This phone call was on my mind just before I embarked on an errand at a small neighborhood grocery store near my home on Manhattan’s East Side. I stood outside the store with my cell phone in my hand, but something told me: just wait, don’t make the call right now. I went inside the store and walked straight to the back, to the cold-foods section. And there, at the rear of this modest, around-the-corner store, stood a pile of fresh, shiny plastic buckets—not only pink but also heart-shaped. I couldn’t believe it. I stopped a stock boy and asked, “What color are those buckets?” Fixing me with the nut-of-the-day look, he replied: Pink. They had just arrived in, he said.
I cannot assert that my tireless search somehow manifested the yearned-for buckets. But nor can I call the situation ordinary. It’s the kind of incident that a person has to be involved in, with some skin in the game: a situation in which you endeavor past all conventional effort, to the point where giving up seems like the only reasonable option, and the experience of then suddenly accomplishing an aim, or in this case finding an unlikely item in the unlikeliest of places, carries an emotional charge that no actuarial table can fully capture.
Statistics are wonderful for measuring odds, but not for measuring the emotional gravity that one attaches to them. It can be argued that emotions are incidental to odds. But not entirely. An event is notable not solely for its odds (and these odds were slim) but for the quality of the event’s meaning given the expectations and needs of the individual. And at such times, an act of positive persistence seems to net a result that goes beyond ordinary cause and effect: something additional seems to occur. Exceptional commitment appears to summon an exceptional factor, neither fully expected nor describable.
It is also possible to observe a contrary case—in which panic, impatience, or anxiety conspires to overturn all reasonable, positive odds, and foments a negative outcome. I purposely used a simple example above not to highlight life’s most dramatic stakes but to illustrate something about the nature of an outlook within the confines of everyday life. But we can also consider graver circumstances, on which a person’s life depends.
“Bill Wanted It with His Whole Soul”
In 1934, Ebby Thacher introduced a hospitalized and desperate Bill Wilson to the principle that alcoholism required a spiritual solution. Bill was able to stay sober by embracing the ideas that Ebby brought to him, including principles from the Oxford Group, Carl Jung, and William James. Bill used these philosophies, and the experience of his own spiritual awakening, to lay the basis for Alcoholics Anonymous.
Yet, tragically, Ebby Thacher, the man who ignited Bill Wilson’s interest in spiritual self-help, soon relapsed into drunkenness. Ebby spent much of his remaining life in a battle with alcohol, often ill and destitute. When Ebby died in 1966, he was sober but living as a dependent at a recovery center in upstate New York. Bill regularly sent him checks to keep him going. Not that Bill’s legs were always strong. Although he remained sober until his death, Bill continually struggled with depression and chain-smoking. But he did attain his life’s goal. Until his death in 1971, he never drank again.
Why did one man remain sober and another fall down?
Bill’s wife, Lois, in a passage from her memoir, Lois Remembers, explained, in an understated manner, the difference she saw between the two men. In so doing, Lois also illuminated a mystery, maybe even the mystery, of human nature:
After those first two years … why did Ebby get drunk? It was he who gave Bill the philosophy that kept him sober. Why didn’t it keep Ebby sober? He was sincere, I’m sure. Perhaps it was a difference in the degree of wanting sobriety. Bill wanted it with his whole soul. Ebby may have wanted it simply to keep out of trouble.
Bill wanted it with his whole soul. Could that be the key? Within the parameters of physical possibilities, you receive what you “want with your whole soul”—whether inner truth, a personal accomplishment, relationships, whatever it is. Excluding some great countervailing force, and for either ill or good, the one thing that you want above all else is what you get.
In 1964, the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti conducted a series of dialogues with a group of young students in India. The teacher spoke of the pull of conformity and the need to develop a sense of inner freedom. A boy asked him: “How can we put into practice what you are telling us?” Krishnamurti replied that if we want something badly enough, we know exactly what to do. “When you meet a cobra on the road,” the teacher said, “you don’t ask ‘What am I to do?’ You understand very well the danger of a cobra and you stay away from it.” Krishnamurti noted:
You hear something which you think is right and you want to carry it out in your everyday life; so there is a gap between what you think and what you do, is there not? You think one thing, and you are doing something else. But you want to put into practice what you think, so there is this gap between action and thought; and then you ask how to bridge the gap, how to link your thinking to your action.
Now, when you want to do something very much, you do it, don’t you? When you want to go and play cricket, or do some other thing in which you are really interested, you find ways and means of doing it; you never ask how to put it into practice. You do it because you are eager, because your whole being, your mind and heart are in it.
Whether the answer to a personal crisis, the attainment of a desire, or the wish for some kind of inner awareness, the only aim that ever gets reached is the one that we want with everything in us. But what if someone doesn’t possess a single soul truth? This may be the meaning behind Revelation 3:16, which condemns those who are lukewarm: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spit thee out of my mouth.” The hesitators, the undecided, those who commit to no path—they receive nothing. Life permits us no halfway measures.
