William James was a philosopher and psychologist at the beginning of that field. He wrote Human Immortality in 1897, and included this:

“Admit now that our brains are such thin and half-transparent places in the veil. …as the white radiance comes through the dome, with all sorts of staining and distortion imprinted on it by the glass, … even so the genuine matter of reality… will break through our several brains into this world in all sorts of restricted forms, and with all the imperfections and queernesses that characterize our finite individualities here below.” (Sorry about all the ellpises; they’re my attempt to skip James’ redundancies.)

He’s talking about a set of ideas here that are usually called “religious.” There’s another reality. We can’t directly perceive it, but by some unknown means it “comes through the dome.” That other reality is “higher”, and we’re “lower.” Those notions seem right at the heart of Western religious thinking.

There are plenty of examples of people who dedicated themselves to aspects of Western religion, and the results were not pretty. Maybe not even what they would have wanted, going in. There’s one example in particular I’m thinking about, because of the day it is: February 7. Today is the 525th anniversary of the bonfire of the vanities. Not the Tom Wolfe novel; it only seemed like it took that long to read. I mean the original Bonfire of the Vanities that Wolfe referred to in his title.

The Bonfire of the Vanities happened in Florence, Italy, when Girolamo Savonarola (the Dominican monk) and his followers burned anything they thought was going to tempt them toward sin. They tossed cosmetics, fancy clothes, books, paintings, musical instruments, playing cards; anything they could think of as “worldly.” Because “there's another reality.” And “it’s higher and we’re lower.” And you can’t help but be detoured in your pursuit of that higher reality by all the stuff in our lower one.

Or can you? There’s another tradition in Western thinking that’s just been around at least as long as the religious match that gave us that bonfire. Around 300 BCE, Zeno of Citium (the “of Citium” is important; there’s another famous Zeno, from Elea) founded the school of philosophy we call “Stoicism.” By the way, it’s called “Stoicism” instead of “Zenoism” because Zeno taught in an area of Athens called the “stoa”. I’m sure I’m going to ridiculously oversimplify Stoicism, pretty much as I’ve ridiculously oversimplified the “there’s another reality” school of thought, but here goes. Stoicism holds that there’s only one universe, that we’re part of it, and if something in it causes problems for you, there’s a good chance that what you need to change isn’t the something; it’s yourself.

Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher (not to mention a Roman Emperor) roughly four centuries after Zeno, and quite a few of the things he said have been preserved. One of them is: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” That is, if you find that things around you are “tempting you to sin,” the lesson you ought to take from that is that you lack self control.

I’m not a psychologist by any means, but I just wonder whether the thought process of the bonfire crowd might be something like “I have to burn worldly things so I can better ignore them. Because I can’t concentrate. I don’t have the discipline. I haven’t mastered myself. And I’m so ashamed. That shame makes me angry. So burn it all.”

Another way to put it, much more delicately, comes from Hedda Sterne: “For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.” To find out more about Sterne, have a look here .

To close this out for now, let me invoke William James once more. No, twice more:

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

And although I’m addressing the wrong audience with this, everybody should please quit bonfires of the vanities nonsense. You can never burn all the books anyway.