From New Dawn 197 (Mar-Apr 2023)
“The Science of Mind is the study of Life and the nature of the laws of thought; the conception that we live in a spiritual Universe, that God is in, through, around, and for us.”
– Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind“It is the childlike mind that finds the kingdom. Words are also seeds, and when dropped into the invisible spiritual substance, they grow and bring forth after their kind.”
– Charles Fillmore“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
– David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
As the world’s elite and powerful meet every year in private to discuss the many plans and agendas they have to control our lives, from what we eat to who owns our bodies to how we spend our money, it’s easy to fall into a sense of total disempowerment, of feeling as though we no longer have choices, individuality, or sovereignty because other far more wealthy and influential people are pulling the puppet strings of humanity. We are told we are “bottom feeders” and “useless eaters” who don’t have the brains to decide our own destinies, and that one day we will be made obsolete thanks to transhumanism.
Yet there is a movement that began back in the early 1900s, based upon ancient wisdom teachings thought about in new ways, that tells us this is not true. The New Thought Movement and its teachings and principles are finding a new home in the hearts, minds, and souls of those who know they were not meant to be puppets under someone else’s control. They are spiritual beings having human experiences, sparks of divine intelligence that bow to no external forces or influences, directly linked to the infinite intelligence of the Universe and are, ultimately, co-creators of their own lives.
Over the last few years, we have all become aware of the agendas of the ultra-rich and powerful, of organisations like the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum, and Big Pharma and the complicit mainstream media that lie to us and deceive us into pushing their chosen narrative. It has left many of us reeling for solid ground physically, mentally, and spiritually as we watch loved ones fall prey to propaganda and brainwashing. They turned the truth on its head, telling us up is down, and altering science to fit their woke agenda.
We have watched as our spiritual lives have been sapped of strength as we questioned those we thought were on our side, doctors and researchers who sold their souls to Big Pharma, celebrities that pushed gender mutilation and the belief that men can give birth and menstruate. Media pundits tell us to look the other way when thousands drop dead of “no apparent cause” because they’ve been told to keep the truth from us about vaccine injuries and deaths.
The whole world has been turned upside down and we have lost our footing.
Focusing on these externals has created a sense of fear and anxiety that is unprecedented in recent times, but there is a great truth the elites don’t want us to remember and will do all they can to hide it from us. A truth with ancient roots and a more modern view that tells us we are way more in control than we could ever imagine. A truth that reminds us real power comes not from some arrogant billionaire with a God complex or some corporation that benefits from illness and death. Real power comes from within each and every one of us, if only we would stop looking for it in all the wrong places.
What Is New Thought?
The name is a bit deceiving because New Thought has been around for well over a century. Not to be confused with New Age, New Thought is a spiritual and philosophical movement with roots in many religions and metaphysical teachings. It is ancient wisdom thought about in new ways as most of its ideas, core principles, and teachings are rooted in everything from Christianity to Buddhism. William James referred to as “the Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” and wrote about the movement in his book, Varieties of Religious Experience, alluding to the emphasis on the power of the mind and our thoughts.
New Thought focuses on using the power of the mind to heal, create reality, and prosper in the world because all is mind and all begins in thought. The “founding father” of the movement was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), an American clockmaker who was also a mentalist and student of mesmerism. Quimby suffered from tuberculosis as a youth, which had no cure, and set about to experiment with his own ideas. He was intrigued by the mind’s ability to control and affect his own pain and thus, the body, and even claimed to use his mind methods to cure his TB.
Mesmerised
Quimby was a follower and devotee of the teachings of Charles Poyen, who came from France to the United States to lecture on “mesmerism,” a form of hypnotism created by German doctor Franz Mesmer in the 18th century which claimed the presence of an invisible natural force possessed by all living things, including humans, animals, and vegetables, and that this force could serve as an attractor, as in animal magnetism. Quimby also followed the teachings of other mesmerists visiting the United States from Europe and began to develop his own practice of working with ill patients, many of whom claimed he cured them.
He was called a quack and fraud by those who did not understand his ideas, but his work served as the foundation of New Thought – how the mind can cure, or harm, by the use of this invisible and mesmerising force.
Mental Sciences
According to an article on NewThoughtWisdom.com, “New Thought also helped guide a variety of social changes throughout the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st centuries. New Thought directly influenced the growing movement of ‘Mental Sciences’ of the mid-19th century, which would later become the New Thought Movement. The mental-healing movement was a protest against old beliefs and methods, particularly the old-school medical practice and the old theology of the time.”