In that sense, too, the positive-thinking approach places a demand on us, one that we may think we’ve risen to but have never really tried. And that is: To come to terms with precisely what we want. When we organize our thoughts in a certain way—with a fearless maturity and honesty—we may be surprised to discover what our desires really are. A person who thinks of himself as “spiritual” may discover a deep wish for worldly attainment; someone who has labored to support the work of others, or of family members, may find that he has deeply unsettled yearnings of his own for self-expression; a person who is very public or extroverted may discover that he really wants to be alone.
This is where the list-building exercises from a book such as R. H. Jarrett’s It Works can yield surprising results. Taking a mature and sustained inventory of desires can open us up rather than limit us. It’s not enough to tell ourselves that we know what we want, but to really dwell on it in a concentrated way. Such an inquiry will almost always produce unexpected insights.
As the story of Bill Wilson and Ebby Thacher suggests, the true yearnings of our soul are not only the best predictor of where we’ll go in life, but the primary means of getting us there.
The Four Schools
People approach positive thinking because of an unmet need. They want to get somewhere in life; they’re looking to solve a problem or find personal peace. To meet a person’s most deeply felt wishes, the different groups and individuals that make up the positive-thinking movement variously rely on psychological techniques, metaphysical beliefs, behavioral conditioning, and sometimes on the cultivation of meaning and purpose.
To consider which of these approaches works best, and at what cost or benefit, it is helpful to break down and critique what I see as the four primary schools of positive thinking. They are:
1. The Magical Thinking or Divine Thought School
2. The Conditioning or Reprogramming School
3. The Conversion School
4. The Meaning-Based School
We will now evaluate each.
1. The Magical Thinking or Divine Thought School
This is the most widespread form of the mind-power philosophy, encompassing the outlook of figures s
uch as Norman Vincent Peale, Joseph Murphy, Ernest Holmes, and Wallace D. Wattles. It informs the outlook of The Secret’s Rhonda Byrne. The Magical Thinking perspective sees the individual as a kind of holy channel for a higher power. It could also be called the Law of Attraction School. It is the least “provable” approach, yet the most popular and enduring.
Each of the aforementioned thinkers professed a different version of the philosophy—Peale was a conservative Christian who used Scripture to support his ideas about “prayer power”; Murphy was a New Age mystic who told of an all-powerful subconscious mind that represented an inner God; Wattles, Holmes, and Byrne adhered to an occult science that considers man a transmitter of an infinite power, or a “thinking stuff,” as Wattles put it. Each denizen of this approach, whatever his or her individual wrinkle, sees the mind as a vessel and ignition engine constantly out-picturing all of our thoughts into reality. Seen from their perspective, the mind, with proper awareness, can function as a tool to dispatch every right desire.
This school’s ethical framework is poorly developed, though Peale and Holmes did hew to Scriptural ethics, and other practitioners spoke of karmic reciprocity. Ultimately, this approach amounts to an intensely personal theology. And as rationalist philosopher David Hume wrote of Christianity: “Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity.”
That said, the power of such faith in the life of an individual should not be discounted. Every religion has its allegories—whether it’s Moses parting the Red Sea or Muhammad ascending to heaven on a winged horse. Some believers see such things as literally true, but for many they are symbolic. The notion of an attitude as a literal force may be seen as the central allegory of the New Age.
“No scientist can prove that our thoughts create our reality,” life coach Anthony Robbins writes. “But it’s a useful lie. It’s an empowering belief. That’s why I choose to believe in it.”
I believe that no act of self-deception can be useful. But Robbins does get at a certain point: That faith in the force of one’s mind, whether definitively provable, can serve as a mechanism for a greater, and deeply affecting, psychological truth. This is explored directly below.
2. The Conditioning or Reprogramming School
This school represents the reconditioning approach of figures such as the Reverend Leslie Weatherhead, French psychologist Emile Coué, and an American cosmetic surgeon and motivational writer named Maxwell Maltz. It is worth noting the case of Maltz, whose 1960 book, Psycho-Cybernetics, was a motivational landmark.
As a reconstructive surgeon, Maltz discovered that many of his patients—from burn victims to people with deformities to nonimpaired individuals desirous of a change in appearance—did, in fact, experience improved self-esteem following surgery. But he also noticed that some manifestly did not. He questioned why. Maltz came to believe that man is a creature of conditioning. Maltz saw the mind as a homing device that seeks out and works to manifest the subconscious images that we constantly and unknowingly send it. The pictures of the mind cannot remake reality, he wrote, but they can lead to and shape outcomes in remarkable ways. Recondition the mind, Maltz reasoned, and you can objectively alter your life.
