Pragmatism, however, requires judging a personal system of conduct not by whether it squares with the general conception of what ought to work, but by whether it does work. Empiricism, in James’s view, means measuring an idea without reference to how it stands or falls in comparison to widely held reasoning, but by what an individual can perceive of is nature, its consistency, and its effects. Pragmatism requires inspecting an ethical or religious idea by the experience of its use, including within oneself.
We will now submit positive thinking to that test.
* * *
* Compare this to Napoleon Hill’s statement “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of man can achieve …”
chapter eight
does it work?
If a person says: I toiled and found nothing,
don’t believe him.
—Talmud, Megillah 6b
From the earliest experiments of Phineas Quimby up through the popularity of The Secret, the movements of mind-power metaphysics have sought to explain evil, suffering, and illness as an illusion—as the result of an individual’s inability to understand and experience the ultimate reality of the universe: a beneficent, creative intelligence whose divine inflow permeates all of life. Evil is said to appear like darkness in a room once the light is blocked out.
When life is viewed from this perspective, a person visits hardship, disease, or catastrophe upon himself through wrong thoughts and flawed self-conception. Sensitive people rightly object: How could such a notion possibly account for the victims of mass murder, infant mortality, and natural disaster? And, on an intimate level, what mature person has not witnessed a life extinguished, even in surroundings of hope and love? No movement can aspire to moral seriousness without convincingly resolving such questions.
This brings us, finally, to the positive-thinking movement’s most serious and lingering dilemma: What are the ethics and moral credibility of a movement that considers the outer world nothing more than a reflection of an individual’s private outlook?
An eccentric but surprisingly well-thought-out book from 1954, Three Magic Words, sought to take on this problem. In defending the perspectives of New Thought and Christian Science, writer U. S. Andersen argued: “Now it must be thoroughly understood that we are not denying the existence of evil; we are simply denying the reality of evil, naming it illusion as it surely is.” Andersen made the allowance that sometimes we succumb to this illusion simply through the weight of conditioned thought, which gets “indelibly recorded” in the psyches of successive generations. “It is also true,” he wrote, “that thought conceptions of other persons than ourselves, nay even every person who has ever lived, may show themselves in our experience.” Hence, human consciousness is burdened by a kind of collective neurosis, which can block out the generative and positive flow of creative thought. Are we thus trapped in a world of illusory evil? No, Andersen insists: “For evil befalls the righteous and the unrighteous, but it cannot visit him who sees and is convinced of nothing but good.” Here we see the familiar belief that mental therapeutics—prayer, affirmations, visualizations, inspirational literature, and conversion experiences or moments of illumination—can reveal the true good within and all around us.
For all the limitations of his arguments—about which more will be heard—Andersen does as good a job as any twentieth-century thinker in attempting to defend the ideas of New Thought. And his perspective also highlights a key difference between various creative-thought movements and traditional mysticism. To understand this difference, and how it separates the mind-power culture from the mystical traditions, requires exploring the foundations of traditional mysticism. From this vantage point, we will be better able to confront the problems—and possibilities—of positive thinking.
The Snake in the Road
An identifiable mystical tradition appears within the teachings of all historic faiths, from Christianity to Sufism to Hinduism. This thread of mystical teaching has traditionally taught that human beings live in a state of ego illusion. In this state, we seek gratification in the form of power, flattery, toys, sex, and money—unconsciously using these things to prop up the needs and hungers of the ego. For most of us, most of the time, desire-fulfillment is our only experience of existence. Absent a connection to any sense of higher purpose, or to some greater principle of life, our pursuit of possessions and attachments, both directly and indirectly, forms our primary feeling of aliveness. The momentary thrill of attainment is also our chief means of avoiding the fear that bodily death spells our complete annihilation.
This critique of human life, as seen in comparable systems of mystical thought, seeks to explain our inability to loosen the bond of worldly attainments and to become aware of the greater truth of existence: Namely, that each individual is part of a larger whole and is a fragment of intelligent creation, or God. Only this awareness, so it is taught, can free us from both the repressed fear of death and the frantic consumption of daily life. Unaware of our true nature, however, we are stuck perpetually consuming—but never to satisfaction. Every gain, promotion, or advancement is a cause for further fear and craving because our attachments are always prone to slipping away. And, ultimately, at our life’s end, they will slip away.
In terms of human neurosis, the mystical tradition describes our psychology with parables such as “The Snake in the Road,” derived from a Vedic teaching but found in many faiths. It goes this way: A traveler is walking down a road and suddenly gets frightened by the sight of a snake up ahead. The traveler fears he’s going to get bitten. But on closer inspection he sees that what he thought was a snake is only a harmless piece of rope. This is how the ego-driven man lives: constantly projecting his fears, then experiencing temporary solace, only to reimagine another snake just ahead. The mystical tradition doesn’t deny the reality of suffering: sometimes the snake is real. Rather, this tradition attempts to summon men and women to seek a state of awareness in which the barriers between the individual and whole, the perpetrator and the victim, the giver and the taker, can be seen to fade. From this perspective, ultimate reality reveals that the barriers we see between “good” and “bad,” or sickness and health, are themselves illusion. In all things, so the tradition teaches, man is at one with the whole, and everything figures usefully and necessarily into the order of existence.
