One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Another spiritual thinker who promulgated this view was Vernon Howard. As noted earlier, Howard’s career as a spiritual teacher and writer began loosely in the New Thought tradition. But the books he wrote in his spiritual maturity, from the mid-1960s until his death in 1992, represented works of extraordinary independence and insight. While unknown within most circles of psychology and spirituality, Howard provided actual, concrete methods for self-development, areas where writers like Liebman and Frankl were weaker.

  It could be objected that the Meaning-Based School is not a mind-power or positive-thinking philosophy at all. Yet this outlook positioned the agency of the mind as a misunderstood and extremely potent instrument, and through the mind’s proper use and powers of perception a person’s way of life could be radically altered, even if outer circumstances remained static. This is probably the most morally and spiritually convincing philosophy to emerge from the mind-power tradition.

  “Positive-Thinking B.S.”

  For all these different approaches, and for all of their influence across varying fields, the positive-thinking philosophy is taken seriously almost nowhere in mainstream culture today. Even some of the most famous exponents of motivational thought seem to flee from the association. Without irony, life coach Anthony Robbins insisted on television in 2010 that his motivational advice wasn’t “positive-thinking B.S.”

  The poor reputation of positive thinking and New Thought is not necessarily due to its perceived lapses in realism. Every religious movement begins with supernatural claims, and if any faith were evaluated solely in terms of demonstrable, quantifiable facts, none would pass. Movements of a similar vintage to New Thought, such as Mormonism and Seventh-day Adventism, have gained acceptance.

  Rather, New Thought’s historical dilemma, as previously explored, is its insistence on embracing a single, all-encompassing theory of life, which is to say, the Law of Attraction. This is what keeps New Thought’s claims from attaining greater acknowledgment, and perpetuates its inability to come to terms with evil and other crises. The idea of a mental super-law binds New Thought to a paradigm of extremist self-responsibility, which cannot be defended to its limits.

  While the mind does possess influences that are not yet fully understood, and that are palpably felt by many people, the wish to depict the universe as the ultimate result of mentality contradicts our overwhelming experience of living under mechanics, chance, and physical limitations. As the body of Christ was pierced on the cross, there is no spiritual, ethical, or physical imperative, in religious literature or in the experience of daily existence, to suggest that even the self-aware person, mystic, or saint is immune from such effects.

  Until this fatal mistake—this reliance on a single metaphysical law of cause and effect—is corrected, the positive-thinking movement and its offshoots will continue to seem theologically and ethically unserious. While its literature may survive, and even thrive, there are already signs that the movement is unable to maintain a flourishing and long-term congregational culture.

  The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed shrinking congregations within Christian Science, as well as stagnant or declining attendance at most New Thought churches. While Mary Baker Eddy prohibited the release of membership numbers, it is possible today to enter a beautifully maintained Christian Science church on a Sunday morning, or during a weekday service, and find just a handful of congregants. I’ve personally been to a Sunday service in a magnificent domed church on New York’s Park Avenue and encountered no more than twenty worshippers, several of them elderly. At a weekday service in a cavernous, cathedral-sized church in midtown Manhattan—this being lunchtime and, hence, a naturally smaller gathering—I counted no more than six people in the pews. These numbers may not typify what is found at a major Boston or California congregation, but they were at two of New York City’s most visible Christian Science churches.

  This trend can also be seen in the institutional New Thought world. At the time of Ernest Holmes’s death in 1960, formal membership in his Science of Mind churches stood at more than 100,000. A 2001 study found about 55,000 active congregants within the two main Holmes ministries. (Notably, though, Holmes’s magazine, Science of Mind, continued to be read beyond the membership base, at a circulation of about 80,000.) This drop in institutional membership appeared in the total number of churches, as well. A 1991 study found about 175 active churches within the United Church of Religious Science (UCRS), the larger of the two ministries based in Holmes’s ideas. Twenty years later, my best estimate of the number of congregations with regular services and facility space, based on published and online directories, showed about 155 active UCRS churches in the United States and Canada.*3 This decline occurred even as The Secret and its many offshoots exploded.

  Modern Mental Healing

  But what if New Thought can break away from this one-law-above-all approach? If affirmative thought can be understood as one ray of light, one vital method and outlook, within life’s greatly deep forest of forces and causes, the positive-thinking paradigm may experience a new form of relevance and reinvention in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, the philosophy’s core ideas are already echoed within many precincts of contemporary science and medicine.

  In 2007, nearly half of medical doctors polled in a Chicago survey revealed that they routinely and knowingly prescribed medications to their patients that they considered ineffective, or in dosages that were too low to produce any real effect. Their aim was to create a placebo response. For more than fifty years, double-blind studies have shown consistent results from the placebo response. Today, a steady spike of placebo responses in control groups perplexes researchers for pharmaceutical companies. In tests of new antidepressants, for example, the placebo effect is often found to match or exceed the efficacy of trial medications. The placebo effect has also been repeatedly prevalent in recent studies of medications for pain relief, anxiety, sexual dysfunction, and the tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease.