Maltz’s philosophy is a good overall summary of this school, which sees the mind as a complex, conditioned machine capable of reprogramming. In this view, conditioning is destiny. The Conditioning School prescribes affirmations, visualizations, behavior modeling, and guided meditations to reprogram our self-image, and thus improve our functioning. Many inquirers who attempt this approach are surprised by the rigor demanded from such programs—at least an hour a day of visualizations and guided meditations can be required in Maltz’s program, for example.
Significantly, the Conditioning School sought to jettison the religio-mystical qualities of the Magical Thinking School and reconfigure New Thought as a secular, success-based psychology that could be used for business, relationships, athletics, and general happiness. In so doing, it popularized the field of business motivation and laid some of the groundwork for the general field of positive psychology. This approach also foresaw recent advances in neuroscience, in particular the concept that the electro-neural responses of the brain are self-reprogrammable, in a process that has been called “neuroplasticity.” (Neuroplasticity is examined later in this chapter.)
The Conditioning School has a weakness similar to that of the Magical Thought School: it offers little in the way of ethical development; the aims of reconditioning are often careerist or success based. But as a motivational psychology it has undeniable validity.
3. The Conversion School
Philosopher William James and psychologist Carl Jung shared a key idea: that a conversion experience, or religious awakening, could objectively alter the circumstances of a person’s life.
This approach was echoed in the narratives of Helen Wilmans and Psychiana’s Frank B. Robinson, both of whom described their arrival at the positive-thinking philosophy through a kind of religious awakening. Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson described a similar experience—though with different ends—which led him to found a faith-based approach to addiction recovery. As related earlier, Jung told Wilson that his method for defeating alcoholism was spiritus contra spiritum—“Higher Spirit over lower spirits” (or alcohol). It was a confirmation of what Wilson and others had experienced, and this outlook is at the heart of Alcoholics Anonymous and all of the offshoot twelve-step programs.
The Conversion School sees man as a psycho-spiritual being who is capable of experiencing dramatic, visible life changes through a consuming experience of faith, which reorders a person’s priorities and perspective. “Conversion,” wrote Bill Wilson, “does alter motivation, and does semi-automatically enable a person to be and to do the formerly impossible.”
Conversion experiences, while obviously not limited to the positive-thinking movement, help explain New Thought’s ability to attract newcomers, some of whom earnestly testify to personal breakthroughs upon discovering its ideas. For individuals who have been raised within uninspiring or punitive religious backgrounds, the self-affirming beliefs of mind-power can generate tremendous enthusiasm and reorientation. The problem is in sustaining that experience. For individuals with a defined and well-ordered aim, such as staying sober, support groups such as AA do provide a sustaining structure. But most people discover positive-thinking philosophy through books, such as The Secret or The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. And their initial excitement—along with the self-validation they may experience—is not generally sustainable. Hence, positive-thinking bestsellers and seminars can attract droves of excited newcomers—but the movement is like a great revolving door through which the curious quickly come and go (another issue to which we will return).
The conversion effect seems most likely to succeed when: (a) it is combined with a support structure, such as AA meetings or church services, and (b) it focuses a person’s energies on solving a specific and well-defined problem. The closest thing to a blueprint for conversion is found in the first three of AA’s twelve steps, as noted in Chapter 5.
There are, of course, certain forms of conversion that go beyond the needs of addiction recovery or crisis intervention—and that lead to a sustainable and dramatically reorganized sense of existence and personal worth, to which we now turn.
4. The Meaning-Based School
This approach is found within the spiritual ideas of Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and the existential philosophy of psychologists such as Erich Fromm and Viktor E. Frankl. Frankl—writing after he survived Auschwitz—drew upon his wartime experiences to reach stark conclusions about the depths of human indecency, but also about the very real possibilities of an inner grace appearing from within a person even under the most horrific conditions.
Frankl and his contemporaries saw man as a being of great potential—but one who is trapped in a state of psychical slumber. In a crisis, Frankl reasoned, man can awaken to his higher self. The key is to locate some meanin
g in life, to find personal terms in which suffering or travails amount to some worth in the world; this revelation can dramatically alter a person’s viewpoint and provide new possibilities.
In his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl used the analogy of an exhausted mountaineer who finds renewed stamina upon spotting the mountain peak. Even though the climber has not reached the peak (and, in some cases, may never), its sight alone changes his outlook and freshens his energies. Whether the peak is self-understanding, self-rescue from destructive behavior, or the personal embodying of a higher principle—if it is morally persuasive and sustainable, the effect is the same: the individual, like the mountaineer, can experience extraordinary new perspective and will for living. The essential point of the Meaning-Based School is that a higher perspective can rescue a person from an existence of aimlessness and undefined anxiety.
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