gav,

I agree completely.  And I'd concur by pointing to the value in the *
Varieties* of Experience - religious, and otherwise.  It is diversity which
leads to realization of what is good.  Sticking with one conceptualization
is what blinds the man to the elephant.

"But James's own robust faith was that the very caprices of the spirit are
the opportunity for the  building up of the highest forms of the spiritual
life; that the unconventional and the individual  in religious experience
are the means whereby the truth of a superhuman world may become most
manifest.

It is the spirit of the frontiersman, of the gold seeker, or the home
builder, transferred to the metaphysical and to the religious realm.

Experience alone can guide us towards the place where these things are;
hence you indeed need experience  You can only win your way on  the frontier
in case you are willing to live there.

 Be, therefore, concrete, be fearless, be exerimental.   But above all, let
not your abstract conceptions, even if you call them scientific, pretend to
set any limits to the richness of spiritual grace, to the glories of
spiritual possession, that, in case you are duly favored, your personal
experience may reveal to you.  James reckons that the tribulations  with
which abstract scientific theories have beset our present age are not to be
compared with the glory that perchance shall be, if only we open our eyes to
what experience itself has to reveal to us."

William James and the Philosophy of Life, author unknown (not really)
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