Authors: Mitch Horowitz
Divert your mind from the discordant thought by thinking in other channels. Do not wait a moment, when the wrong thought gets into your mind, but turn to the magazine or the book, and read until your mind is filled with other thoughts. Or, take up some task that calls for all your energy, and forces you to concentrate your mental activities along other lines. It may be a little difficult at first, but I want to tell you, on the experience of multitudes of men and women [that this approach] if persevered in, will succeed in every life.
Randall’s technique and terminology foreshadowed the precise method of neuroplasticity as it relates to OCD.
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People fail to devise constructive new habits, Randall wrote, “because they are not persistent and patient enough in forming the new brain centres from whence must be permanently expressed the new life, that may in very truth be born in them …” And elsewhere: “Our thinking must be turned into other channels than those which we know will lead to the worrisome thoughts”—the remedy being to “substitute some new line of thought,” anything that gets us out of “narrow restricted grooves.” Randall’s insights
anticipated the language and findings of twenty-first-century neuroplasticity.
This brings us, finally, to a convergence among the questions and possibilities probed by the contemporary psychiatric researcher, the earnest New-Thoughter, and the broad-minded quantum theorist. If overstatement or conclusion-leaping can be avoided, the questions that surround today’s studies of physical reality and the uses of the mind can be understood as extraordinary and profoundly challenging—both to students of physics and metaphysics, and for the same reasons.
In 2009, I attended a presentation on the “quantum measurement problem” delivered by scientist Dean Radin before an audience of scientists, social thinkers, and scholars of religion. I asked Radin to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room: If observation and perspective alter material on a micro level, in the world of waves and particles, might that say something about the legitimacy of the New Thought or mind-power thesis? “It’s not complete bullshit,” Radin replied. “There may be an inkling of something to it.” Another physicist and longtime military researcher was also present. “As the resident skeptic,” he said, “I concur.”
Boston University geologist Robert M. Schoch has an expression: “Something only has to be a little bit true to change everything.” Is New Thought “a little bit true”? The experiences of the past 150 years suggest as much. Yes, positive thinking does work—but it works amid a variety of different forces: accidental, biological, natural, and psychological. We live under the accidents of fortune, illness, forces of nature, traumas of the past, and on the waves of relationships with others, who may possess conflicting needs and aims. These are lawful facts of life.
But the mind also wields a shade of influence
—it is an influence that we don’t fully understand, but one that is accorded steadily greater credibility by generations of study in medicine, psychology, biology, and the physical sciences. Historically,
the powers of attitude, observation, and outlook become ever greater-seeming, never more-proscribed.
In medicine, the positive-thinking movement, long before any other thought school, anticipated our still-expanding conception of how a patient’s mind can be used to manage illness and discomfort. In psychology, positive thinkers foresaw the potential for behavior modification, autosuggestion, hypnotherapy, and reconditioning as a means to relieving dysfunction. In the emergent field of neuroplasticity, in which thoughts are seen to alter aspects of brain biology, the protocols prescribed to patients echo methods that positive thinkers devised over a century ago. And, finally, before the foundations of quantum mechanics were laid in the early twentieth century, the positive-thinking movement struggled to express a ragged, rough-hewn instinct for one of the remarkable challenges being considered in some of today’s quantum physics labs: Namely, if the presence of an observer not only affects the thing being observed, but actually localizes an object or brings it to its resting place when an observation or measurement is made, then what is the nature of the mind and observation, and what is meant by creation itself?
On a personal scale, at those moments when the mind and emotions are at one—at such times it may be better to speak of a psyche than a mind—the experience of generations of self-aware individuals testifies that our focus adds
something extra
to our experience. This is not strictly a matter of rewiring the brain or making suggestions to the subconscious. “Psi studies,” Radin related to me, “go one step further and suggest that all this positive thinking also tweaks the world at large in small but measurable ways we still don’t understand.”
Returning to Krishnamurti’s dialogues with Indian youths, the spiritual teacher responded this way to a student who feared being thrown out of his home if he violated his father’s wishes and pursued an engineering career:
If you persist in wanting to be an engineer even though your father turns you out of the house, do you mean to say that
you won’t find ways and means to study engineering? You will beg, go to friends. Sir, life is very strange. The moment you are very clear about what you want to do, things happen. Life comes to your aid—a friend, a relation, a teacher, a grandmother, somebody helps you. But if you are afraid to try because your father may turn you out, then you are lost. Life never comes to the aid of those who merely yield to some demand out of fear. But if you say, “This is what I really want to do and I am going to pursue it,” then you will find that something miraculous takes place.
Yet the exertions of the psyche and the determinations of the soul cannot be seen in isolation from the forces around us. When we suffer—as we inevitably will, probably in a fifty-fifty mixture with our joys over the course of a lifetime—we can aspire not to glibly affirm away our suffering, which can lead to desperation and frustration, but rather to see ourselves as
thinkers
who have charge over a certain range of circumstances, which may variously loop and weave within and without our control. From such a state, we can face life finally and fully
as ourselves
, possessed of soul desires that will, if persisted in and within natural parameters, be reflected in the folds of our experience.
The act of questioning, probing, and affirming the fullness of our possibilities can avert the psychological pain of feeling that we haven’t faced life as we should, which is actually the chief cause of shame and anger. The wish to authentically search for the self and its true aims is, perhaps, the greatest form of mental affirmation to which a person can aspire,
and the one that brings the most help
.
