Newsletter

For those of you who tuned in late, The Philosopher's Stone , Alan and Deb's newsletter, was first launched in Spring/Summer 1993. The masthead listed Deb as Editor and Alan as Publisher. Graphics included our smiling faces, vintage 1991, and a Debsketch of a stone with a lantern next to it. In later iterations, the stone appeared on a low, wheeled platform, as the Philosopher sought a new location down among the sheltering palms, which were pictured after he/it arrived there. The newsletter went into hiatus as Alan's and Deb's lives became complicated in other areas. It has now reappeared here, more or less regularly.

August 29, 2010

More Mnemonics

This continues our series of mnemonics for remembering Henry Wood’s 25 mental photography Suggestions from Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography (1893). In case you tuned in late, Henry Wood (1834-1909) was a successful businessman, early New Thought author, and philanthropist—too modest to call himself a healer—who co-founded and was at one time president of the Metaphysical Club. The Philosopher and I like to refer to him by his Christian name because at this point we feel that we know him really well. The New Thought movement could well follow the example of the inhabitants of Belfast, Maine, who referred in the local newspapers to P.P. Quimby’s son George as "our George". Our Henry was a remarkable person, and I feel blessed to have rediscovered him. All of his books are available online as PDF files, and a few of them are reprinted for sale by various vendors. Even with his business books, what is surprising is how timely they are more than a century later.

Here are a few more of our Henry’s Suggestions along with ways to remember them so that you can rehearse them in bed in the middle of the night if you have trouble falling asleep. However, there is no substitute for doing the work of reading the daily meditations and contemplating the Suggestions. You can access the free online PDF files by clicking on our Henry Wood tag to your left and then clicking on the title Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography (1893).

11. SPIRIT IS THE ONLY SUBSTANCE. (Process thinkers will kindly note that spirit-mind-idea-experience all refer to that which is non-physical as the nature of the building blocks of the universe that underlie— sub stare— all that is. What we refer to as physical is a very dense form of it.) Since this is Suggestion 11, take those two numeral 1's and stick S’s on top of them, rather like the symbol for the U.S. dollar. The S’s of course stand for spirit and substance.

12. I AM FREE. Picture a Black Forest cuckoo clock. The bird pops out of its little doors under the 12. In our mnemonic version, it then does a swan dive straight down onto the floor, not understanding what it really means to be free.

13. THERE IS NO DEATH. The number 13 is traditionally associated with bad luck, so let’s turn it 180 degrees and associate it with really good news.

14. I LOOK UPWARD. Make the numeral 1 and the tall stick of the numeral 4 into arrows pointing upward.

15. I AM GOD’S CHILD. True confession time: I have yet to come up with a mnemonic for this one. It always just seems to pop up for me, in a lot better form than the cuckoo. Perhaps at age 16 one starts to leave childhood behind (but of course, we continue to be God’s children.)

We’ll polish off the last 10 Suggestions next time.

August 15, 2010

Summer Memories, Summer Not

The Philosopher has been estivating. He looks so cute sitting on the stone with his colorful beach umbrella raised to keep off the ambient summer breezes. (The Philosopher hates moving air. If we ever have another Pentecostal outpouring, he’s in big trouble.) His main preoccupation has been trying to develop mnemonics for Henry Wood’s 25 mental photography suggestions from Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography (1893). Henry occasionally sits on the stone next to him, but Henry takes a dim view of anyone who fails to do the work in consciousness of mentally photographing the suggestions and reading the meditations that elaborate on them.

If he had listened to me, I could have saved him the trouble. Below are the 25 suggestions and how to remember them. Be sure to read the meditation for each, following Henry’s instructions. If you don’t happen to own your own copy, you can download the PDF file to your desktop in two clicks: 1) our Henry Wood tag on the left, and 2) the 1893 title. Invaluable technical assistance in this operation was provided by computer genius and Quimby scholar Ron Hughes. The connection is that Henry’s buddy, Horatio, was the eldest child of Quimby patients Julius and Annetta Dresser. Check out www.ppquimby.com .

