The great accomplishment of The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James's enduring classic, was to demonstrate that people come to faith not just because they decide that the propositions are true but because they experience God directly. They feel God's presence. They hear God's voice. Their hearts flood with an incandescent joy. Moreover, these feelings and sensations are patterned. Despite the deep idiosyncracies of personality and life path, when people feel and sense the divine, they do so in ways that can be detailed like a naturalist observing the flight of birds. James set out to describe these features. It is a brilliant book. But it missed the role that spiritual training can plan in encouraging the experience.

In fact, The Varieties of Religious Experience deliberately downplays the role of practice. Prayer is given the most cursory of mentions. There is scant attention to spiritual discipline. The book is about what people experience, not how they get there. James gives the impression that it is these powerful experiences which come, spontaneously, out of nowhere, that become the presence of God for individuals. It is their unwilled quality, their unsought-for surprise, that is so compelling. They come as if from without, and it is the apparent authority that becomes evidence for the external presence of the divine. Here the most famous and dramatic example is the mystical experience, one of whose central characteristics is passivity.