Mark Manson

Now, the cool thing about James is that once he did get into psychology, he noticed that there was nothing in the literature that described what he went through.

you know, kind of this like sudden lightning bolt moment where everything turned around for him.

And so he decided to research that.

And he spent a number of years meeting and studying different people who had had similar experiences

He gave a lecture series in 1901, and then that lecture series eventually became his book called The Varieties of Religious Experience.

And I would say to this day, it's probably his best known book.

Now, what's interesting about William James's framework around this is that he divided the world up into two types of people.

He said that there were the healthy minded individuals and the healthy minded individuals tended to direct their own change slowly over time by altering behavior and their own beliefs.

Everything we've talked to up until this point.

But then he said there are another group of people which he called the six souls.

Sounds like a metal band.

And he said that the six souls suffered intensely, were kind of like these broken individuals.

And it was only under the unbearable weight of their own suffering that they would have to kind of crack open and have these massive wounds.

epiphanies and huge transformations that seemingly happened overnight or happened over a short period of time.

And of course, James couldn't help but notice that in many of these cases,

that kind of crack open moment was often a mystical or religious experience and so a lot of what he wrote around this topic had to do with people becoming born again or people having you know visions of god or people you know having like a deep profound spiritual experience becoming one with the universe etc we're going to come back to that later in this chapter because

That is a huge part of this.

But I think what's most interesting about James's work is that nobody really picked up the baton and ran with it after him.

He did a lot of work on this in the early 20th century, and then it just lied dormant for like almost a century.

And it really wasn't until the 1990s, a researcher named William Miller picked up this subject again and decided to start