Authors: Mitch Horowitz
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 meaning 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.
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.
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.
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: