One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  People called in for help, first in the thousands and then hundreds of thousands. They rang from farms, cities, small towns, and overseas—making prayer requests for healing, marital strife, loneliness, or financial needs. Countless callers felt some solace from the sympathetic voice on the other end of the phone who answered: “This is Silent Unity. How may we pray with you?” Silent Unity remains a popular service, handling thousands of calls a day. It is not a money-raising outfit or a faith-healing operation, but a confidential prayer service run with dignity and sensitivity. Silent Unity was the type of prayer program that physician Richard C. Cabot would have found an appropriate complement to medical treatment.

  In 1919 Charles began using his real-estate savvy to acquire land near Kansas City, which took shape as the fourteen-hundred-acre Unity Village. This campus housed the Fillmores’ publishing operations, distance-prayer ministry, radio broadcasts, churches, meeting spaces, hotel rooms, and residential quarters.*3 Continually expanding their media operation, the Fillmores exposed hundreds of thousands of American households to mind-power metaphysics through their magazine Unity and their children’s periodical, Wee Wisdom, which also launched the literary career of novelist Sidney Sheldon. It published the ten-year-old’s first poem in 1927 and sent him five dollars.

  All of this occurred in an era before the nation’s vast media ministries had taken root. The pioneering televangelist Oral Roberts did not publish his first pamphlet-sized work until 1947, the year before the deaths of Charles Fillmore and Frank B. Robinson. At a time when America’s evangelical revivals were still held in large tents, the Fillmores had already completed a model of the ministry as a clearinghouse for magazines, pamphlets, advice books, radio shows, and prayer requests. In 1948, journalist Marcus Bach, the friend to Frank B. Robinson, visited Unity Village and was astonished at how the Missouri operation dwarfed even Robinson’s own:

  As I walked through the mailing rooms at the plant in Kansas City, I could believe what I had been told; an average of four thousand pieces of mail was leaving Unity every day. Many of these were heavily stuffed envelopes from Silent Unity, a prayer room equipped with a telephone. The attendant who answers … relays the requests to a group of Unity believers who pray without ceasing. Someone is at the altar of Silent Unity day and night; receiving requests, tuning in on God, and stuffing envelopes with a mimeographed letter, a booklet of testimonials, and a printed affirmation, “The healing power of God, through Christ, is now doing Its perfect work in me, and I am made whole.” The output of Unity’s efficient publicity machine is astounding: a million monthly periodicals, thousands of tracts, pamphlets, pocket-sized editions of daily devotions, and numerous books written by the Fillmores. To an amazingly varied clientele they bring a realization of the “Christ within.”

  This was the first full-scale realization of the modern media ministry, built on positive-thinking ideals.

  NEVILLE GODDARD:

  MAN AS CREATOR

  Perhaps the most intriguing and substantive teacher of New Thought in the years immediately following World War II was an Anglo–West Indian dancer and stage actor who cultivated a mysterious biography and went by the singular name Neville.

  Born in 1905 in Barbados to an English family, Neville Goddard arrived in New York in the early 1920s to study theater. His ambition for the stage faded as he came in contact with various mystical and occult philosophies. By the early 1930s he embarked on a new and unforeseen career as a lecturer and writer of mind-power metaphysics. In lectures, Neville often referred to an enigmatic, turbaned black man named Abdullah who he said tutored him in Scripture, number mysticism, Kabbalah, and Hebrew.

  Whatever the source of Neville’s education, his outlook not only reflected the most occultic edge of New Thought but also the philosophy’s most intellectually stimulating expression. Neville saw each individual as a potential God, who could select from among a universe of infinite realities, all brought into existence by a mixture of our mind’s-eye imagery and emotive states. That which we think, feel, and see to be true, Neville taught, literally is true. In Neville’s viewpoint, our active imagination—that is, our thoughts and corresponding feelings—creates reality. (I consider the implications of Neville’s ideas further in the final chapter.)