For remembering any ten things, you can’t beat associating them with bun, shoe, tree, door, hive, sticks, heaven, gate, vine, hen; so we’ll start with those. (If you don’t get it, read them aloud.) Make up your own associations; the sillier and crazier, the better they work.

1. GOD IS HERE. How about an open hot dog bun upon which is a piece of paper bearing the word GOD in large black letters? God is here, right on this bun.

2. DIVINE LOVE FILLS ME. How about a glamorous high-heeled shoe filled with little pink candy hearts? This would be you as shoe.

3. GOD IS MY LIFE. There’s a wonderful Tree of Life at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and "only God can make a tree". The first three go together as a sort of set.

4. CHRIST IS WITHIN. Just think of "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." I have heard it said that the Christ is actually asking to be let out into the world.

5. I AM SOUL. Hive implies a beehive, and I am comes from to be.

6. I AM PART OF A GREAT WHOLE. Financier Meyer Rothschild supposedly showed his young sons a bundle of sticks. A single stick could be easily broken, but the bundle tied together had enormous power. Or go back to the Roman fasces.

7. ALL THINGS ARE YOURS. Author Andy Andrews in The Traveler’s Gift tells of a warehouse in heaven filled to overflowing with all the things people had wanted but had given up hope of getting before their desires could be delivered.

8. I AM NOT BODY. The gate separates you from the hive.

9. I FEAR NO EVIL. A surrealistic black vine snaking around in the darkness makes me think of evil.

10. I WILL: BE THOU MADE CLEAN. These are the words of Jesus. Beecher was a Christian minister. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. wrote the following limerick about him:

"The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher

Called a hen a remarkable creature.

The hen, pleased with that,

Laid an egg in his hat,

And thus did the hen reward Beecher."

To be continued.

June 15, 2010

Revision or Restoration

"To every thing there is a season", wrote the author of Ecclesiastes. One of the more important skills we humans need to learn is deciding whether to revise or to restore: should we come up with something new or go back to the tried and true? Every life cycle, be it personal or business, needs a taking-stock stage or season when one evaluates one’s results and chooses to stay the course or change it. Either one is stuck in the mud and needs to do something different, or one has lost one’s way and needs to get back on the path. Which is it?

One illustration of the need for this stock-taking is today’s political situation. The country has ceased to prosper as it is being bled white by assorted special interests, blocked from using its talents and resources, and having its citizens’ freedoms whittled away. Many of our career politicians—and individuals from both political parties are guilty of this—have abandoned the principles of the Founders and are twisting the Constitution to suit their own ends. They rationalize this by calling it "a living document", which to them justifies their undermining it. But the men who drafted the Constitution had learned bitter lessons from their own situation and from studying history and philosophy. They therefore created "a government of laws and not of men", a rule of law carefully divided to allow sufficient central power to get the job of national governing and defending done in accordance with the powers delegated to it by the people, but to leave the greatest possible number of choices to the individual states. The Tea Party movement (TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already) consists of people of integrity from both political parties and of assorted races and faiths who seek to restore, not revise, the Constitution, which already includes provision for amendments and for the making of new laws.

In another arena, economist Julian Simon looked at the same data that other economists—and economics is known as "the dismal science"—had viewed with great pessimism, and viewed it instead as full of opportunity. Here we need to revise our thinking and take another look at the facts. It was Simon who realized that the ultimate resource, the real wealth of any nation, is the ingenuity of its inhabitants. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s show on Fox News this past weekend featured the inventors of various simple and workable methods of cleaning up oil spills such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico, who demonstrated their methods in front of the TV cameras. Some people, instead of wringing their hands in despair, have set to work, using the means available, and mitigated the damage to an astonishing degree.

Then there’s Christianity with its various interpretations of the Bible. Many people may be trying to live good lives according to the interpretation supplied by Calvin or the Inquisition, but they are violating Jesus’s admonishment not to judge by condemning anyone who doesn’t see things the way they do. Here again, we need to pray for wisdom and discernment: can we advance spiritually by changing our current practices in thought, word, or deed, or do we need to be open to something quite different? Should we restore or revise? There are many layers of meaning in the Bible, and to Eastern minds, symbolism is the normal way of communicating, so the authors of the books of the Bible never expected much of what they wrote to be taken literally. On the other hand, the authors of the Gospels were doing their best to record what they had seen and heard, and it is overboard to dismiss it all as mythical.

