One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  New Thought’s pioneers never pondered the potential limitation, or disadvantages, of man’s place in creation. The British judge Thomas Troward, who formed a key influence on Ernest Holmes, surmised in a series of 1904 lectures that man was the pinnacle of evolutionary creation. As such, Troward reasoned, man possessed access to the “ultimate principle of intelligence,” with which he served as a cocreator. The flaw in Troward’s approach is that he did not question man’s apex; he did not consider that a ladder of creation may extend far beyond man in an unimaginable cosmic scheme in which man plays no part. Troward and his closest followers did not consider the possibility that man possesses limited perspective, and is a being whose existence may be relative to some higher intelligence just as a plant is relative to man. There is no reason to believe that man shares in an ultimate intelligence. Man is neither all-seeing nor all-knowing; and his creative faculties, whatever their nature, cannot surpass his point of perspective.

  Emerson actually sought to deal with this problem. He took account of both aspects of human existence—man’s great potential and unthinkable smallness—in his 1860 essay, “Fate.” Making the kind of pronouncement that later was selectively quoted by mind-power acolytes, Emerson wrote, “But the soul contains the event that shall befall it; for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts, and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.” Yet Emerson also insisted that man’s creative faculties are not all that he lives under. He added that there existed just “one key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition.” And that was to acknowledge that man exists under both self-direction and nature’s will. And the will of nature contains purposes we cannot know, but can only bow to, and thus take our place in creation. “So when a man is victim of his fate,” Emerson continued, “… he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the daemon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain.”

  Thinking Big

  When confronted with questions of evil and suffering, New Thought, unable to fully account for tragedy and limitation in a self-created world, tended to slip into circular reasoning or contradiction. New Thought’s popular minister and writer Joseph Murphy tried to confront the problem of suffering in his 1971 book Psychic Perception.

  Murphy, in a similar vein to U. S. Andersen, described man as subject to the thoughts of a “world mind” or “race mind,” which contained the substance of every thought—good or ill, nourishing or punishing—that every soul had ever conceived. Hence, an infant born ill could be a victim of this “world mind.” To assume, as Murphy does, that every thought has a potential ripple effect—so that a person can be affected by something thought centuries earlier—places us at the mercy of a near-infinitude of influences and outcomes. This amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of randomness or accident, the very thing that Warren Felt Evans said didn’t exist.

  By the early twenty-first century, this hopeful, innovative movement of New Thought, which posited man as a being of ultimate self-destiny, seemed incapable of accounting for man in his varied roles and predicaments. In 2007, The Secret’s creator, Rhonda Byrne, who was the preeminent New Thought voice of the early twenty-first century, replied to a reporter’s question about what caused the Holocaust by saying, “The law of attraction is absolute.” Byrne continued: “In a large-scale tragedy, like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, etc., we see that the law of attraction responds to people being at the wrong place at the wrong time because their dominant thoughts were on the same frequency of such events.”

  When facing ultimate moral questions, Byrne, like Cerminara more than a generation earlier, spoke of the experience of others, describing events that she had never personally encountered or reckoned with. Opinions, like philosophies, demand verification, either by logic or lived experience. Byrne’s logic was akin to that of a person visiting a neighbor’s house, whistling for a dog, receiving no response, and concluding that the neighbor has no dog. She took no account of possibilities outside of her purview.

  “A Pathless Land”

  This question of personal verification highlights one further challenge to New Thought. As noted earlier, the positive-thinking approach seeks measurable outcomes—in effect, the individual is promised, if I think correctly I will escape, recover, receive, and so on. This perspective can ultimately reduce the human search to desire-attainment. This is not to say that desires are wrong. Indeed, an individual’s desires may point to profound and necessary things at certain stages of life.

  But seeing a Law of Attraction as the governing principle of existence is potentially damaging because it limits self-discovery to what I might generally think my needs are, not what they may be in the light of the deepened question that mysticism encourages. The search for awareness is at risk when we are told precisely what our deliverance is supposed to look like: the fulfillment of what we want.

  The twentieth-century spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti observed: “Truth is a pathless land.” When the path is mapped, usually based upon our current mind’s-eye image of where we want to be, the inner search and the unknown realizations that it may bring are proscribed. A narrowly conceived New Thought can slam closed the doors of perception that it was once envisioned to open.

  The Beauty of the Good

  Given the extent of New Thought’s flaws, can anything of lasting value be attributed to this homegrown metaphysics, this audacious attempt by ordinary people to chart their own course to the Divine? The answer is yes. And here, we return to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although he despised the pursuit of easy success and the shallowness of self-adulation, Emerson acknowledged—quite decisively—that life favors enthusiasm. He wrote in his essay “Success”:

  Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and glooms in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and a disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

  When bound up in the expectancy of magical results, enthusiasm can degenerate into blindness and single-mindedness. It can inculcate a person to failure or foolishness. It has no ethical dimension. But what sensitive person has not felt and observed the impact of an attitude? Who could deny that thoughts of confident expectancy, or gloomy resignation, seem to influence the events of our lives? When not wildly overstated, the claims of New Thought possess enough commonsense appeal and anecdotal evidence to attract any earnest listener. And there is more to it than that.

