Wittmann, a research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, instead seems to underscore James’s idea that only “the filmiest of screens” separates ordinary and altered states of consciousness. Here the connection between religious experience and altered states fades from view almost entirely. Published in Germany in 2015 and now out in translation, Marc Wittmann’s Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences Out of Time and Self ( MIT Press) is an update of sorts on what’s happening along the trail William James blazed. I don’t know if Walt Whitman believed in a personal deity, but the point seem moot: his poetry is the gospel of an individual who merges with the universe with some regularity, implying that the reader might do so, as well. For that matter, it was possible to undergo such experiences without adhering to any creed. In particular, there were the experiences described by saints, mystics and ordinary adherents of various religious traditions - a spectrum of states of awareness that seemed to cut across seemingly enormous differences in belief. But he did not assume that everything outside the purview of normal, waking rationality was necessarily pathological. “Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), “rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”Īs the founding father of psychological research in the United States, James was as well informed as anyone about “potential forms of consciousness” that landed some people in asylums.
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