One of my favorite New Thought affirmations is DIVINE INTELLIGENCE KNOWS ALL I NEED TO KNOW, AND DIVINE INTELLIGENCE TELLS ME ALL I NEED TO KNOW. But first, we have to be still. . .

May 31, 2010

One Presence and One Power

Although New Thought has no formal creed that one is required to swear to, there are principles to which nearly everyone in New Thought subscribes. One of these is "There is but one Presence and one Power: God, the good omnipotent". This statement is capable of two interpretations. One is sound philosophy; the other is errant nonsense.

Let’s first get rid of the nonsense. If you believe that God is the only power in the universe, you just dissed yourself. You have free will, and that is a power. Obviously, there is more than one power in the universe. People are forever trying to get around this by turning to some pantheistic notion that "God" is made up of all of us, that all there is, is God; or that God is all there is. Either way, that adds up to what process philosopher David Ray Griffin calls a performative self-contradiction. That means that although you may give lip service to such a notion, your actions belie it. Griffin illustrates performative self-contradiction with the example of a solipsist, a person who believes that he is all there is, that he is the only one out there. The moment he makes that statement aloud, he has shot himself in the foot, for to whom is he speaking? If he then writes it on a word processor, his actions reveal that he acknowledges the existence of the word processor in addition to himself, and the absurdity becomes even more clear.

Some people deny that they have free will, claiming that free will is an illusion and that we are all determined. This is a performative self-contradiction, because the same people turn right around and act as if they have free will; their performance contradicts their claim.

All these are metaphysical issues, pertaining to the nature of the universe. In what sense, then, can we logically and reasonably say that there is only one Presence and Power? For this, we must turn from metaphysics to axiology. Axiology is the study of values, including morals and ethics. Ethical dualism concerns the belief that there are two powers in the universe: good and evil. Most people in New Thought hold that evil is insubstantial, that it is immature good, or good that has somehow gotten off track. God, who is totally good, never created evil. Evil has been described as being like darkness: when you walk into a dark room and turn on the light, you do not have to chase the shadows out; they vanish instantly in the light. Or evil can be described as being like cold: at absolute zero, there is a total absence of heat, but cold has no substance of its own.

Evil can appear in a totally good creation in the same way that a green light can result from the blending of a blue light and a yellow light. Seeking the source of that green light, you will find only blue and yellow, but not green. Evil is real; it does exist, but it has no lasting substance. It represents the misuse of God’s creation and the need for more divine order. It is good somehow run amok. God offers only perfectly good initial aims for each occasion of experience, but experiences don’t always accept those good initial aims. "God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions" (Eccl. 7:29). There are evil entities, beings who use their free will to say no to God’s perfect possibilities. These beings were not created evil, and they may yet eventually choose to say yes to God.

In an ethical sense, then, we can wholeheartedly and reasonably affirm that there is but one Presence and one Power in the universe: the wholly good, all-sufficient God that Jesus called Father.

May 15, 2010

The Philosopher is really on a roll lately. Here are his latest thoughts on the basic building blocks of the universe and God’s interaction with them.

What God Does All Day (and Night)

Did you know that God has a job description? Maybe he didn’t before Deb and I gave him one, but he is very patient and didn’t mind waiting countless billions of years before someone got around to making one for him, not that numerous thinkers hadn’t done it without calling it that. Since God never has been unemployed and wouldn’t be applying for a different job (and to whom would he apply?), he really hasn’t needed a job description.

I imagine that all descriptions of God are his job descriptions, although some are woefully incorrect in describing what he does or can do. Possibly the most important characterization of what he does was brought about when someone translated the Greek pantokrator into Latin as omnipotent, changing all-sufficient into all-powerful. People are always saying strange things behind his back.

