A Perfect Correlation Between Mind and Brain: William James's Varieties and the Contemporary Field of Mind/Body Medicine

"Perhaps philosophers should study physiology and physiologists should study philosophy."

—William James, 1884

Two thousand and two marks the one-hundredth anniversary publication of William James's now-classic text, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and efforts are underway in the United States and Europe to celebrate both the intellectual significance and the spiritual meaning of James's ideas by philosophers, psychologists, religious scholars, and educated laymen and -women alike. One of the most important implications of James's work, in this regard, has to do with its effect on understanding the mind/body relationship, particularly where there is evidence that a text on the psychology of religion has had a documented influence on a newly emerging aspect of medical science. I refer specifically to the field of mind/body medicine, especially the investigations of Dr. Herbert Benson at the Harvard Medical School and the role his reading of Varieties played in understanding the physiology of meditation. The implications of this work for philosophy are potentially significant because they suggest the power that philosophical ideas have on the dramatic alteration of bodily processes, corroborating James's observation that, while they do not assure its occurrence, intention and systematic practice can favorably alter the conditions for the onset of mystical awakening.

James spoke to the relation between religion and medicine in the first chapter of Varieties, saying that religion and neurology were linked, if only because all experience involves the mechanisms of one's biology. There is no experience without some chemical activity somewhere. Medicine, however, has persistently labeled religious experience as pathological. It is a fact of observation, for instance, that religious types tend to be neurotic, and for that reason medical materialists universally condemn religion.

But this attitude does not give the enlightened scientist access to the objective study of religious states of consciousness, especially as far as their meaning for the individual is concerned. To get that, James said, one has to turn to the phenomenology of interior events. Therefore, experience, James said, and not biology, anthropology, or theology, was to be his focus. He intended to approach his subject as a psychologist of religion, he said, a task that included the analysis of facts as well as the assessment of what value individuals placed on their own experience. His database would come not from an autopsy of the cadaver, the statistics of religious behavior, or the history of ideas in theology. Rather, his focus would be on what he called the "documents humains," that is, living human documents or personal accounts of lived experience (James 1902, 3). ¹

The historic significance of James's text lies in his position that the experience of the sacred, our sense of reverence for the divine, all awe and wonder, and even our moral compass, while certainly influenced by a complex of social and historical factors, familial lineage, and different temperaments of personality, are based ultimately on the depth and power of experiences that we can only call mystical. ² The expansive sense of presence, the experience of no boundaries, the revelation of knowledge through intuitive insight more vast than we have ever known, the certainty of the eternal, the vision of all creation, a direct immersion in the Void—all of these have been associated at one time or another with mystical awakening. And, as a result of such experiences, our lives have been changed forever. We become different persons. Suddenly it all makes sense; we have direction and meaning, the will to live, or, finally, the courage to die, as the case may be.

James identified four characteristics of mystical states of consciousness: (1) They are always ineffable. Words cannot describe them because consciousness has expanded beyond words. To say that they defy expression is to...