7

Homage to William James

The more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to succeed.

William James (1842–1910)¹

William James was quoted in the introduction in relation to attention. Chapter 6 mentioned him twice in the context of the nightingale metaphor. This chapter reviews some of his ideas on the competence of our subconscious mechanisms. In the century since he died, no one has surpassed him in the prescience with which he anticipated themes now within the larger scope of neuropsychology. James’s words live on in a centenary edition, The Heart of William James. It suggests countless ways that his far-sighted perspectives have illuminated our contemporary discourse.

This centenary edition collects 17 of his essays from the definitive 19-volume set of The Works of William James, published between 1975 and 1988 by Harvard University Press. The essays begin with the topic of emotion (1884). Unfolding in chronological order, they close with his prescription for a moral equivalent of war (1910). In the intervening 26 years, James’s many-faceted mind explored diverse topics. They include his crucial contributions on habit (1892), will (1899) and pragmatism (1899).

Front and center is the essay, “What Is an Emotion?” James points out that how we act toward another person will transform our own emotional state of mind. Indeed, we may feel some of our former cold-heartedness starting to melt as we continue to practice some age-old elementary practices that Buddhism refers to as loving-kindness (Pali: metta).

Is it really this easy? Can we actually thaw our own attitudes just by learning how to “Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather the ventral aspect of the frame, speak in a major key, and pass the genial compliment?” In “The Gospel of Relaxation,” James explains some psychological roots underlying this calm and erect postural approach to everyday behavior. He suggests that each of our actions generates “ceaseless inpouring currents of sensation.” In return, this neural feedback reshapes “from moment to moment what our own inner states shall be.” A recent review provides psychological evidence in support of James’s behave-as-if principle.² In the essay, “The Hidden Self,” James predicts which persons “will be in the best possible position” to study such subtle phenomena. They will be the investigators (like James himself) who “pay attention to facts of the sort dear to mystics, while reflecting upon them in academic-scientific ways.”

We discover his prediction amply confirmed not only in his classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience (first published in 1902)³ but also in the way that research into the psychology and neuroscience of meditation has exploded during the past three decades. In 2008, when David Brooks coined the term “neural Buddhism” in his New York Times article, he foresaw how our whole culture would be influenced by this recent brain research.⁴ Comprehensive reviews of this topic have recently been published by Hölzel and colleagues and by Malinowski.⁵ They summarize many of the neural mechanisms currently believed to operate in this important field in which James was a major pioneer.

Of course, researchers in laboratories are not the only ones who can benefit from carefully examining contemplative/spiritual phenomena. Indeed, in the essay “Habit,” having provided useful maxims for how to behave, James advises educators at every level “to make our nervous system our ally, instead of our enemy.” Following his private interview with Swami Vivekananda at Harvard in 1892, James lamented the lack of comparable meditative practices throughout education in the United States. In his talks to teachers and students, he pointed out that education had caused much harm by sponsoring excessive tension. As these words are written in 2013, meditation has finally been introduced into education at every level from grade school through graduate school.⁶ It is also flourishing in corporate enterprises,⁷ and is being tested for effectiveness in a group of U.S. Marines undergoing training at Camp Pendleton.⁸

James advocates a more relaxed lifestyle. He does so in ways that could help advance the cause of those who are now introducing secular meditative practices into societies worldwide. In “The Gospel of Relaxation,” he contends that “we must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes.” Instead, what does he believe our communities of the future should provide? This future setting should be a place where citizens no longer “look down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull” but rather cultivate “harmony, dignity, and ease” for their own sake.

Anticipating research into the kinds of creative freedom that flow selflessly, James states this basic psychological principle: “Strong feeling about one’s self tends to arrest the free association of one’s objective ideas and motor processes.” He asks, Do we truly “wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious, varied, and effective?” Then he says, “we must form the habit of freeing them from our inhibiting influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation about their results.” In short, stop ruminating and wasting precious time. Just do it!

