“If Knowledge Is Power, It Is Also Pain”

Wrestling with New Thought

Rooted in mid-nineteenth century Transcendentalism, the philosophy called New Thought is the popular spiritual self-help movement that teaches thoughts are causative.

Historically, New Thought has done a better job of popularizing than refining itself. Its most famous variants include The Secret, The Power of Positive Thinking, Law of Attraction, and manifesting. Although these are not my terms or outlook, I detest snobbery toward these idea movements. If you want to establish how “serious” you are, ask good (i.e., non-rhetorical) questions.

In fact, New Thought’s founders demonstrated lasting insights into human nature and extra-physicality, including what I consider the selective capacticies of the psyche. In their own way, these extreme Idealists—who included a wide range of spiritual-social experimenters—anticipated our quantum-entangled-retrocausal-nonlocal-neuroplastic age.

Outside the efforts of William James and Neville Goddard, however, New Thought has neither matured nor evolved. As a thought movement, it has not taken account of the myriad laws and forces under which we live (thus challenging its “super law” model); devised a persuasive theology of suffering; and accepted its internal contradictions versus placing them on the querent or borrowing words like “karma” from unrelated traditions.

I try to foster a reformed and refined New Thought in my books Daydream Believer, The Miracle Club, One Simple Idea, Happy Warriors, and others. This is my introduction to Daydream Believer.

Vox populi.

-M-

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“What are all beliefs but the possibilities of I?”—Austin Osman Spare, The Focus of Life

Several years prior to this writing, a famous political operative—someone you would immediately recognize and perhaps be surprised by—asked me to meet him at a suite in a posh Park Avenue hotel.

I biked up from my then-home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As I settled into a sofa with my helmet in my lap, he asked me: “Who is the best writer in New Thought?” My questioner referred to the philosophy of positive-mind metaphysics that began in the transcendentalist ferment of New England in the mid-to-late 1800s and mushroomed across the nation.

“Neville,” I immediately replied, referring to Neville Goddard, one of the most intriguing mystical voices of the past century.

“No,” he said, ribbing me—“I didn’t ask who’s the coolest, I asked who’s the best.”

I repeated my assessment. The British-Barbadian Neville, whose career spanned from the late 1930s until his death in California in 1972, was a resplendent speaker who, under his solitary first name, wrote more than ten books on the limitless powers of thought. He has been my greatest influence. But I have differences with Neville’s ideas, which I do not believe cover the full gamut of human crises and mortality. I wondered then as I have other times: who could I recommend unreservedly?

Although I do not approve of the actions of the political figure who put the question to me, I nonetheless determined to allow it to serve as a personal goad. I decided right there to adopt it as my challenge to lay out a metaphysics of thought causation that shied from neither the sublime heights of possibility nor the severity of the barriers facing us. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journals of February 22, 1824: “If Knowledge be power, it is also Pain.”

Daydream Believer is the result of that effort. It deals with the interdimensional and infinite nature of your psyche—by which I mean a compact of thought and emotion—and also the paradoxical limits that create the tension of existence.

This book considers your psyche’s causative abilities, practically and theoretically; it responds to the ablest critics of mind-power metaphysics; it presents the evidence for extra-physical mentality, which is overwhelming; and it considers the role of ethics in thought causation. I equate ethics with reciprocity. And reciprocity, as I use it, is a wild force not to be understood as simple cause-and-effect between individuals but as part of a vast cycle of action and reaction within the human symmetry. Reciprocity must be approached with great care and acknowledgment of one’s limited perspective.

My hope is that Daydream Believer takes the last 150 years of experimentation in New Thought to its sharpest peak and sets us on a path for the next stage. More importantly, I wish that the book shines a light for your own practice and experiments, frames mind-power as a meaningful response to life, and provides you with the tools to surpass its insights. If you find my claims bold, I trust that you will find my self-disclosures—necessary for any honest reckoning of practical philosophy—equally so.

What is the purpose of a spirituality of personal creation? “All events that result from intention are reducible to the intention to increase power.” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote those words in 1885–1886 in his notes to an incomplete and posthumously published book The Will to Power, as translated in 1967 by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Let me be plain: that is my driving principle in this book.

When people speak of pursuing truth, peace, understanding, freedom, justice, forgiveness, patience, or faith, they are indirectly identifying means to power: to the growth of their capacities for expression, attainment, and connection to the source of causation and creation. To argue against this framing inadvertently demonstrates its activity. Philosophies seek primacy.

“Desire is a manifestation of power,” wrote Wallace D. Wattles in The Science of Getting Rich in 1910. A leading light in New Thought, the socialist and metaphysical explorer belonged to an early and influential strain of positive-mind philosophers.