If you have read as far as page 125 of our New Thought: A Practical American Spirituality, you know that Deb and I say:

The divine job description provides for God to start everything, to finish nothing, and to keep everything. Your job description calls for you to start nothing, to finish very quickly, and to realize that you can’t keep anything for more than a moment. If this seems to violate common sense, keep reading.

Much as I’d like to tell the rest of the story, my typing finger may not be up to it, and the publisher would lose some sales, if I were to reveal the next two hundred pages here. So I’ll summarize mercilessly: God starts everything in the sense that everything is made up of nonmaterial something called more or less synonymously mind, spirit, and experience. Everything is composed of that, so the outlook is metaphysically called an idealistic monism, but philosophers disagree on how many units of it there are. An absolutist, also known as a pantheist, holds that all is mind, which makes him an idealistic qualitative monist; but he also claims that there is only one unit of it, which makes him a quantitative monist. Most idealists, while embracing qualitative monism, stoutly reject quantitative monism, in that there are, it seems to most of us (and some dare to try to prove it) many units of mind, so we are idealistically monists, but quantitatively pluralists.

If there were only God, all seeming else would be no more than an appearance. So God would be out of work in influencing anyone or anything else, for there would be no else.

Possibly the most widely known pluralistic idealist was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), but probably likely to outdistance him in fame was Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), after whom Whiteheadian process thought is named. Leibniz believed that basic units, for which he borrowed the name monad, do not interact, but are somewhat like trains running on parallel tracks. Whitehead’s basic units (called actual entities or occasions of experience) are nothing apart from interaction. So process often is followed by -relational. It is practically impossible to distinguish process philosophy from process theology, so if you are looking for any reference to us in Wikipedia, you will find it at the end of someone’s lengthy entry on process theology.

Getting back to what God does: he presents each actual entity with the perfect (God offers no imperfect merchandise in his store of wisdom) possibility for what exactly would be best for that particular arising actual entity in the context of whatever is the background out of which it is arising. Needless to say, only God could provide such a tailor-made possibilities for the unimaginably great number of entities constantly coming into existence. Estimating the number of stars in existence probably would be simple compared with God’s job.

Contrary to the belief of many, God never condemns, nor especially praises, any entity for the decisions of its predecessors in accepting or rejecting God’s proposals in the past. God and the endless succession of actualities are, as Deb and I emphasize in our domain name, new every moment. Now you see why this outlook is referred to as a process one.

May 1, 2010

Remarks by the Philosopher himself.

Looking Up and Down

Some of my days seem better than others, and I imagine that this is true of you. But did you ever think that it may be true of whole civilizations? I don’t mean that one civilization is necessarily better than another, although the classification of Western history into ancient, medieval, and modern can be taken to imply that there were high stages before and after the middle period of something like a thousand years that was merely marking time, lacking the greatness of both ancient and modern civilizations.

What I am thinking of is the leveling up and leveling down that have characterized Western civilization (and perhaps all civilizations) on the basis of whether they were (and are) upward-looking or downward looking. I’m speaking here not of optimistic or pessimistic, although those may go along with the upward and downward metaphysical approaches.

The term reductionism has come to be associated with the attempt to explain everything in terms of atoms or even smaller bits of something claimed to be lacking any sort of awareness. The overall term for this is materialism in the metaphysical rather than acquisitive sense. The great opposite to materialism is idealism in the metaphysical sense, not necessarily having anything to do with practical high-mindedness. Since we cannot very well use the term reduce in relation to explaining the lower in terms of the higher, we must settle for something such as resolve: explaining one level in terms of another without necessarily meaning to explain the lower in terms of the higher, as in resolve matter into mind. But as soon as we confront the word mind, most people probably think of a ghostly invisible sort of something that is called a substance. Also, some people distinguish mind from spirit: a century and more ago metaphysical idealism commonly was called spiritualism, although not the sort emphasizing communication with the dead.

Partly perhaps because of the difficulty in choosing between the terms idealism and spiritualism, in recent years there has been a tendency in some quarters to refer not to mind, consciousness, or spirit, but simply to that which characterizes everything on whatever level of being it may exist: experience. Alas, this has produced as a substitute for idealism the jaw-breaking term panexperientialism. Most likely one can live well without ever hearing of or employing that term, unless one wants to stir things up at a party with a dearth of discussion. Even one professing to be a panexperientialist is unlikely to cause anyone to phone 911 to let the police know that there is a panexperientialist at large.

