Yes Rich, it certainly does turn everything upside down. As does James’s thinking on original sin as being the non-recognitions of the other, in other words the autonomous self as you describe the “individual, perceiving, conceptualising, egocentric agent in charge of mediating ‘reality’.
Opening up to contemplative prayer can be a long, slow process, a sort of osmosis, but it goes hand in hand with what James is telling us,that is, that we find God in the other.