Question Concerning New Thought

One conversation partner puts his question thus:

The logical line goes like this: thoughts create your habits, your actions, your character; they color the world around you and thus ultimately create the world around you. If you think everyone is evil, you will ultimately see everyone as evil, respond accordingly, and ultimately even attract evil people. 

The magical thought power is the manifestation camp: think Rhonda Brynes, etc. Whatever your mind dwells on actually turns into material reality. In Thought Power (p. 110), Sivananda even flirts with this view by calling the mind omnipotent: “whatever is intensely thought by your mind, that comes to be materialized.”

The logical line says that the mind shapes your experience of reality which then shapes reality itself. The magical thought camp would say that thoughts and mind directly shape and create reality itself. The second is obviously the most exciting and tantalizing as it allows for incredible amounts of power and an entirely new metaphysic. 

He goes on to ask me what I think of this distinction.

Reply

When I first read his question, I, in fact, misread it. The logical or rational line has to do with subjectivity–your character is formed by the “thought grooves” that keep getting deeper–while the magical line has to do with objectivity, with thoughts “materializing.”

Initially, I thought that my interlocutor was implying that the first line was legitimate while the second one was dubious. But that’s not actually what he wrote.

It’s telling that I misread him because that’s what I used to think!

The rational line is easy to substantiate. I argued as much in the post, “Do My Thoughts Create My Destiny?” It’s not hard to grasp that thinking in such and such a way could become a habit; that this habit could, in turn, shape my character; and that my character could reveal my destiny, or the course my life ultimately takes.

Far harder–hence my misreading–to take “thoughts are causative” or “thoughts create physical reality” seriously, but this is precisely a key part of the (weird) project known as New Thought. My question is: “Can we collapse the distinction, then, between the reasonable and the magical, and if we do, what might we discover?”

My hypothesis is that the external line has to do with seeing reality in subtle (or dream-like) terms. On my interpretation, thought doesn’t actually “cause” “materialization.” In fact, there is no mind/body or mind/matter problem because there is, in actuality, no such distinction. There’s only mind stuff: this is what a refined New Thought approach wishes to disclose.

Let’s take what’s termed “mental healing.” The view pioneered by P.P. Quimby is that disease is the result of a false belief. All that is needed is to hear and “accept” the truth and the body will conform to this new, clear understanding.

It seems to me that what mental healing could instead reveal is that there’s only mind stuff: the gross body is nothing but a concept. Therefore, as the mind becomes clearer (sattvic) and more powerful, all other mind stuff–from “the grossest” (so-called physical body which is actually made of mind) to subtle energy (which is also made of mind stuff)–becomes a clear expression of clear mind.

Or consider an oft-cited maxim: “Like attracts like.” What one starts to experience is the dreamlike quality of, for instance, personal relationships. One’s thoughts moved in certain (positive) grooves and the phenomena in the waking state dreams come to seem as if they’re appearances that conform to this particular “mental vibrational frequency.”

In other words, the character in the dream (the reasonable line) is just as dreamlike as the appearances in the so-called world (the magical line). It’s just as true to say that “As one thinks, so he becomes” as it is to say that “As one thinks, so the world appears.”

What is the point of this line of inquiry? It is not just that life is like a dream. It is also that this dream is beautiful, wondrous, redeemed, “worth it all.” Creation is a beautiful dream.