The pioneers of the positive-thinking movement, acting with deep practical intent, probed the possibilities and capacities of our psyches earlier than any scientists, theologians, or psychologists of the modern industrialized age. The founders of New Thought and affirmative thinking created a fresh means of viewing life, one that was rough and incomplete, rife with mistakes and dead ends, but also filled with possibility
and practical application. These pioneers, whose work commenced only in the latter half of the nineteenth century, began an extraordinary conversation and experiment about the power of thought to shape the experience of the individual. There exists an authentic and efficacious beginning in their ideas, which remain relatively new. In that sense, the positive-thinking movement created the genuine and still-unfolding Reformation of the modern search for meaning for which William James had hoped.
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Apart from the belief in a change of conditions, the New Thought and Christian Science perspectives diverge. As noted earlier, Christian Science does not see the mind as an instrument of good but as a tool of illusion. New Thought, by contrast, views the mind as a divine and empowering agency. For the remainder of this chapter I focus chiefly on New Thought, which undergirds the positive-thinking culture.
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Evans used an 1875 English translation.
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UCRS has since merged with Religious Science International, the other major Holmes ministry, to form United Centers for Spiritual Living.
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In 1904 the Nobel-winning Spanish neuro-anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal also had the insight that thoughts repeated by “mental practice” would reinforce neural pathways, though the brain imaging that would prove his point did not yet exist.
These notes are intended to supplement attributions that appear in individual chapters. When a source is already cited within a chapter, it is not generally repeated here.
Emerson is quoted from his 1870 essay “Success.” The Talmudic precept is from
Pirkei Avot
(“Ethics of the Fathers”), chapter 1:15.
William James used the term “the religion of healthy-mindedness” in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(Longmans, Green & Co., 1902). In his memoir
Manifest Victory
(Harper & Brothers, 1941, 1947), religious scholar J. R. Moseley recalls James’s conviction that New Thought “constituted, together with Christian Science, a spiritual movement as significant for our day as the Reformation was for its time.” James referred to “a wave of religious activity” in his essay “The Energies of Men,” Philosophical
Review
, January 1907.
Thomas Jefferson’s statement about Unitarianism is from his letter of June 26, 1822, to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse. Mark Twain’s explorations of Christian Science date back to
Cosmopolitan
magazine of October 1899 and appeared in their fullest form in his book
Christian Science
(Harper & Brothers, 1907).
My reference to the work of Barbara Ehrenreich is from her book
Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America
(Metropolitan Books, 2009). Richard Hofstadter’s observations are from his
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, 1963). The X song “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” appeared on the band’s 1983 album,
More Fun in the New World
.
The quoted correspondence is from Christy Croft, written to me in an e-mail of March 5, 2012. I am grateful for her permission to quote from it, as well as for her broader insights into the ethical issues of positive thinking.
Gary Ward Materra is quoted from his dissertation,
Women in Early New Thought: Lives and Theology in Transition, From the Civil War to World War I
(Department of Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara, 1997).
Historian John K. Simmons highlighted the positive-thinking roots of popular advertising slogans in his “Christian Science and American Culture,”
America’s Alternative Religions
edited by Timothy Miller (State University of New York Press, 1995).
George Berkeley’s passages are from his 1710 work
Principles of Human Knowledge
(Penguin Classics, 1988, 2004).
On the excesses of heroic medicine, and related topics in early American medicine, I have benefited from Wakoh Shannon Hickey’s dissertation,
Mind Cure, Meditation, and Medicine: Hidden Histories of Mental Healing in the United States
(Department of Religion, Duke University, 2008). Also helpful on the issues of nineteenth-century American medicine are Materra (1997);
Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America
edited by Norman Gevitz (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and
Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America
by James C. Whorton, Ph.D. (Oxford University Press, 2002), from which Benjamin Rush is quoted.
Of the many volumes that survey Phineas Quimby’s life and writing, a uniquely helpful resource is Ronald A. Hughes’s
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby: His Complete Writings and Beyond
(Phineas Parkhurst Quimby Resource
Center, 2009); Hughes’s collection identifies errors that have persisted in earlier collections. Also valuable is
The Complete Collected Works of Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby
edited by Rev. Lux Newman and the Phineas Parkhurst Quimby Philosophical Society (Seed of Life Publishing, 2008, 2012). Quimby’s recovery story is drawn from “My Conversion,” January 1863, as published in
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby: The Complete Writings
, vol. 3, edited by Ervin Seale (DeVorss, 1988). Details on Quimby’s life are also from a biographical treatment written by Quimby’s son George and published in the March 1888 edition of
The New England Magazine
, as reprinted in the Belfast (ME) Republican Journal of January 10, 1889. Other aspects of Quimby’s early career are drawn from commentary by Hughes (2009) and Seale (1988);
The Quimby Manuscripts
edited by Horatio Dresser (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1921, 2nd edition); and
The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby
by Annetta G. Dresser (Geo. H. Ellis, 1895).
A great deal has been written about Quimby in surveys of American religion and psychology, much of it drawn from the early work of Dresser and George Quimby; as covered elsewhere in these notes and in footnotes in the narrative, I have, wherever possible, corroborated early biographical information with period newspaper coverage and studies of the mental-healing and New Thought cultures, including the volumes
Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought
by Charles Braden (Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, 1987);
Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920
by Beryl Satter (University of California Press, 1999);
History and Philosophy of Metaphysical Movements in America
by J. Stillson Judah (Westminster Press, 1967); and Hickey’s above-referenced 2008 Duke dissertation. Also helpful are Robert Peel’s seminal study,
Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial
(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), and
Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil War to World War I
by Gail Thain Parker (University Press of New England, 1973). An important adjunct to these works is Donald Meyer’s
The Positive Thinkers
(Wesleyan University Press, 1965, 1980, 1988), which provides a rigorous historical overview of the movement from a dissenting and critical perspective. For a thoughtful contemporary critique see Oliver
Burkeman’s
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
(Faber & Faber, 2012).