delightful. He answers me again and again, often in words so clearly spoken that it seems my outer ear mist have carried the tone, but generally in strong mental impressions. Usually a text of Scripture, unfolding some new view of him and his love for me, and care for my safety. I could give hundreds of instances, in school matters, social problems, financial difficulties, etc. That he is mine and I am his never leaves me, it is an abiding joy. Without it life would be a blank, a desert, a shoreless, trackless waste.“

William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. “The Reality of the Unseen”

The White Knight Religion

The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that out lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! Are not.

And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of a happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.

William James The Varieties of Religious Experience. “Circumscription of the Topic”

personal identifying

Doch dieser Schwelle Zauber zu zerspalten

Bedarf ich eines Rattenzahns.

Noch eiaen Biss, so ist’s geschehn!

[But to break through the magic of this threshold

I need a rat's tooth. (He conjures up a rat.)

Another bite, and it is done!]

Er sieht in der geschwollen Ratte

Sein ganz naturlich Ebenbild.

[For in the bloated rat he sees

A living likness of himself]

- Respectively – Goethe, Faust, Part I; Faust, Part I., Scene in Auerbach’s Cellar -