Why do I subject you to a term that is neither illegal nor immoral, but is likely to fatten your vocabulary? Simply because panexperientialism is the latest word to use in characterizing the leveling upward that—in line with Alfred North Whitehead’s Modes of Thought—proclaims nature to be alive. Primitive animists indulged in such believing, but had no such word for it. Now we have, and in New Thought we begin our thought and practice by turning to the ultimate possessor of experience (both his own and ours): God. There is nothing higher than that.

April 15, 2010

New Thought on the Threshold of Postmodern Science

Lately, the Philosopher and I have been preoccupied with the early years of the New Thought movement, even before it had acquired that name. Horatio Dresser included in his anthology, The Spirit of the New Thought, Henry Wood’s answers to criticisms of the New Thought that had appeared in three periodicals. Although we do not have the exact words of the critics before us, we can pretty well guess what they were accusing New Thought of. Wood, approaching New Thought as a philosophy, notes, "This is no cult, in the sense of having any central authoritative creed or specific formulated system. If so, criticism could be more definite. It is rather a great spontaneous trend, an impersonal movement. It is free from dogmatism, and so permeated by an evolutionary optimism that it sees the good even in everything and everybody which most actively opposes it." He goes on to deny "that the ‘all-is-spirit’ philosophy properly belongs to the New Thought", based on his "somewhat extensive acquaintance with its most prominent exponents". Elsewhere in Wood’s writings he makes it quite clear that as an idealist, he is completely opposed to materialism; here he comments, "Matter is regarded as expressive, secondary, and resultant, but by no means as unreal. In its proper place and relation it is good and useful. Man is the normal and rightful executive of his physical organism, and not its subordinate, nor the slave of its sensations." This is a clear repudiation of the view held by Christian Scientists that matter is completely unreal.

At this point (1901), Wood and the other early New Thoughters stood on the threshold of quantum physics and process philosophy, even though that threshold had not yet been crossed. They were looking at the same world that Planck, Whitehead, and other great thinkers were contemplating. Today materialism has been philosophically discredited, but those fleeing that sinking ship have clambered onto the foundering vessel of dualism, which according to process philosopher David Ray Griffin, has even more philosophical flaws than materialism. It was Wood and the other idealists who foreshadowed the cleaned-up idealism known as panexperientialism. Panexperientialism takes into account the immanence of God in each occasion of experience, whereas Wood and the other idealists were not yet able to work at the level of quanta. But Wood would have understood Whitehead’s distinction of "nature lifeless" from "nature alive". He quoted Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "And every common bush afire with God". Wood, who had an excellent liberal arts education before heading for business college, was well grounded in philosophy as well as theology, insisting on a foundation of reason as well as forays into mysticism. He stressed the importance of a universe that operated lawfully in both the physical and non-physical realms, for a Creator who could contradict himself or change his fundamental character was not one worthy of worship. He insisted on the importance of good character, and here he parted company with the many in the New Thought movement and the success literature who ignored it, attracting extensive criticism continuing to this day.

Wood also makes very clear his view of miracles as the orderly operation of laws that we as yet do not understand. He espouses naturalism of the non-supernatural, non-superstitious sort that Griffin later outlined. He was so broad and yet balanced in his interests that every page brings up new topics to pursue in both science and religion, which Wood sought to reunite. At this point, I am still in the process of familiarizing myself with Wood’s writings and accumulating Wood’s thoughts on various topics. The Philosopher and I are reading Wood aloud and finding new delights on every page. Until we familiarize ourselves sufficiently to write at length about him, I wish David Griffin would dip into him.

