New Thought

The theoretical spokesman, all his life long, of bold and forthright thinking, of the unafraid statement of ideas.

He stated his own so warily and so muggily that they were ratified on the one hand by Nietzsche and on the other hand by the messiahs of the New Thought, that lavender buncombe.

What one notices about him chiefly is his lack of influence upon the mainstream of American thought, such as it is.

He had admirers and even worshipers, but no apprentices.

Nietzscheism and the New Thought are alike tremendous violations of orthodox American doctrine.

The one makes a headlong attack upon egalitarianism, the cornerstone of American politics.

The other substitutes mysticism, which is the notion that the true realities are all concealed for the prevailing American notion that the only true realities lie upon the surface and are easily discerned by congressmen, newspaper editorial writers, and members of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics.

When one casts about for salient men whom he moved profoundly, men who got light from his torch, one thinks first and last not of Americans, but of such men as Nietzsche and Herman Grimm, the Germans, and Tyndall and Matthew Arnold, the Englishmen.

At that time, the old-timers in AA were talking a lot about what is called now the law of attraction, about your thoughts creating a reality that, yes, I had a drinking problem, but much more importantly, I had a thinking problem.

and a lot of them had gone, had studied the works of Emmet Fox and some of the new thought thinkers of that time that say similar things to what you, Abraham, are saying.

Yes.

And so now, as I appreciate very much that at a time in my life when I needed it, I discovered your tapes and have listened to the message and have grown enormously from it.

It was published in 1902.

And this is, in essence, new thought metaphysics.

The idea comes from people like Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.

And it is the idea that thought's create reality, and therefore through the power of positive thinking you can manipulate your environment and your circumstances to your own benefit.

It's not just, you know, it's not just in the United States, but it is, you know, very strong here of, you know, you can recreate reality using your, you know, your mind, you know? And on some level you can trace that back to, you know, American transcendentalism.

You know, but you can trace it back to all ki- you know, there's something I talk about in the book called the, the New Thought movement, and Cas- which was, uh, something that has its origins in the 19th century, but it, it is basically you, you can change your reality using your mind.

And the thing about that is there's some truth to it.

You know, if I have, you know, a positive attitude toward things, you know, th- that can help, right? You know, you can create your own bad realities through, you know, negative belief systems.

But then this gets, you know, taken to the extent of saying that, [laughs] you know, physical reality isn't even really a thing, and that's, that's a bit trickier.

But Castaneda, you know, through, actually through his wife Margaret, you know, was introduced to a fellow, um, named Neville Goddard and who was active in the 1950s, who was a, um, from Barbados, and was this, um, you know, mystical New Thought practitioner.

And, um, Donald Trump went to the, you know, Marble Collegiate Church, uh, led by Norman Vincent Peale, who was also a New Thought practitioner.

You know, so, so they both had that, you know, deeply, deeply embedded.

And so that's what I needed to set up right up front.

But I knew it wasn't just about holiness evangelicalism, and I show how the same kind of mechanisms work in Mormonism, which emerges at the same time, and in something called New Thought, which later becomes known as positive thinking, a kind of secular variant of this.

All of them are working with the same kind of suppositions that Attitude controls, the mind controls reality.

Your attitude will change circumstances.

So before we leave that idea, I just think that's really important to kind of hammer home this idea of what is oftentimes presented as biblical, unchanging truth.

shifts and morphs throughout history as biblical truth, as we say, kind of, yeah, intersects with different political ideologies and moments in history.

I just thought the whole history of new thought, which I had never heard of the term new thought.

I mean, the power of positive thinking, like that whole movement, very kind of familiar with, but to hear about the origins of it.

And he said that when a student has a pure heart, And when they really want to know the truth, just from their heart's sake, then a master or a teacher can't not share it with them.

And Young talked about this a lot too, as many of the leaders in the New Thought in the early 1900s, everyone's trying, quote, quote, to figure out this question that we're sitting in together.

And we don't have the answer.

And I think it's very unique, which really pulls all the way back to the beliefs that we create.

I'm going to add my own stuff kind of to it as well.

And what she's talking about, though, is this this phrase called new thought.

And I didn't realize how distinctive new thought was from more kind of Eastern religions and perspectives.

But new thought is very much wrapped up in, I think, flows out of some of the you know, Wiccan kind of perspectives and behavior, white witchcraft, that kind of thing.

And it's, it's, it's written into tons and tons of self-help literature and not that all self, some self-help literature is great, but, but when you find these things of the, you know, the inner divinity within us and, and a lot of the using a lot of the language and, and giving Jesus the, you know, honor in a sense.

And yet when you dig in, you realize, oh, the author of this book actually believes that Jesus was just one of us.