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William James wrote in his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience
(a primary influence in the founding principles of Alcoholics Anonymous): "Medical
materialism greatly overgeneralizes its knowledge of the connections between physiological
variables and mind states." James who taught physiology at Harvard well knew that
the current knowledge in physiology did not justify the conclusions being made
by the pathology writers. As a corrective to their overstatements James wrote:
"It seems far more reasonable to ascribe them [experiences viewed by some as
pathological] to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity
correlative to which we as yet know nothing."
As educator Jeffrey Rubin, Ph.D. writes on James in The Journal
of Humanistic Psychology (Spring, 2000) he says:
By calling a wide range of conditions that affect all of us in
one form or another pathological, and then reducing mystical experiences to such
pathological conditions, was, to James, superficial medical talk."
Bringing James' thinking to current times, I think of Gerald Epstein's
ideas on Mind Medicine:
It lies behind our everyday sensory reality, the visible, objective,
physical reality. You discover and experience invisible reality by turning your
senses inward, when you use your imagination and its functional process of mental
imagery.
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