April 1, 2010

A Visitor to the Philosopher's Cave

The Philosopher’s cave, which has more features than Snoopy’s doghouse, boasts a large if untidy library. Recently some chance conversation between us impelled the Philosopher to rummage around in it and come up with a copy of The Spirit of the New Thought, edited by Horatio W. Dresser. Browsing through this early New Thought anthology, I noticed a couple of articles by Henry Wood (1834-1909), who was singled out for praise, along with Dresser, as the two New Thought writers that the great philosopher and psychologist William James considered especially admirable in a field of literature that he frequently dismissed as "moonstruck".

I had never read any of Henry Wood’s ten books, but the Philosopher had acquired them all in his travels many years ago. We have begun reading Wood’s works aloud together and are increasingly delighted by them. In fact, we find ourselves frequently visited by the ghost of Wood, so much so that we are all now on a first-name basis. Henry doesn’t care much for the Philosopher’s cave, which he finds too messy, but he, no slouch in the philosophy department himself, occasionally sits on the Philosopher’s stone alongside the Philosopher on sunny days. Henry likes the Garden by the Sea, so on that page I will begin to post various excerpts from his writings suitable for meditation. Henry frequently says things that foreshadow process thought, which impresses the Philosopher, so we will have to begin collecting those as well.

Henry gave an address at the first annual convention of the International Metaphysical League, held in Boston in 1899. That year, he was elected president of the Metaphysical Club, which included many of the leading lights in the early New Thought movement. In his speech, titled "A Rational and Positive Spiritual Philosophy", he wrestled with the various aspects of the new movement, which had just acquired the name New Thought but at the time was also known as the Metaphysical Movement, Practical Idealism, and other names. After acknowledging that "its validity would yet depend upon the personal point of view", he emphasized "its rationality and spirituality".

Wow! What more could one ask than the combination of rationality and spirituality? All too often, those who fancy themselves spiritual pride themselves on being irrational, or those who pride themselves on being rational, particularly in the sciences, dismiss spirituality as irrational. But Henry emphasized common sense and the rule of law in the nonphysical realms as much as in the physical. While respecting the role of mind and deploring philosophical materialism, he stressed the importance of one’s evolving spiritually, following in the footsteps of Jesus. He also insisted on the lawfulness of the realms of mind and spirit just as much as in the physical.

Henry had had a successful career as a businessman, but became seriously ill as a result of stress. He began to study New Thought, and gradually healed himself. He then resolved to devote his life to helping others understand New Thought principles and practices and put them to work in their own lives. He was not a minister or a doctor, but his books were very popular, selling in the tens of thousands. We look forward to many more visits from him, since he deserves a far more prominent place in the New Thought of today than he presently enjoys.

March 8, 2010

The Winter of our Discontent

At this time of year, winter seems to be dragging on unreasonably long, and everyone in the North is ready to scream. This year, those of us who thought we had escaped from New England to the sunny South find ourselves in the same predicament as we look out at withered ghosts of palm trees and bare stubs of hibiscus bushes. March so far has brought more "breezes loud and shrill" than "dancing daffodils". The only green in our yard is the weeds in the lawn, and the Philosopher hasn’t even poked his head out of the cave long enough to sweep the front walk. The news is full of blizzards and ice storms, earthquakes and bank failures, pirates and cruise ships struck by rogue waves, and flu epidemics even when they fail to materialize. States and even whole countries are facing bankruptcy. Our collective negativity seems to be manifesting itself in myriad ways, not the least of which is the global cooling which for the last fifteen years has rebutted the Big Lie of global warming, which turns out to be a conspiracy to make a few people very rich at the expense of the rest of us.

Let’s add to the pile the latest round of criticisms of New Thought, a book titled Bright-Sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. She claims that "positive thinking" has led people to get mortgages they can’t afford, indulge in magical thinking, fail to guard against terrorists, and put an artificially cheerful face on disease and death, all while blaming the victim for failing to be positive enough. New Thought with its positive thinking is to blame for all the misery we are currently facing. But the distortions of New Thought that are being referred to as positive thinking are not New Thought as outlined by its early founders and proponents. It’s high time we set the record straight. It was Norman Vincent Peale whose famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking, started a lot of the fuss. But the critics neglect to note that it was Peale who also talked about the need to "keep on keeping on" when things aren’t going well, and it was Peale who also wrote The Tough-Minded Optimist. Turning one’s thoughts to God instead of to one’s problems and being optimistic about the outcome in the long run may be simple, but it is anything but easy.