  Carl Jung noted the role that enthusiasm can play in a thought system. Jung studied a series of experiments conducted by Duke University research psychologist J. B. Rhine in the 1930s to test for clairvoyant perception. Rhine’s subjects consistently, and inexplicably, scored higher “hits” on a deck of cards early in sessions when excitement and expectancy ran high. As time passed, accurate hits would taper off, though they could spike again if the subject’s interest was newly aroused. Thus, reasoned Jung:

  Lack of interest and boredom are negative factors; enthusiasm, positive expectation, hope, and belief in the possibility of ESP make for good results and seem to be the real conditions which determine whether there are going to be any results at all.

  Jung’s observations amount to more than they first appear. It is not always easy for twenty-first-century readers to appreciate the stature in which experimental psychologist Rhine and his ESP tests were once held. For about a generation, from the early 1930s through the 1960s, Rhine was one of the most talked about scientists in America, a subject of public fascination and scholarly respect. Years of mostly polemical and tautological criticism have quieted the renown once associated with his name. For intrepid readers, however, Rhine’s 1934 monograph, Extra-Sensory Perception, will still prove an extraordinary journey into the statistical findings he amassed in his ESP experiments with so-called Zener cards. Zener cards are a deck of twe
nty-five cards with five symbolic images (such as a circle, a cross, squiggly lines), which Rhine employed in tens of thousands of trials to track the persistence of higher-than-average hits among various subjects. Rhine’s statistics and the conditions of his testing have been subjected to probably more scrutiny than any other lab-based psychological study; they have never been overturned. But for the persistent controversy surrounding ESP in general, the Rhine experiments demonstrated, beyond evidentiary doubt, the occurrence of some kind of anomalous transfer of information in a laboratory setting. If ESP, or trans-physical data conveyance of some kind, does not exist, then the clinical model on which we base our data testing is itself flawed in some not yet understood way.

  Rhine was so dedicated to eschewing any kind of sensationalism that he hesitated to draw conclusions from his own studies. In the British appendix to his classic 1934 work, Rhine, in the kind of quietly monumental communication that marked his style, did briefly remark on the effects of enthusiasm among subjects in his ESP lab:

  Since my greatest interest is in stimulating others to repeat some of these experiments, I should like to mention here what has seemed to me to be the most important condition for ESP. This is a spontaneity of interest in doing it. The fresh interest in the act itself, like that of a child in playing a new game, seems to me the most favorable circumstance. Add now … the freedom from distraction, the absence of disturbing skepticism, the feeling of confidence or, at least, of some hope, and I think many good subjects can be found in any community or circle.

  In effect, not only was the researcher commenting on advantageous circumstances for the occurrence of ESP, but his remarks amounted to a capsule playbook in the circumstances that cultivate any human achievement.

  Rhine and Jung made points that could aptly be applied to religious experience, as well. How often do people find the household faith of their childhood a bore, seeming to hold no mystery or promise? By comparison, other belief systems can appear electrifyingly fresh and portentous. Because of its promise of concrete results, New Thought and its offshoots can seem veritably magical to the newcomer. Such expectations are a precondition for producing objective changes in a person’s outer life, at least temporarily.

  Just Think About It

  The methods of positive thinking can arouse hope because they are so enticingly simple. The key to New Thought, as it has been restated for decades, is that a person must “think from the end”—that is, think as if the goal he desires has already come to pass. Imagine how it would it feel, New Thought counsels, if you already possessed the job, mate, or healthiness that you crave. But here the movement’s methods hit a peculiar bump.

  Permeating the space in between the lines of New Thought doctrine was the assumption that an individual could enter into a feeling or emotive state more or less at will—and that the aggrieved or anxious individual could “change his thinking,” in New Thought terms, and “change his life.” In such instances New-Thoughters seemed to conflate thoughts with emotions. The failure to see that thoughts and emotions operate on different lines, and often in a fashion that is unnervingly ruptured from each other, is a blind spot found not only in New Thought but in many psychological traditions. And if a person comes to believe that he can think his way in or out of a feeling state, further difficulties can ensue. C. S. Lewis’s character Screwtape put it this way:

  Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by action of their own wills.… Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.

  A British Methodist minister named Leslie D. Weatherhead looked for a way around this problem. Weatherhead was active in the Oxford Group in the 1930s, and he wrote a series of penetrating psychological and spiritual works. He had a particular interest in using suggestions or affirmations to improve a person’s sense of self-worth and to puncture limiting beliefs. In essence, Weatherhead was attempting to update the work of French therapist Emile Coué.

