The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time

Jonathan Bricklin

Description

A Seminary Co-op Notable Book of 2016

William James is often considered a scientist compromised by his advocacy of mysticism and parapsychology. Jonathan Bricklin argues James can also be viewed as a mystic compromised by his commitment to common sense. James wanted to believe in will, self, and time, but his deepest insights suggested otherwise. "Is consciousness already there waiting to be uncovered and is it a veridical revelation of reality?" James asked shortly before his death in 1910. A century after his death, research from neuroscience, physics, psychology, and parapsychology is making the case, both theoretically and experimentally, that answers James's question in the affirmative. By separating what James passionately wanted to believe, based on common sense, from what his insights and researches led him to believe, Bricklin shows how James himself laid the groundwork for this more challenging view of existence. The non-reality of will, self, and time is consistent with James's psychology of volition, his epistemology of self, and his belief that Newtonian, objective, even-flowing time does not exist.
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. William James: A Guide for the Perplexed

2. Thoughts without a Thinker

3. Ghostbuster

4. The Feeling of Effort

5. Free Will and Indeterminism

6. Universe and Nulliverse

7. Precognition

8. Fate and Free Will

9. That Thou Art

10. Consciousness and Consciousness of Self

11. Psyche

12. Undoing unto Others As Well as Oneself

13. Belief in Fate Is not Fatalism

14. The Nonreality of Time

15. Eternalism

Appendix
Abbreviations for James Texts
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Metaphysics
• System
• Mysticism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438456294
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time
“We are taken step by step in a stunning tour of many powerful yet still disputed ideas that were fervently argued a century ago. Congratulations to Jonathan for a book that every psychologist should read whether doubtful of current paradigms or searching for new ones but mostly, for an enriching experience that brings these age-old controversies into relation with findings in modern physics and psychology.”
— Jason W. Brown, MD, Center for Cognition and Communication
The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time
SUNY series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology Richard D. Mann, editor
The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time
WILLIAM JAMES’S RELUCTANT GUIDE TO ENLIGHTENMENT

JONATHAN BRICKLIN
Cover image of William James from the Houghton collection “Letters to William James from various correspondents and photograph album” courtesy of Harvard College Library.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Ryan Morris
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bricklin, Jonathan, [date]
The illusion of will, self, and time : William James’s reluctant guide to enlightenment / Jonathan Bricklin.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in transpersonal and humanistic psychology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5627-0 (hc : alk. paper)—978-1-4384-5628-7 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5629-4 (e-book) 1. James, William, 1842–1910. 2. Psychologists—United States. 3. Philosophers—United States. 4. Transpersonal psychology. I. Title. BF109.J28B75 2015 150.19 87—dc23 2014024577
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sharda Rogell
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That, chang’d thro’ all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in th’ ethereal frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives thro’ all life, extends thro’ all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart:
As full, as perfect, in vile Man that mourns,
As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
—Alexander Pope
The great cosmic Intellect is one in all of us,—true!
Yet every man we meet requires to be humored.
—William James
CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. William James: A Guide for the Perplexed
2. Thoughts without a Thinker
3. Ghostbuster
4. The Feeling of Effort
5. Free Will and Indeterminism
6. Universe and Nulliverse
7. Precognition
8. Fate and Free Will
9. That Thou Art
10. Consciousness and Consciousness of Self
11. Psyche
12. Undoing unto Others as Well as Oneself
13. Belief in Fate Is not Fatalism
14. The Nonreality of Time
15. Eternalism
Appendix
Abbreviations for James Texts
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE

