Authors: Mitch Horowitz
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.
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 Prentice 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.
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.”
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.