Its roots, though, don’t just lie in explicitly Christian tradition. In fact, it’s possible to trace the origins of the American prosperity gospel to the tradition of New Thought, a nineteenth-century spiritual movement popular with decidedly unorthodox thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. Practitioners of New Thought, not all of whom identified as Christian, generally held the divinity of the individual human being and the priority of mind over matter. In other words, if you could correctly channel your mental energy, you could harness its material results. New Thought, also known as the “mind cure,” took many forms: from interest in the occult to splinter-Christian denominations like Christian Science to the development of the “talking cure” at the root of psychotherapy. The upshot of New Thought, though, was the quintessentially American idea that the individual was responsible for his or her own happiness, health, and situation in life, and that applying mental energy in the appropriate direction was sufficient to cure any ills.

A religious experience (sometimes known as a spiritual experience, sacred experience, mystical experience) is a subjective experience which is interpreted within a religious framework.[1] The concept originated in the 19th century, as a defense against the growing rationalism of Western society.[2] William James popularised the concept.[2] In some religions, this may result in unverified personal gnosis.[3][4]

John Blackthorne, also known as Anjin-san, is the protagonist of James Clavell's 1975 novel Shōgun. The character is loosely based on the life of the 17th-century English navigator William Adams, who was the first Englishman to visit Japan. The character appears in the 1980 TV miniseries Shōgun, played by Richard Chamberlain,[1] and by Cosmo Jarvis in a 2024 series based on the book.

James' Principles of Psychology is both a scientific and a philosophical work, although it is primarily scientific.

an overview of the paper

Above all, Becker says, adopting a phrase from Luther, you must be able to “…taste death with the lips of your living body [so] that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die (88).” Then quoting William James (who is himself quoting the mystic Jacob Boehme), Becker further describes this “tasting” of death as a “passage into nothing, [a passage in which] a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one (88).” Thus in this process of self-realization, Becker writes, the self is “brought down to nothing.”

William James’s self-assessment: “I am no lover of disorder, but fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it entirely.”

One example of a siloed approach to critical infrastructure is the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection’s framework and action plan, which focuses on reducing vulnerability to terror attacks but does not consider integrating climate or environmental dimensions.39       Instead of approaching critical infrastructure protection as another systems maintenance task, the hyper-response takes advantage of ecoinnovation.40 Distributed and localized energy, food, water, and manufacturing solutions mean that the capacity to disrupt the arterials that keep society functioning is reduced. As an example, many citizens and communities rely on one centralized water supply. If these citizens and communities had water tanks and smaller-scale local water supply, this means that if a terror group or other malevolent actor decided to contaminate major national water supplies—or if the hyperthreat itself damaged major central systems—far fewer people would be at risk, and the overall disruption would be less significant. This offers a “security from the ground up” approach, and it applies to other dimensions such as health, food, and energy security.

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

William James