I have said it before and I say it again: New Thought is all about what you say to yourself when everything seems to be going wrong. It has nothing to do with what philosopher Tom Morris calls "chirpy cheerfulness" or what New Thought minister Marianne Williamson calls "pouring pink paint over everything". If life were all sunshine and lollipops, it wouldn’t stay that way for long, because we would lose our hardiness. Most of us are well aware of what happens when we fail to get enough roughage (fiber) in our diet. If there were no darkness, how would we ever know what light is? Worst-case analysis can be a very positive thing to do because it helps ensure that we will reach our goals even if we run into difficulties and have to revise plans, and lucky people therefore tend to be pessimists. Author Robert Ringer in his highly misunderstood book, Winning Through Intimidation describes his Theory of the Sustenance of a Positive Attitude in the Face of a Negative Outcome, and that is more nearly what New Thought teaches.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of stories about people who made the best of a bad situation and had things turn out all right. Joel Osteen recently recounted the tale of a man who was shipwrecked on a desert island. Weeks passed, and there seemed no hope of his being found and rescued. Then the hut that he had laboriously built caught fire and burned to the ground. This was too much for the man to bear, and he broke down and wept. Just then, a Coast Guard rescue boat landed on the beach. Overjoyed, the man cried, "How did you ever find me?" The Coast Guard officer replied, "We saw the smoke from your signal fire." God frequently comes to our aid at what Emmet Fox calls the thirteenth hour. When you have reached the end of your rope, as the saying goes, tie a knot and hold on. HOPE: Hold On, Praying Expectantly. I wish I’d said that.

3/1/2010

The Beginning

If you’re new to New Thought—or even if you’re not—you may wonder where it came from. It came from the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, without getting into the teachings about Jesus of Nazareth. Nineteen centuries later, a New England clockmaker and inventor named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby got interested in mesmerism, the latest scientific wrinkle at the time, decided to try his hand at it, and discovered to his surprise that 1) he was actually healing people, not faking anything, and 2) the explanation he had been given for mesmerism was inaccurate. Word quickly spread, and the world beat a path to the door of "the Portland doctor", who was healing all sorts of ailments, both physical and mental/spiritual. What Quimby did was to argue his patients out of the idea that they needed to be sick: as he put it, "mind acts upon mind" and "my explanation is the cure". It was the beginning of what was to become known as nonlocal healing on any sort of scientific basis, rather than the occasional miracle considered to be the suspension of natural law.

Quimby, puzzled at the terribly negative, self-punitive ideas that his patients had acquired from those he referred to as "the priests and the doctors", had begun his own careful reading of the Bible to see if he could find out where these toxic ideas were coming from. He found that many of the churches had twisted the message of the Bible into these damaging messages, and the real message of Jesus was one of life, love, healing, and prosperity. Quimby believed that he had rediscovered the lost healing methods of Jesus. He healed thousands of patients during his lifetime, but he did not leave any individual or institution able to carry on his work and develop his ideas.

Two of Quimby’s patients met in his office, fell in love, and married. Their eldest son, Horatio W. Dresser, grew up to be the first historian of what became the New Thought movement. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard, studying with William James and becoming a psychologist as well as an author of many books. He was a co-founder of the Metaphysical Club of Boston, arguably the cornerstone of the new movement. He founded and edited two journals, The movement, which was originally referred to as Mental Science, in 1894 acquired the name New Thought. In 1917 Dresser published a collection of speeches and essays by various early leading lights in the movement, including a few of his own, under the title The Spirit of the New Thought. Comments Dresser, "The theory was essentially a "new" thought for most of its devotees, a new attitude towards life, hence the term was in a sense appropriate." He continues,

The New Thought is a theory and method of mental life with special reference to healing, and the fostering of attitudes, modes of conduct and beliefs which make for health and general welfare. The theory in brief is that man leads an essentially mental life, influenced, shaped and controlled by anticipations, hopes and suggestions. . . . Life is largely what we make of it, what we bring to and call out of it. Hence the importance of cultivating optimistic, constructive and productive beliefs. Beliefs lead to attitudes and these determine conduct. . . . The application of these principles to life in general grows naturally out of the success attained in applying them to health. . . . The New Thought fosters individual development, and leads each man to believe he can go to the supreme sources of life. He may make of his theory and method a spiritual gospel by turning afresh to the New Testament to find it a guide to the efficient religious life. The Christ then becomes an inner or universal principle, accessible to every soul.