Quimby’s belief that one could cure themself of disease by using their own mind was at the forefront of a revolution in how we thought about illness and suggested strongly that we had more control than even doctors or pills and surgeries.
The ‘Mental Sciences’ are also rooted in the work of Warren Felt Evans who became a student of the movement in 1863 after seeking healing from Quimby. His great achievement was being the first to write about the New Thought healing methods as taught and practised by Quimby. His first book was published six years after Quimby died.
The New Thought movement may have originated in the United States, but it also had some roots in England, where the term “Higher Thought” was used instead of “Mental Sciences.” New Thought ideas spread via lectures, books, magazines, and leaflets in the early days. It was never intended to be a formal or organised religion. New Thought groups and churches were non-judgmental and open to all, unlike more traditional religions with rules, doctrines, and dogma.
Eventually, there arose three major branches within the movement that still exist today:
- Religious Science/Science of Mind
- Church of Divine Science
- Unity Church/Unity Christianity
Religious Science was founded by Ernest Holmes (1877–1960) who wrote the seminal textbook, The Science of Mind. Holmes was heavily influenced by other New Thought pioneers such as Judge Thomas Troward, a founder of Mental Science, and literary legend Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as the work of Emma Curtis Hopkins, who was often described as the New Thought “teacher of teachers” because of her influence on the movement.
Religious Science is a spiritual system based on the idea that all religions claim the same divine truth. Holmes wrote, “The varying faiths of mankind are unnumbered, but the primal faith of the race is today, as of old, the One Faith; an instructive reliance upon the Unseen, which we have learned to call God.” The teachings of Religious Science, summed up in The Science of Mind, claimed people could realise their true power and individual goals by believing the Universe was filled with divine intelligence, purpose, and order and that they could access that intelligence within, through the power of their minds and alignment of their thoughts.
The Church of Divine Science originated in San Francisco in the 1880s under Malinda Cramer (1844–1906). She and her husband Frank created the Home College of Spiritual Science in March 1888. Cramer later changed the name to the Home College of Divine Science. According to Divinescience.org, divine science teaches “that the fullness of Spirit is forever pouring Itself through the mind of man, limited only by the way man thinks and feels about life in general and about certain conditions and situations in particular. Therefore, all change begins as an activity in mind and through the law of cause-and-effect mind manifests as a personal experience.”
Unity Church or Unity was founded by Charles (1854–1948) and Myrtle Fillmore (1845–1931) in 1889, with roots in Transcendentalism. Unity describes itself as “for people who might call themselves spiritual but not religious” and publishes a popular devotional publication called Daily Word. Unity has more of a Christian basis but without the dogma and doctrine. Unitychurch.org describes “a philosophy of life that emphasises a positive approach to Christianity and daily living and is based on the principles of Truth taught and exemplified by Jesus the Christ. We welcome all people regardless of religious background and serve their spiritual needs through prayer, education, publishing and being of loving service.”
All were incorporated into the International New Thought Alliance (www.newthoughtalliance.org), which provides educational information as a gathering place (now online) for those who follow the principles and practices.
Key Principles
The principles of New Thought, no matter what group or branch, are as follows:
- Infinite intelligence, or God, is omnipotent and omnipresent.
- Spirit is the Ultimate Reality.
- True human self-hood is divine.
- Disease has a mental origin.
- Divine thought has power for good.
- Right thinking can heal.
- There is power in prayer, meditation, and positive thinking.
New Thought regards God as the Source of all, infinite intelligence that is everywhere, and that divine thought is a force for good in the world. God, or this infinite intelligence, exists within and yet is the entirety of the Universe itself, and there are metaphysical laws that govern the spiritual universe just as scientific laws govern the physical universe. We can use these metaphysical laws to consciously create our life experiences.
According to NewThoughtWisdom.com, “New Thought teaches that everything begins in the mind, and that events in the ‘outer’ world reflect the atmosphere of the ‘inner’ world: the macrocosm of human collective consciousness is regarded as inseparable from the microcosm of individual thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs. Through a shift in consciousness, conditions can be altered – for the individual and thus for the collective.”
In other words, as the late modern New Thought teacher/author Dr Wayne Dyer put it, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Neuroscience tells us that our brains will look for evidence of what we expect and believe. We are pretty much what we think about all day long, as are our experiences.
These concepts can be traced to the more mystical teachings and philosophies of the ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Taoist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Vedic, and Muslim cultures, emphasising the interaction between the mind/thought and consciousness and its effects in the external world outside of the human mind. Unlike many religious teachings, there is no need for a middleman, an intercessor, a Church leader, a dogmatic doctrine, or a set of fixed rules.
