contact with gods—while the majority are content to perform the rit-
uals as prescribed and hope they will work as expected. For James, the
common version of religion, according to which most concepts are
accepted out of usage rather than conviction, and people trust there
must be supernatural agents but do not experience direct contact with
them, was only a degraded form of these special people's experience.
Only the latter would tell us why there was religion around.^2
This reasoning—(a) religion is certainly special, (b) what makes it
special is experience, (c) exceptional people have a purer version of
that experience than the common folk, (d) common religion is just a
[308] bland, diluted form of the original experience—is not limited to
James's psychology. It is in fact a very common way of thinking about
religion, leading many people to think that all discussion of religious
ideas is misguided and that an exaggerated interest in concepts is a
Western bias. Among the many (non-Eastern) people who find special
fascination in Buddhism or other Eastern teachings, it is generally
assumed that these are precious because of their focus on experience
rather than argument. (Incidentally, there may be an ironic misunder-
standing here. After all, most Eastern teachings are primarily about
correct performance of various rituals and technical disciplines, rather
than personal experience as such. Some variants of these teachings do
emphasize subjective experience, but they may have been strongly
influenced by Western philosophy, by phenomenology in particular,
so that what disenchanted Westerners find most fascinating about
them might be a distant echo of their own philosophy.) This assump-
tion is quite widespread, which is why it seems that we will learn a lot
about religion by asking mystics or devotees about their specific expe-
rience, about its special features, about the way it connects with other
thoughts.^3
The notion that religious experience is special is so powerful that it
seems to persuade even some cognitive scientists. For some time now,
the tools of neuropsychology—measuring brain activation, studying
brain pathology, examining the effects of particular substances—have
been applied to religious experience. Cognitive scientists usually mea-
sure brain activity as subjects perform exceedingly boring tasks, like
deciding whether a word is printed the right way up, whether a picture
is of a tool or an animal, whether an image is new or was already pre-
sented before. Compared to all this, it would of course be more excit-
ing to visualize or otherwise measure what is happening in a brain
processing religious thoughts. But again (this is where the Jamesian
RELIGION EXPLAINED