P eople love a sense of destiny without loving destiny itself. We love to feel we have arrived at where we were always meant to be—but only at certain points along the way. Believing, say, that something mysterious—more than chance and chemistry—was responsible for bringing us together with our beloved, we embrace the concept of fated encounters yet spurn the concept of Fate.
But at the end of their lives, two of the most celebrated thinkers of the modern age suggested that Fate itself might be part of a vaster, more diffused, order of things. “For us believing physicists, this separation between past and future has the value of mere illusion, however tenacious,” wrote Einstein, 1 three weeks before he died, endorsing the most radical interpretation of the new physics he launched in 1905 with his publication of “Special Relativity.” 2 “Is … consciousness already there waiting to be uncovered and is it a veridical revelation of reality?” asked William James a few months before he died in 1910, in an essay entitled “A Suggestion About Mysticism,” oblivious to the space-time revolution already underway ( ASAM , 1280).
Sage that he was, even “spiritual prophet” who cut through the riddle that perplexed the ancients,” 3 Einstein’s mission was not, however, to probe deeply into the psychological and spiritual questions implied by his cosmic answer. The “ demand ” of his physics, as Jacob Needleman said, “to think in new categories about the universe … to search for a new structure of mind, a new consciousness, based on confrontation with the fact that … [we] do not know what … [we are] in this universe of immense pattern and incomprehensible force” 4 was not a demand to be met by a physicist. 5 But this was precisely the demand met by William James.
James thought that his mystical suggestion of “consciousness already there waiting to be uncovered” would not be verified “in this generation or in the next” ( ASAM 1280). A century after his death, as if on schedule, physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and parapsychologists have gathered new evidence in its support. Few, however, know what to do with this evidence, and in this, too, they follow James, who treated his mystical revelation as an unwanted child he had to acknowledge but not legally adopt.
Yet despite resisting his revelation’s implication of timelessness, James had well prepared the way. Recognized today as the father of transpersonal psychology, 6 his research into “consciousness beyond the margin ” ( ML , 70) challenged both the commonsense boundary of subject-object duality and the brain’s role as the generator of consciousness. One of the most esteemed philosophers of the last century credited him with launching “a new epoch in philosophy,” by directly undermining Cartesian dualism. 7 And as an explorer of what we now call entheogenic experiences, and a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research, James fully engaged, without prejudice, evidence of “ultra-phenomenal unity,” such as clairvoyant knowledge, acquired beyond the “ordinary waking use of … eyes and ears and wits” ( ILR , 60; WB , 694). The “most urgent intellectual need,” James declared, was that “science be built up again” in a form in which such phenomena “have a positive place” (ibid.). Independently of Einstein’s relativity revolution, he believed that “the limits of the admitted order of things” had “broken down,” and insofar as science denied such research, it lay “prostrate in the dust” (ibid.).
That James—a self-described “dry and bony individual, repelling fusion” ( C8 , 221)—did not inhabit this “positive place” he had helped establish; that he found his own epoch-making nondualism a form of “madness,” and the dualism of “Common Sense” “the biggest stroke of genius ever made in philosophy” ( C7 , 292); that he lived his entire life believing he was an individuated self, willing consequential actions in linear time; is what makes him such a valuable guide to all the evidence that suggests otherwise. For the evidence, in both James’s era and our own, is not lacking; only the capacity to receive it. As Charles Tart recently expressed this limited capacity in relation to the most baffling of all transpersonal phenomena:
[P]recognition … has so much experimental evidence attesting to its reality that no reasonable person could doubt it … [but] at some deep level, I find the idea of precognition, where the inherently unknowable future can sometimes be known, so incomprehensible that I just never think about precognition in a serious way. 8
This book is about finding such a way.
Obviously, we experience something that feels like will, self, and time; the experience of them is not in question. But what precisely is that something we feel? How does the feeling differ from our interpretation? For it is that interpretation, not merely the feeling itself, that forms our belief. “The ‘inner world’ is full of phantoms … the will is one of them,” wrote James’s contemporary Nietzsche, and he identified self, what he called will’s “afterbirth,” as another. 9 In the following pages we will enter this “inner world,” where not only will and self, but time reside, only to discover that will, self, and time do not so much reside in an inner world, as constitute it. And the door, as Rumi came to realize, opens outward:
I have lived on the lip of insanity
Wanting to know reasons
Knocking on a door. It opens
I’ve been knocking from the inside! 10
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T he seed of this book was planted on a 1989 Vipassana retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Christopher Titmuss led that retreat, and his direct engagement with the dharma has been a sustaining inspiration. I am also deeply indebted to IMS for providing a haven for spiritual inquiry these past three decades.
The first opportunity to publicly share some of these core ideas was on Advaita-L , where I especially benefited from exchanges with Allan Curry and Vidyasankar Sundaresan. Sandra Martin of Paraview had the temerity to represent an early draft of this book more than two decades ago. Anthony Freeman and Keith Sutherland were the first to see some of it into print, and I have been immensely enriched by my ongoing collaboration with their pioneering Journal of Consciousness Studies . I am also grateful to Marcie Boucouvalas for adding my voice to the essential Journal of Transpersonal Psychology . The encouragin