Let’s not delude ourselves: At almost every moment of existence, this sense of oneness is impossibly distant, especially when we are facing an immediate need. And yet this higher truth can also reveal itself in moments of transcendent joy, such as the birth of a child, as well as in moments of true crisis, such as when confronting the untimely death of a loved one. Such tragedies drive us to the limits of our conditioned responses to life, as well as to the limits of our belief in our ability to change conditions. In times of tragedy or joy, when our human will is suspended, and when grief does not crush us or euphoria sweep us away, a more expansive view can settle over us. Again, this experience of oneness can appear hopelessly far away. Yet its occurrence is long recognized not only in spiritual literature, but in the testimony of many modern individuals who experience such a state, albeit briefly, at times of acute need or intense joy.
The Christian Science and New Thought views share commonalities with the mystical tradition—but only up to a point. While Christian Science specifically denies the reality of illness, it also promises a change in condition from illness; or, as Christian Scientists put it, a revelation of truth. Christian Science testifies that if you realize higher truth, in understanding the absolute permeation of all things by the beneficence of God, you will experience that goodness as freedom and true healing. In Christian Science this often involves sickness yielding to health; in New Thought it typically means poverty transforming to plenty. This change in outer circumstance is the central promise of the psycho-metaphysical philosophies. It is what distinguishes them from mysticism, Transcendentalism, and various strands of existential or meaning-based psycholo
gy.*1 The traditional mystical philosophies recognize the problem of illusion, but they also recognize the realness of suffering and evil—and they offer the same corrective: A higher or inner perspective that can dispel our conditioned ideas of separateness between the individual and the whole, and, ultimately, between deprivation and satisfaction.
Many acolytes of New Thought and other spiritual-therapeutic therapies would rush to signal their agreement with the mystical point of view. But do they really agree? They teach that evil is an illusion, but they nonetheless seek a measurable change in outer conditions. To call suffering an illusion, yet also demand that it bend to desired change, signals a core inconsistency in the mind-power perspective. Rather than seeing all of worldly clamor as an illusion, New Thought defines whatever is discomforting as illusory and its opposite as a reflection of higher truth. Hence, New Thought and the mind-power philosophies seek to rise above the world and consume its bounty at the same time. In a biting critique, historian Freeman Champney called New Thought a rationale of “transcend your cake and eat it too.”
Matters get more troublesome when New Thought tries to explain chronic tragedies or catastrophes. In the twentieth century, some New Thought voices attempted to explain calamity by appending ideas of karma onto the positive-thinking philosophy. Past-life sins, in this view, could explain why a person, or millions of people, experience painful lives or violent deaths. Such reasoning appeared in the late 1950s in the work of a widely read metaphysical writer, Gina Cerminara. Cerminara had previously done a great deal to popularize the work of the medical clairvoyant and psychic Edgar Cayce in her 1950 book, Many Mansions. In a later book, The World Within, Cerminara attempted to bring a karmic perspective to global suffering. “Present-day Negroes,” she suggested in 1957, might understand the roots of their racial oppression if they
can project themselves back into the past and in imagination see themselves to be brutal English slavetraders, arrogant Virginia slaveholders, or conscienceless Alabama auctioneers, smugly assured of their white supremacy—if they can make this imaginative leap, their own present situation may seem far more intelligible and far more bearable.
Her advice continued:
Present-day Jews who feel that they are the victims of unjust prejudice should reflect that a long racial history of regarding themselves as a “chosen people,” and of practicing racial exclusiveness and pride, cannot but lead to a situation where they themselves will be excluded.
Such arguments collapse under any degree of scrutiny. Spiritual insight arrives through self-observation—not in analyzing, or justifying, the suffering experienced by others. To judge others is to work without any self-verification, which is the one pragmatic tool of the spiritual search. The private person who can maturely and persuasively claim self-responsibility for his own suffering, or who can endure it as an inner obligation, shines a light for others. The person who justifies someone else’s suffering, in this case through collective fault, only casts a stone.
In a sense, all of this ethical difficulty arises from the mind-power movement’s tendency to see reality as subject to a single law—namely, the Law of Attraction, with its absolute powers of cause and effect.
Unlike the Transcendentalists, who studied the cycles of nature, the teachers of New Thought made no allowance for the inevitability of night following day. They made no room for the balance of life and death, illness and health that Emerson depicted in his essays, which many New Thoughters called their inspiration. (In actuality, references to Emerson did not appear in New Thought literature until the late 1880s.) Diverging from Transcendentalism, New Thought viewed life as subject to a single principle and ignored the prospect of multiple laws and forces. This limited New Thought’s ability to respond to life’s tragedies, complications, and reversals.