  The minister understood that affirmations—such as “I am confident and poised”—could not penetrate the “critical apparatus” of the human mind, which he compared to “a policeman on traffic duty.” Other physicians and therapists similarly noted the problem of affirmations lacking emotional persuasiveness. Some therapists insisted that affirmations had to be credible and achievable to get through to the subject; no reasonable person would believe exaggerated self-claims, a point that Coué had also made. While Weatherhead agreed with these critiques, he believed that the rational “traffic cop” could be eluded by two practices. The first was the act of repetition: “A policeman on duty who refuses, say, a cyclist, the first time, might ultimately let him into the town if he presented himself again and again,” he wrote in 1951. Continuing the metaphor, Weatherhead took things a step further:

  I can imagine that a cyclist approaching a town might more easily elude the vigilance of a policeman if the attempt to do so were made in the half-light of early dawn or the dusk of evening. Here also the parable illumines a truth. The early morning, when we waken, and the evening, just as we drop off to sleep, are the best times for suggestions to be made to the mind.

  As Weatherhead saw it, the hypnagogic state—that is, the drowsy state between wakefulness and sleep, generally experienced when a person is drifting off in the evening or coming to in the morning—is a period of unique psychological flexibility, when ordinary barriers are down. This is probably why people suffering from depression or anxiety report the early waking hours as the most difficult time of day—the rational defenses are slackened. If the individual could use the gentlest efforts to repeat affirmations, without rousing himself fully to a waking state, the new ideas could penetrate, Weatherhead reasoned.

  Neville Goddard made a similar point about the malleability of the hypnagogic mind. So did the twentieth-century psychical researcher and scientist Charles Honorton, who used this observation as a basis for testing the potential for telepathy between individuals. Honorton believed that a hypnagogic state was, in effect, “prime time” for the reception of extrasensory communication.

  In the early 1970s, Honorton and his collaborators embarked on a long-running series of psi experiments, known as the ganzfeld experiments (German for “whole field”). These trials were designed to induce a hypnagogic state in a “receiver.” The subject was placed, seated or reclining, in a soft-lit or darkened room and was fitted with eye covers and earphones, to create a state of comfortable sensory deprivation or low-level stimulation (such as with a “white noise” machine). Seated in another room, a “sender” would attempt to telepathically convey an image to the receiver. After the sending period ended, the receiver was asked to select the correct image among four—three images were decoys, establishing a chance hit-rate of 25 percent. Experimenters found that receivers consistently made higher-than-chance selections of the correct “sent” image. Honorton collaborated with avowed skeptic and research psychologist Ray Hyman in reviewing the data from a wide range of ganzfeld experiments. The psychical researcher and the skeptic jointly wrote: “We agree that there is an overall significant effect in this data base that cannot be reasonably explained by selective reporting or multiple analysis.” Honorton added, “Moreover, we agree that the significant outcomes have been produced by a number of different investigators.”

  Hyman insisted that none of this was proof of psi, though he later acknowledged that “contemporary ganzfeld experiments display methodological and statistical sophistication well above previous parapsychological research. Despite better controls and careful use of statistical inference, the investigators seem to be getting significant results that do not appear to derive from the more obvious flaws of previous research.”

  My references here do not rest upon sufficiently acknowledged modes of research to settle any arguments about the potentialities of the mind
. But they suggest the unique suppleness and flexibility of the mind in the hypnagogic state. It is a period of distinct mental openness, and it presents the possibility for self-conditioning, and perhaps much more. The ganzfeld trials point to the continued validity of psi experiments, which today encompass a much wider range of procedures and methodologies. Such work, however, is historically funded at very low levels, making study a continual challenge

  We will return to clinical studies of the mind and its abilities. But to get a more intimate look at the occurrence of exceptional mental states, and their potential, requires considering an individual’s most private experiences, to which we now turn.

  The Bucket List

  In the first decade of this century, I spent several years within a spiritual group dedicated to the ideas of Russian philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. I was under the guidance of a remarkable and very gifted teacher—a gruff, lovable man of razor-sharp intellect. He demanded the most from everyone around him, though no one so much as himself. He used to delight in giving my colleagues and me “impossible” tasks to perform. At every turn we found our mettle tested and our limits stretched.

  One time in preparation for a winter camping trip, he instructed me to purchase some plastic buckets, for a choice purpose: to serve as chamber pots for those female campers who didn’t want to venture outside of their tents into the icy woods at night. The buckets, he directed me, with glee, must be heart-shaped and colored pink. Or, as a second-best option, he allowed, they could be red. I began searching—visiting hardware and bed-bath stores in New York City. No pink buckets could be found, and certainly no heart-shaped ones. I made calls, and checked still more stores. Aside from receiving some odd looks, I turned up nothing. I fell back on looking for red plastic buckets, of an ordinary shape—not too difficult a task, it seemed. But, once more, in the commercial capital of the nation, no one seemed to have red plastic buckets for sale. By this point my wife was losing patience with me. Why, she wondered, didn’t I show the same zeal for ordinary household projects as I did for this task? After more days of searching, it was final: I could find no pink, no red, and certainly no heart-shaped buckets. I would have to call up my teacher and say, “I tried, but I failed.”