From The Varieties of Religious Experience

LECTURE III

THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN

WERE one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this hour to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities of such an attitude as this, of belief in an object which we cannot see. All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the 'objects' of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us a reaction; and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.

Those who suffer from PTSD or live the anguish of depression, I believe, know very well that this condition of there being a greater reality to things unseen than seen is a hindrance to the effort to live their lives in a happy and productive manner. And the less anguished adult recognizes that such an inner life, painful though it can be, is nevertheless the basis for “our whole higher prudential and moral life.” Lessons learned from painful actions  past can guide us in their avoidance in the future, and equally suggest to us possibilities for morally and emotionally superior activity and outcomes.

However, there is also a sense in which even the normal person is hindered from a fuller and happier life by this very mundane reality of the inner life of conscience. It is this fact that underlies the ferocity with which George Bernard Shaw proclaimed that “I never apologize!” (Quoting from my ever-fading memory of a course in GBS. At the time, this assertion seemed like obvious posing to me, as big a poser myself as there ever was, but with the slow unrolling of years I have come to see a solid foundation to that grandstand.)

There is much to which our part of mind could be open were it not for our too-frequent turning to planning and regret. See Dr. Stanley H Block later.