New Thought’s incomplete perspective can be traced back to a theological error made at its founding. To unearth this error may point the way toward fixing it—and expanding the positive-thinking movement’s capacity to address all aspects of the human experience.
Rule One
When early New-Thoughters embraced the principle of the Law of Attraction, they gave the mind-power culture its best-known phrase and most enduring concept. As noted earlier, the Law of Attraction began with medium Andrew Jackson Davis, who in 1855 used it to describe correspondences between the earth and the spirit world. In 1892 the term got remade in the work of journalist Prentice Mulford as a mental law of like attracts like. Generations later this principle reemerged as the core concept of New Age spirituality, echoed in the oft-heard phrase: There are no accidents. The concept of “no accidents” holds that everything in life is purposeful, advancing, and reflective of an individual’s needs.
In many ways, New Age spirituality is an update of New Thought. Throughout New Age culture—and especially within the popular literature of channeled spirituality—the most common message is of the mind’s ability to shape and attract circumstance. In this view, all events are meaningful and arise from the inner requirements of the individual, whether for growth, learning, or fulfillment. Hence, the Law of Attraction has linked the culture of New Thought and New Age, from the nineteenth century to the current day.
But where did this “no accidents” idea come from?
The conviction that thought is an all-encompassing force, one that supersedes happenstance or randomness, got launched in the final book of Warren Felt Evans. It was a work called Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics, which the mental-healer published in 1886. By that point, Evans was the preeminent figure in the mind-power culture. He incorporated a wide array of sources into its theology, ranging from Swedenborg to Buddhism to the occult ideas of Theosophy, thus creating the spiritual openness for which New Thought became known.
In his final book, Evans declared: “In case of accidents, or chance occurrences, there is always the relation of cause and effect, for it is inconceivable that a thing should occur without a cause, and all causes are mental.”
To support his point that “all causes are mental,” Evans drew upon a book that also happened to be Swedenborg’s final work, The True Christian Religion, which the seer published in 1771.*2 Evans enlisted the philosophical muscle of the Swedish mystic to validate his observation, quoting Swedenborg this way: “There is not anything in the mind, to which something in the body does not correspond; and this which corresponds may be called the embodying of that.” Evans took this to mean that illness, or any condition in the world, stems from “the principle of thought.”
But Evans did not properly capture, or contextualize, Swedenborg’s full statement. The seer’s complete sentence was of a different tenor (and far more discursive) than what Evans used. It went this way:
There is not anything in the mind, to which something in the body does not correspond; and this, which corresponds, may be called the embodying of that; wherefore charity and faith, whilst they are only in the mind, are not incorporated in man, and then they may be likened to an aërial man, who is called a spectre, such as Fame was painted by the ancients, with a laurel around the head, and a cornucopia in the hand.
What Swedenborg is saying is: Ethical thoughts without corresponding action make man’s life a charade. The section of Swedenborg’s book in which this passage appears makes no mention of bodily health or accidents; it deals specifically with questions of “Charity and Faith,” and the need to act on one’s highest ideals. “That Charity and Faith are only mental and perishable Things,” Swedenborg wrote, “unless, when it can be done, they are determined to Works, and coëxist in them.”
Swedenborg believed in correspondences between events on earth and events in the heavens; he likewise believed the mind, when properly used, possessed a profound creative faculty, which could place a person in touch with higher energies. But he never made a claim like the one that Evans describes, in which all events, tragic or cheerful, emanate from the mind alone.
Regardless, the metaphysical journalist Prenti
ce Mulford wasted no time seizing upon this idea, and in the same year as Evans’s book he wrote: “Success in any business or undertaking comes through the working of a law. It never comes by chance: in the operations of nature’s laws, there is no such thing as chance or accident.”
And there it was: There is no such thing as chance or accident. It was the premise of the Law of Attraction, a term Mulford resurrected a few years later, as well as the future credo of the New Age: There are no accidents. This perspective was rooted in Evans’s misinterpretation of Swedenborg, and then got memorably reworked by the journalist Mulford.
The Law of Attraction ultimately burdened New Thought with a principle that was difficult to defend, and one that was never really constructed, in its foundational sources, to function as an overarching rule of life. The founders of New Thought evidently did not pause over Evans to ask: Isn’t it possible that humanity exists under multiple laws and demands, including accidents? And that our lives may serve many imperatives, some of them inscrutable and even painful? Don’t we, like all creatures, exist to fertilize, feed, and facilitate an unimaginably vast scale of creation, on which we have little perspective?
New Thought considered no such limits on the mind of man. The Idealist philosophers had long acknowledged the problem of the mind’s limits, and they noted that the mind, when searching and conceiving, was finally limited to experiencing itself—that is, the mind’s filtered view of reality rather than the ultimate nature of things. The influential twentieth-century spiritual philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff also acknowledged this problem, though in a different way. Gurdjieff saw man as capable of experiencing higher energies, but also as a being situated on a relatively low rung in the scale of creation, with a great chain of existence stretching above him in the cosmos, which man’s thoughts and prayers could not reach.
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