  The placebo response seems to operate on factors including positive anticipation, empathy of the caregiver, and support-group dynamics, such as experiencing and discussing the positive benefits of a treatment with fellow patients. These traits mirror the methods of early mental healing and New Thought. Researchers who are studying the mechanics of the placebo response obviously share none of the spiritual assumptions of the mental-healing traditions; yet the placebo phenomenon is, in effect, the mind-cure of our era.

  Some medical authorities might privately nod in sympathy with the defense of Mesmer by Charles d’Eslon, the late-eighteenth-century Paris physician: “It may indeed be entirely imagination. And if it is? Then imagination is a force as potent as it is little understood. Let us work with this mysterious imagination, let us use it to cure, let us learn more about it.” Or, as it was put to Benjamin Franklin’s committee by a patient of Mesmer’s: “If it is to an illusion that I owe the health which I believe that I enjoy, I humbly beg the scholars who are seeing so clearly, not to destroy it; let them enlighten the universe, but let them leave me to my error; and let them allow to my simplicity, to my weakness, and to my ignorance, the use of an invisible force, which does not exist, but which heals me.”

  Many physicians counter that misleading a patient, as in the Chicago study, has no place in ethical medicine. They make a vital point. But through further study, physicians and researchers may discover new ways to transparently replicate the settings and circumstances that produce the placebo response. A 2010 study by Ted J. Kaptchuk and fellow researchers at Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter produced remarkable findings in this very area: Patients reported relief even when they knew they were receiving a placebo pill. Researchers informed eighty sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome that some would be receiving a placebo while others would be in a no-treatment control group. Fifty-nine percent of sufferers who took the “honest placebo” reported “adequate relief” (compared to
35 percent in the control group). It marks one of the first pieces of modern clinical data that reveals the powers of the mind to give physical relief even when a “sugar pill” is transparently administered.

  Why do people respond to a substance they know is inert? It may be that these results reflect the public’s general acceptance and acknowledgment of a placebo response. People generally believe in the efficacy of placebos, even when transparently administered. They have often heard or read about them in popular sources, such as Reader’s Digest. They already possess confidence that a placebo can work. What seems to be required in order to harness that faith is a setting in which this perspective is validated and formalized—which naturally arises from the environs of a formal clinical study, where patients are led to trust that they are involved in something therapeutically sound, responsibly administered, and proffered in an atmosphere of hopeful expectancy.

  In his Duke University experiments of the 1930s, psychical researcher J. B. Rhine noted the same dynamic: A supportive, validating atmosphere consistently appeared to “spike” responses above chance in his card-guessing experiments. A similar environment prevails in the structure of twelve-step meetings, where addicts often credit their success to peer support and empathy.

  A related area for additional study is hospital care. For decades, patients have complained about the serious discomfort and demoralizing qualities of hospital settings. Further research may uncover a relationship between recovery and the nature of hospital surroundings—specifically, whether the rate and pace of wellness may improve according to a patient’s privacy, physical comfort, mood, and rapport with caregivers.

  Clinicians have found that treating patients as mature, capable partners, and sharing vital information with them, can make a difference in their recovery from functional diseases such as migraines, stomach and bowel disorders, and chronic back pain. Physician John Sarno called it “knowledge therapy.” A professor of clinical rehabilitation medicine at NYU School of Medicine, Sarno has treated thousands of patients for neck, back, or shoulder pain—and he found that the vast majority of such patients had also previously experienced persistent headaches, heartburn, and stomach disorders. Yet few of them showed any structural abnormalities. Sarno hypothesized that their maladies were related to stress and tension. He found that if back pain sufferers understood how muscular tension arose from stressful emotive states, they could experience relief. The very act of sharing this information, in a constructive and accurate manner, appeared to have a therapeutic benefit. Sarno wrote in his book Mind Over Back Pain:

  What I discovered was that faith or belief in a concept could have a powerful, permanent therapeutic effect if it was based on accurate information. When patients were taught the facts of tension mitosis syndrome [his term for tension-based back pain] they were able to develop confidence in the diagnosis; it made sense to them; they believed it at a conscious level. In a sense, I made my patients partners in the diagnostic process. “This is how it works,” I said. “Do you agree?” I found that patients who were able to say “yes” to that question got better—without a recurrence of their pain.

  Frontiers of the Mind

  The mind-power thesis takes on a different type of relevance within the most extraordinary and contentious field of physics: quantum mechanics. Contemporary physics journals discuss what is called the “quantum measurement problem.” Many people have heard of some version of it. In essence, more than eighty years of laboratory experiments show that atomic-scale particles appear in a given place only when a measurement is made.

