John S. Haller Jr.’s treatment of “the prosperity gospel” in his book The History of New Thought: From Mind Cure to Positive Thinking and the Prosperity Gospel (2012) shows all the marks of the contemporary academy’s small-mindedness.

Of course, it would be easy to say, with Haller, that the 1920s (“the roaring twenties”) effected a shift from New Thought’s prior, more wholesome interest in mental healing to its form of greedy selfishness, which is no more evident than in such adages as “think and grow rich.” Of course, we could also trudge out our leftist critique and claim, not without reason, that talk of prosperity, abundance, and the like is masking the very real economic inequalities that have been brought about by industrial capitalism. Finally, it’s also fair to say that the spate of New Thought books that cast the universe or deity or divine intelligence as a “cosmic vending machine” certainly don’t help their cause either.

True, all this does seem pretty gross.

But yet could there be an alternative, charitable interpretation of this turn toward prosperity? I think so, and that’s because ego tendencies run deep. Let me explain.

Deep down, most of us feel that we’ll never have enough. This was true of Charles Dickens who, despite the wealth he accrued over the course of his industrious life, died with the great fear of the workhouse left intact. The amount of money one has (or doesn’t have) doesn’t, alone, dissolve this deep ego tendency, the tendency that rises again and again, proclaiming: “You’ll never have enough.”

Cultivating the counter-thought on a daily basis (e.g., “I have everything.”) is, on my reading, an antidote to this deep-seated fear. It’s not, pace Rhonda Byrne, that one gets $5,000,000 in the mail–but that’s not my point. The supreme–this is to say, Yogic–benefit is that one goes beyond one’s preoccupation with scarcity.

Let me zoom out. What I think that New Thought can offer, from a Yogic point of view and provided that one proceed wholesomely, is a purification of the mind. Thanks to visualizations, affirmations, counter-thoughts, and the like, one is emptying out one’s ego tendencies. The consequence is that one’s heart does open and that the world more generally is seen as good.

In this sense, there is prosperity for sure. There’s always, one feels, one knows, more than enough to go around.