What a dangerous concept in these trying times when we feel so out of control because of tyrannical entities such as the World Economic Forum, the UN, Big Pharma, and our government leaders seeking to take away every remaining freedom we have. If we were to all wake-up and realise we have this divine power within us and that we alone control our minds, thoughts, and beliefs, those who seek to control us and make money off of our backs would be… powerless. This is why a new revolution of New Thought principles and teachings can literally change the world.
But first, we must change ourselves individually. We must achieve right thinking and learn to focus our thoughts and attention on what we want to create, not what we don’t want. New Thought teaches us that we are all sparks of divinity and that, as stated in the Divine Science Statement of Being, “God is all, both invisible and visible. One Presence, One Mind, One Power is all. This One that is Perfect Life, Perfect Love and Perfect Substance.” We are also told that “the transcendence and immanence of God is manifest in all created things.” Imagine knowing that we are a part of this divine powerhouse that takes invisible, unformed substance and brings it into form. Who would need institutions and corporations to create prosperity? Who would need the constant intervention and meddling of medical authorities and Big Pharma when we can learn to heal our own bodies via the power of our minds?
New Thought reminds us that there is visible and invisible, absolute and relative, universal and individual and that it is all God, and we are a part of this. God is within us. Just as Christians are told the Kingdom of Heaven is not some external place, but in us and through us and all around us.
New Thought is called a process that evolves with each individual. Unlike traditional religions, New Thought remains “new” by embracing insights, discoveries, and levels of consciousness that allow the individual and the collective to continue to “become” more.
How Can Evil Exist if God is All Good?
As millions of people die from vaccine injuries, COVID-19, crime, poverty and other causes, one might ask how New Thought views evil. In “Toward the Prophetic: A New Direction in the Practice of New Thought” by independent scholar Liza J. Rankow for Religion Online, God is not personified but regarded as “an Eternal Principle that appears as Law, Being, Mind, Spirit, the Cause and Source of All.”
Rankow explains that the Christian doctrine of God as good is contrasted with “some independently existent evil, in a dualistic context (whether or not that evil is personified as the devil or Satan). New Thought, however, believes in ultimate oneness and that God is all there is, and “evil is regarded not as a fundamental part of the universal order, but as the byproduct of a human consciousness of separation.” Thus it is this sense of separation that is at the root of all evil and despair.
We are, therefore, individualised expressions of and one with the Life of God, spiritual beings in human incarnation. We can choose good or evil within that context and Life will respond to the force and focus of our thoughts. To reach our greatest soul development and for the good of the collective soul, it behoves us to choose good. This was a central teaching of Jesus Christ and other great wisdom teachers who believed in The Golden Rule.
The Power Is Us
Those who seek to suppress, control, or rule over us, whether individuals or institutions, know that many of us have lost our connection to this truth – that we are divine co-creators, that we have the power within to change our thoughts and minds and therefore our external experiences, and that no one can take away the sovereignty of our minds and freedom of our thoughts. They know we have little to no spiritual life because they have forced us into a relentless fear-based survival mode.
As more of us awaken to these New Thought teachings, their power over us will diminish and vanish. We will no longer be victims of people, things, or situations outside us. We will step into our true nature, one they will do anything to keep from us.
We can then apply the principles of universal and divine oneness of the individual to the greater social condition, creating a profound new understanding of how we interact with others and the Earth itself. If we understand that the essence of all life is unified with Source, and we are all of that Source, then there is no “we” and “them” and only all of us, and harming one harms all. Individual transformation leads to the transformation of the entirety of life itself. The power begins with each of us.
What a truly revolutionary act it is today, amidst censorship and banning and suppression of truth, to learn to reclaim our inner power, our divine connection, and our ability to use our minds to create the lives we desire and to control our thoughts, our lives, and our destinies. This is the gift of New Thought.
Sources
Braden, Charles. Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought. Southern Methodist University Press, 1963.
“History of New Thought.” Center for Spiritual Living Tahoe-Truckee. tahoecsl.org/history-of-new-thought/
Holmes, Ernest. The Science of Mind: A Philosophy, A Faith, A Way of Life. Tarcher Putnam, 1998.
International New Thought Alliance. newthoughtalliance.org
“The Philosophy and Foundation of the New Thought Movement.”
newthoughtwisdom.com/about-new-thought.html
“Toward the Prophetic: A New Direction in the Practice of New Thought.” Liza J. Rankow, Ph.D., Religion Online. religion-online.org/article/toward-the-prophetic-a-new-direction-in-the-practice-of-new-thought
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