  Astonishing as it sounds—and physicists themselves have debated the data for generations—quantum theory holds that no measurement means no precise and localized object, at least on the atomic scale. Put differently, a subatomic particle literally occupies an infinite number of places (a state called “superposition”) until observation manifests it in one place. In quantum mechanics, a decision to look or not look actually determines what will be there. In this sense, an observer’s consciousness determines objective reality on a subatomic level. Some physicists would dispute that characterization. Critics sometimes argue that certain particles are too small to measure; hence any attempt at measurement inevitably affects what is seen. But there exists a whole class of “interaction-free measurement” quantum experiments that don’t involve detectors at all. Such experiments have repeatedly shown that a subatomic object literally exists in more than one place at once until a measurement determines its final resting place.

  How is this actually provable? In the parlance of quantum physics, an atomic-scale particle is said to exist in a wave-state, which means that the location of the particle in space-time is known only probabilistically; it has no properties in this state, just potentialities. When particles or waves—typically in the form of a beam of photons or electrons—are directed or aimed at a target system, such as a double-slit, scientists have found that their pattern or path will actually change, or “collapse,” depending upon the presence or measurement choices of an observer. Hence, a wave pattern will shift, or collapse, into a particle pattern. A ray of light, for example, will display the properties either of a wave or of distinct particles, depending upon the activity of the observer. It is not light alone that behaves this way. Classical quantum experiments show that if you project an atom at a pair of boxes, interference patterns prove that the atom was at one point in both boxes. The particle existed as a wave, and became localized in one box only after someone looked. In this sense, an atom can be observed shifting from a potential to an actual thing. The outcome depends on whether someone is watching. Contrary to all reason, quantum theory holds that reality is a duality. Opposing outcomes simultaneously exist.

  The situation gets even stranger when dealing with the thought experiment known as “Schrodinger’s cat.” The twentieth-century physicist Erwin Schrodinger was frustrated with the evident absurdity of quantum theory, which showed objects simultaneously appearing in more than one place at a time. Such an outlook, he felt, violated all commonly observed physical laws. In 1935, Schrodinger sought to highlight this predicament through a purposely absurdist thought experiment, which he intended to force quantum physicists to follow their data to its ultimate degree. Schrodinger may have succeeded too well, as his model, rather than exposing quantum physics’ apparent impossibilities, became a rallying point for the field’s most audacious theorizing.

  Schrodinger reasoned that quantum data dictates that a sentient being, such as a cat, can be simultaneously alive and dead. A variant of the “Schrodinger’s cat” experiment could be put this way: Let’s say a cat is placed into one of a pair of boxes. Along with the cat is what Schrodinger called a “diabolical device.” The device, if exposed to an atom, releases a deadly poison. An observer then fires an atom at the boxes. The observer subsequently uses some form of measurement to check on which box the atom is in: the empty one, or the one with the cat and the poisoning device. When the observer goes to check, the wave function of the atom—i.e., the state in which it exists in both boxes—collapses into a particle function—i.e., the state in which it is localized to one box. Once the observer takes his measurement, convention says that the cat will be discovered to be dead or alive. But Schrodinger reasoned that quantum physics describes an outcome in which the cat is both dead and alive. This is because the atom, in its wave function, was, at one time, in either box, and either outcome is real.

  Of course, all lived experience tells us that if the atom went into the empty box, the cat is alive, and if it went into the box with the cat and the poisoning device, the cat is dead. But Schrodinger, aiming to highlight the frustrations of quantum theory, argued that if the observations of quantum mechanics experiments are right (and for decades they have not been in dispute), you would have to allow for each outcome.

  To take it even further, a cohort of quantum physicists in the 1950s theorized that if an observer waited some significant length of time, say, eight hours, before che
cking on the dead-alive cat, he would discover one cat that was dead for eight hours and another that was alive for eight hours (and now hungry). In this line of reasoning, conscious observation effectively manifested the localized atom, the dead cat, the living cat—and also manifested the past, i.e., created a history for both a dead cat and a living one. Both outcomes are true.

  Absurd? Impossible? Yes to that, say quantum physicists—but decades of quantum experiments make this model—in which a creature can be dead/alive—into an impossible reality: an unbelievable yet entirely tenable, even necessary, state of nature. Schrodinger’s thought experiment forced a consideration of the meaning of quantum mechanics (though not many physicists pay attention to the radical implications).

  It must be emphasized, of course, that classical quantum data is derived strictly from events on an atomic scale. We are only at the beginning of testing the “superposition” function in the everyday macroscopic world in which we live, where Newton’s laws still reign. Laws, however, demand consistency. So, why is there an apparent divide in our view of reality, in which one set of rules governs the events of the micro world and another set governs the macro world? It may be due to the limits of our observation in the macro world. Some twenty-first-century quantum physicists call this phenomenon “information leakage.” The theory of “information leakage” holds that the apparent impossibilities of quantum activity exist all around us. They govern reality. However, when we step away from whatever instrument we are using to measure micro particles, and begin looking at things in larger frames and forms, we see less and less of what is really going on. We experience a “leakage” of data. William James alluded to a similar dynamic in his 1902 Gifford Lectures: “We learn most about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true of religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact.”