James was restored by the hours he spent engaged in the outdoors. Reserved for his letters is one account of an episode when he spontaneously experienced profound “spiritual alertness” and “intense significance.” This “boulder of impression” overcame him one moonlight night. It followed his day hike up Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks. [ZB: 523–524] To preserve one’s “full youthful elasticity,” he counsels simple hygienic measures: getting ample sleep and exposing oneself daily to “the morning sun and air and dew.” Because Nature’s bounties were themselves “sufficiently powerful intoxicants,” no other stimulants and narcotics were deemed necessary. [ZB: 424–426; ZBR: 291–302; SI: 267–268]

The title of the next essay poses this hard question: “What Makes a Life Significant?” James offers no easy answer. For him, no ordinary levels of our usual ideals and aspirations will suffice. First we have to stick our necks out, accept substantial new risks and fresh challenges. Only then would emerge our deeper, sterner, traits of character and novel uplifting ideals. These alone can enable us to prevail. Few of these requisite skill sets were fully developed in our earlier repertoire.

This essay did not suggest that his readers seek the actual challenge of an outward-bound experience. Nor did it prescribe a rigorous meditative retreat. However, in a context in which he refers explicitly to the Buddha, he specifies which three “underground virtues” are the deep traits of character that emerge under duress. This triad is “courage, patience, and kindness.” These pivotal qualities, hard-tempered during adversity, would seem to have been criteria high on the list of the Nobel committee when it chose an exiled Tibetan-born candidate, the 14^th Dalai Lama, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

James was a practical philosopher. He advanced the elementary principle of pragmatism from an earthy perspective. While staying grounded in the present moment, he could still reach up to pluck low-hanging fruits from a situation, accepting that those now within reach were more immediately useful than some of the deeper roots. Notwithstanding, he still held that our most deeply rooted authentic beliefs were “really rules for action” in the world at large.

What about the slippery issue of truth? James believed that our various theological belief systems had developed only as “secondary accretions” in the course of a long cultural history. Of primary importance to him were the vast numbers of direct, “concrete religious experiences,” not doctrinal concepts. By providing fresh intuitions for renewal, these intimate experiences enabled “humble private men” to transform their lives.

The “Energies of Men” was his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in 1906. In it, James observed that the ways we actually behave in the world are far from optimal. Even so, we still possess private, deep, reservoirs of untapped potential energy to draw upon. When such surges of excitation infuse our consciousness, they “carry us over the dam,” stimulate us to make renewed efforts that are driven by fresh ideas and novel insights. However, James’s pragmatism also included don’t as well as do. He emphasized that restraint (Sanskrit: shila) still has a powerful role to play in our behaviors. Why did he advocate the regular application of common sense—urge our “saying ‘no’ to some habitual temptation?” Because he had found that these small “single successful efforts of moral volition” had a weighty influence that could endure for many days.

How can we train ourselves to develop this greater willpower? In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James prescribes first applying our “faculty of effort” in small incremental steps. This means doing the “little heroic things” we really do not like to do. Instead, do them anyway. Later, when it takes major reserves of willpower to accomplish the real heavy lifting, we will then be well-equipped and not unnerved by the challenge. [ZBR: 31]

The essay entitled “The Will” came from his book Talks to Teachers (1899). Here, he clarifies why we benefit by deliberately choosing to say yes to the positive aspects of our everyday life. It is because a negative idea “quickly vanishes from the field” of consciousness whenever we affirm our positive options. He found that this simple strategy of affirmation was much more effective than trying to submerge unwholesome ideas “by repression or by negation.”

The final essay in this collection was published only a few months before he died in 1910. In it, he concedes that war can create group cohesiveness by its appeal to our sense of patriotism. However, he expresses the hope that war will become only “a transitory phenomenon in human evolution.” Let every angry emotion that war stirs up be replaced by those peaceful behaviors that have become, in his memorable phrase, “the moral equivalent of war.”

The 17 essays in The Heart of William James still pulse with systolic prescience. They exemplify a distinctive sensibility for today’s readers who seek authentic psychological insights and spiritual nourishment. More than a century ago, James foresaw that “a wave of religious activity is passing over our American world.” He predicted that this larger movement, driven by its native optimism, would have the potential to release “a firmer, more elastic moral tone.” Readers struggling to survive in this century’s unrelenting turmoil now have this fresh opportunity on their horizon. They can share in James’s optimism that their innate sense of pragmatism will someday “come to its rights” and help us all “in our struggle toward the light.”