A century after Quimby, the Philosopher (Alan) also earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, writing his dissertation on Horatio W. Dresser and including much about Quimby. It was later published as the book Healing Hypotheses (now available online at www.ppquimby.com). Lately, we have been rereading The Spirit of the New Thought. The movement has been through so many changes over the years that it is refreshing to return to the viewpoint of the early participants, resting squarely on a foundation of American individual freedoms, Christian principles, and outstanding character as exemplified by the founders of the United States of America. Dresser concludes his introduction:

"This is the spirit of the New Thought, the glad tidings it declares to the world—the great revelation of spiritual unity and beneficent evolution by the heeding of which not only disease shall cease, but war and unhappiness. It is another form of the gospel of the Christ. It is a new interpretation of the evangel of love."

It is high time we returned to those magnificent principles of the founders of New Thought and of the founders of the United States of America, the necessary climate into which New Thought could be born. The Spirit of the New Thought is available online by Googling The Spirit of the New Thought.

Reprinted from the first issue:

WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT

In days of yore, the philosopher's stone was what alchemists sought to transmute base metal into gold. The object of this newsletter is to help to transmute lives, throught higher consciousness and deeper understanding, for more abundant, successful living. One needed mental transmutation is from outmoded ideas, appropriate in a day of Newtonian physics, into views consistent with quantum physics. This calls for replacing notions of changeless substance with a vision of dynamic, developing process. In relation to New Thought, the result is Process New Thought.

Our mission is to teach, in a process perspective, the practice of the presence of God for practical purposes; in other words, to show people how changing their thinking, expectation, and ultimate awareness can bring about desired changes in their lives. We teach the philosophy and psychology of New Thought: the science behind the science of mind.

Alan has described philosophy as an armchair enterprise, one that examines the nature of reality and teaches people to think independently. A peripatetic philosopher, wandering about the world with his mental lantern for illumination, as philosophers are wont to do, might stop to rest upon a stone in place of his habitual armchair; and might address a few thought-provoking remarks to those who happened to be at hand, as philosophers are also wont to do. Such remarks might even be part of the cornerstone rejected by most philosophical builders.

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I (Deb) have been thinking about the various heroes and heroines that I have come across over the years, people whom I have read about or perhaps even met, who serve as role models for me, particularly when going through one of those Red Sea places in life, where "there is no way out, there is no way back, there is no other way but through." One of the most recent ones is Terry McBride. I described his book in my notes last September, and since then, Alan and I have attended his seminar at Unity Church in Clearwater, Florida in October. We bought his set of cds and materials to help internalize the lessons he teaches.

To meet Terry, knowing his horrific medical history, is to be amazed at his obviously outstanding physical condition. He radiates energy and enthusiasm, moving with ease and vigor that make it hard to believe that he once faced the prospect of a short and painful life in a wheelchair. How could anyone who does a little hip wiggle to emphasize various points have ever had back problems? The mental image of his physical presence just won't go away, and I think, "If he could learn to overcome all of that, certainly I can overcome whatever I am facing at the moment." Some of his main points:

Our beliefs determine our experiences.
Beliefs--our own and others'--can be changed.
We can live out our beliefs without making anyone else's wrong.
God--however conceptualized--is already cocreating with us, empowering us; so, by our beliefs lined up with our intentions, we are--in a sense--controlling God.

You can order Terry's book through Amazon by clicking on the link to be found in our Book Store, or go to Terry's new website, http://www.terrymcbride.net for descriptions or purchase of his book, The Hell I Can't, and his cd program, Everybody Wins.

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