Indeed, I believe that a great deal of what gets defined or expressed as neurosis is the frustration of the power-seeking impulse in the individual—not power as brutality or force but as self-agency. If that impulse can be validated and reawakened, rather than explained away, then anxiety, fear, or hostility can often be transformed. I write this from personal experience. But I must add two serious notes of caution. First, experience also compels me to note that certain baseline traits of behavior seem likely to follow a person to some greater or lesser degree for a lifetime. There may be a complexity of reasons for this (or, possibly, one simple reason that exceeds our focus here: reincarnation); whatever the case, we seem to never wholly shed a particular emotional thumbprint. My second caution is to watch for the tendency toward overcompensation for past disempowerment. I have also witnessed this in myself. Exercising personal power and self-determination can serve to right past wrongs and foster personal happiness; but it can also, at times, result in a too-ready capacity to act rashly or sever ties. It can lead to selfishness. I have hurt others in this way. It was never my wish to do so. But medicine is in the dosage.

Because it addresses the practical needs of life—money, intimacy, health, self-image—New Thought, or the spirituality of mind causation, has proven enduringly popular since it took modern form in the late nineteenth century. But New Thought culture has proven more adept at popularizing than at refining its ideas. With the death of philosopher William James in 1910 (the year before Wattles and the same year as Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and transcendentalist medium Andrew Jackson Davis), few serious efforts have emerged from within New Thought’s sprawling, informal culture, of which I count myself a part, to confront and resolve the philosophy’s inadequate response to suffering, both physically and emotionally, both intimately and on a macro scale.

“The cabalists, like the Gnostics,” wrote historian Richard Cavendish in his 1967 history of the occult The Black Arts, “set out to answer questions which confront any religious thinker. If God is good, how has evil entered the world which God created? If God is merciful, why is there pain and suffering in life? If God is limitless, infinite and eternal, what is the connection between God and a world which is finite, limited in space and time?”

In recent decades, New Thought has done too little to probe these questions; many of its practitioners rush to ascribe every event to thoughts, either individually or in the “race consciousness;” and current New Thought philosophy does almost nothing to meaningfully confront the discordance between wish and event in the experience of the seeker, other than to say: try again. Trying again usually involves some variant of assuming the feeling state of your wish fulfilled. Although I honor that familiar approach, and believe in its utility, I am not single-minded on the matter. It is simply impractical and psychologically unfair to impel a suffering, grieving, or frightened person to “change” his or her feeling state to foster a desired outcome.

Indeed, recent to this writing, I heard from a suicidal young man who had previously experienced success with the methods of Neville Goddard to whom this book is dedicated. As alluded, Neville has been a vital influence on me. His contention is that your imagination is the creative force symbolically called God in Scripture — and that everything you experience is yourself out-pictured into the world. Neville’s key method is to emotionally “live from the end” (a phrase tattooed above his visage on my upper left arm) or view yourself from the feeling state of the wish fulfilled. I do not accept this approach as absolute. Alternate methods, along with supports that may be nonspiritual in nature, are urgently needed. The young man I mentioned had some early breakthroughs but then encountered intrusive thoughts, perceived failure, and desperation. I replied to him in part:

Hello, I am sorry to hear of that and I think I understand some of what you are going through. Neville is wonderful—but we must also accept that our emotions run on their own track and they cannot always be controlled, nor should they. Also, I believe that what happens to us in life can trace a long arc. Suffering today can be the basis of something much greater tomorrow. Life is a polarity.

I also encouraged him to seek medical and therapeutic help. Mind metaphysics is not an exclusive path. (See my appendix, “Depression and Metaphysics.”) Insofar as we avail ourselves of it, mind-power philosophy must acknowledge friction and suffering; its acolytes must prove capable of confronting life without leaning on homiletic quotes or catechistic references handed down generation after generation, or in translation upon translation, of canonized spiritual literature. We need a spirituality of personal verification and results.

We must also shed the shibboleth that “positive thinking” produces the same kind of personality: rosy, ebullient, upbeat. Positivity takes many forms, including deliberateness, persistence (what some call faith), and dedication to evaluating events based not on whether they produce happiness, which may be fleeting, but on their potential for fostering personal development and self-expression.

Nothing that I have written is cause to reject New Thought and its affiliated expressions, which often go under what I consider the inadequate (and, in this book, revised) terms “Law of Attraction,” “Power of Positive Thinking,” or “manifesting.” Rather, what I describe is reason to reform New Thought.

We need a revitalized New Thought: one that remains spiritual, which is to say extra-physical. In its history, New Thought has been largely right about the limits of philosophical materialism, or the belief that matter creates itself. New Thought’s pioneers evinced a powerful instinct for current findings in placebo studies, neuroplasticity, autosuggestion, mind-body medicine, as well as insights in psychical research, string theory, and interpretations of quantum mechanics and computing.

What future advances might a revitalized New Thought and its practitioners foresee? For this potential to be realized, we require a New Thought in which intellectual excellence is seen not as a barrier to feeling but as a conspicuous embarrassment in its absence. In short, a New Thought that warrants its name. By the end of this book, that is what we will have, together. And I vow to you: we will get there through sharing the truth of the search, not as idealized but as lived.

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