The James Gang
William James, Henry James, Jesse James, Frank James, and James Joyce
William and Henry were brothers, as were Jesse and Frank, the core of the notorious James-Younger Gang. They were men who got used to open carry, and figured, why the fuck not? It beats working. William James developed a psychology which was distinctly American. In his, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” James examined an experience characterized by a greatly enhanced esthetic sense, and embodied truth, a truth with higher authority than can be found in the flow of ordinary moments, bound to each other like the cars of a passing train.
William James was the missing link between Freud and Jung because he opened the door to the unconscious as a subliminal field, which fostered a holistic view of psychology. The path opened into the concept of the collective unconscious. James’ exploration was of experiences so powerful that they overwhelmed reason, so that the personality construct surrendered to what was encompassing, and thus, in control. These experiences were reported as religious experience because they overwhelmed rationality. In truth, the seat of consciousness can shift between the left and the right hemisphere.
The first time I had one of these shifts, I had read James, and so instead of surrendering to God, I was able to stay woke and observe the characteristics of the altered state, observing that it is the right hemisphere, which controls the body, at the fore, and that logical processes work in the background, at such speed there is no space between things, thus, no passing time. This eternal moment characteristic gives it the quality of a religious experience. Maurice Nicoll (protege of Jung and of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) wrote that the processing speed is so much faster we can’t imagine it. AI estimates the unconscious may process up to 400 billion bits per second while the conscious mind processes between 10 and 2,000 bits per second.
When something is fully materialized it has no other possibilities, as it is fully manifested. With no other possibilities extant, the moment is experienced as complete and unalterable, thus, the sensation of timelessness is an experience of the eternal moment. The symbol of a horizontal intersecting a vertical is of these two experiences of time. The vertical is sacred time, the eternal moment, and it is always there. The horizontal, the events in time, move through it. In the Western mindset language tends to be divorced from symbol and image, relating only to itself, while in the Chinese mind the writing remains rooted in the body, like the fat Buddha who blends into the earth where he sits in meditation. Language which is self-referencing, which is not processed in the body, quickly develops neurosis. This is what we see in our current leadership, not even grounded in the classics from the Greeks. The reason it feels like insanity is that it is insanity.
Another characteristic of the altered state is that everything becomes obvious. Nothing is hidden. Any question comes packaged with the answer. Don Juan calls this, the place of direct knowledge. He describes it as ancient, secure, grounded, while the new mind flits around, nervous and unsure of itself. When Carlos asks if there is an evolutionary advantage to being in the place of direct knowledge, he answers that if there were, we’d all be there. I think that has shifted and the seat of consciousness is shifting back to the right hemisphere, while all the computations run outside consciousness, at ever faster speeds. The seat of consciousness shifted up and promised to return. And here we go.
The most unsettling thing about the shift is seeing what is beneath the masks of congeniality and comportment in flowing time. How hideous it is to see Dorian Gray suddenly come out of the closet, and out of the frame. One pretends not to see it, like avoiding staring at a freaks on a day trip to the zoo.
James Joyce explained the difference between art and pornography, and why the former is difficult while the latter is easy. Let’s say I want to create a hero character, and so I give him the qualities of a hero, such as bravery, predictability when faced with a choice between desire and morality, a protective instinct toward women, particularly comely ones, and those others who can afford an introduction.
If you “get” the ego shadow connection, you already know the villain will be cowardly, treacherous in his disregard for rules, and one from whom comely and sensitive women require protection. This is all pornography, Joyce explains, whether you create the hero with the preferred qualities in the group, or create the villain with what is left on the cutting room floor. What makes art different is that all the qualities are there, as they are in a real person. Art blends the opposites and creates a moment of esthetic arrest, a unification with the eternal moment.
The writing moves out in all directions as energy does in the psyche. We contain all of it, some in ego, some in shadow, and the shadow can be integrated by acknowledging it and including it, as with humor or through interior dialogue. I think it was in a Nero Wolf mystery where a writer was dismissed as the killer even though he’d written a story in which the narrator was the culprit. Wolf observed that the writer was dealing with the shadow through the writing of the story, and had not acted out the crime.
When I am writing as an exercise, what seems erratic to a following logic, is exploring the energy field, meandering here and there like a dog with his nose in the grass. I call it the weave. Which reminds me, did you see that the Shingles vaccine is a longevity drug? It seems to prevent symptoms of Alzheimer's.
“Receiving the shingles vaccine was associated with a 20 percent lower chance of being diagnosed with dementia. Those findings held up to all kinds of veracity checks — and they were repeated in similar natural experiments in Australia and Canada. A December 2025 study based on the (Welsh) data concluded that people who already had dementia and received the shingles vaccine saw slower progression of the disease and fewer deaths, suggesting that the shot may be effective in treating dementia, too.” (Dylan Scott, Vox)
I think all the James gang has been brought in to sit around the fire … except, Henry James. Henry is complicated and can’t easily be summed up. He and Mark Twain had a rivalry of sorts, with Twain finding James’ fiction too refined and distant, while James found Twain too coarse and common in his prose. I like this little video interviewing Joseph O’Leary on James.