  In public talks, Neville made extravagant claims—such as his use of mental visualizations to win himself an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army after being drafted at the height of World War II. In actuality, such a sudden discharge did occur. Neville entered the army on November 12, 1942, obligated to serve for the duration of the war. But military records show that four months later, in March 1943, the mystic and Greenwich Village aesthete was “discharged from service to accept employment in an essential wartime industry.” Neville resumed his “essential wartime” job as a metaphysical lecturer. A profile in The New Yorker of September 11, 1943, described the handsome speaker back at the lectern before swooning (and often female) New York audiences. It is unclear why Neville, a lithe man in perfect health, would have been released from the military at the peak of the war. “Unfortunately,” an army public affairs officer said, “Mr. Goddard’s records were destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center.”

  Neville also made bold claims about the prosperous rise of his family’s food-service and retail businesses in Barbados—claims that likewise conform to public records. Even Neville’s tales about the mysterious Abdullah, as will be seen, are far from dismissible.

  Yet other stories surrounding Neville are shakier. In 1955, Hollywood gossip columnist Jimmie Fidler described the young Neville as “enormously wealthy,” his family possessing “a whole island in the West Indies.” In actuality, Neville’s material existence as a young man was precarious, a fact he never disguised. While he landed roles on Broadway and toured as part of a ballroom dancing duo, Neville lived hand-to-mouth, working for a time as an elevator operator and a shipping clerk. In pursuit of spiritual awareness, the young man experimented with ascetic living, including swearing off meat, dairy, tobacco, and alcohol. At one point, his weight dropped from 176 to 135 pounds.

  By 1930 Neville felt physically unwell and was no closer to peering into life’s mysteries. But he experienced a dramatic turnaround upon meeting his mysterious spiritual mentor named Abdullah. In Neville’s recollection, his first meeting with Abdullah had an air of kismet:

  When I first met my friend Abdullah back in 1931 I entered a room where he was speaking and when the speech was ended he came over, extended his hand and said: “Neville, you are six months late.” I had never seen the man before, so I said: “I am six months late? How do you know me?” and he replied: “The brothers told me that you were coming and you are six months late.”

  Writing about Neville in the 1940s, the occult philosopher Israel Regardie called Abdullah an “eccentric Ethiopian rabbi.” The description stuck, and Neville’s apprenticeship under an “African rabbi” became part of his mythos.

  Following this fateful encounter, Neville said he and Abdullah together studied Hebrew, Scripture, number symbolism, and mystical religions for five years—planting the seeds of Neville’s philosophy of mental creativity. Neville recalled first grasping the potential of creative thought while he was living in a rented room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the winter of 1933. The young man was depressed: his theatrical career had stalled and he was broke. “After twelve years in America, I was a failure in my own eyes,” he said. “I was in the theater and made money one year and spent it the next month.” The twenty-eight-year-old ached to spend Christmas with his family in Barbados, but he couldn’t afford to travel.

  “Live as though you are there,” Abdullah told him, “and that you shall be.” Wandering the streets of New York City, Neville adopted the feeling state that he was really and truly at home on his native island. “Abdullah taught me the importance of remaining faithful to an idea and not compromising,” he remembered. On a December morning before the last ship that year w
as to depart for Barbados, Neville received a letter from a long-out-of-touch brother: Tucked inside were fifty dollars and a passenger ticket.

  By the mid-1950s, Neville’s life story exerted a powerful pull on a budding writer whose own memoirs of mystic discovery later made him a near-household name: Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda told his own tales of tutelage under a mysterious instructor, in his case a Native American sorcerer named Don Juan. Castaneda first discovered Neville through an early love interest in Los Angeles, Margaret Runyan, who was among Neville’s most dedicated students. A cousin of American storyteller Damon Runyon, Margaret wooed the stocky Latin art student at a friend’s house, slipping Carlos a slender Neville volume called The Search, in which she had inscribed her name and phone number. The two became lovers and later husband and wife.

  Runyan spoke frequently to Castaneda about her mystical teacher Neville, but he responded with little more than mild interest—with one exception. In her memoirs, Runyan recalled Castaneda growing fascinated when the conversation turned to Neville’s discipleship under an exotic teacher:

  … it was more than the message that attracted Carlos, it was Neville himself. He was so mysterious. Nobody was really sure who he was or where he had come from. There were vague references to Barbados in the West Indies and his being the son of an ultra-rich plantation family, but nobody knew for sure. They couldn’t even be sure about this Abdullah business, his Indian teacher, who was always way back there in the jungle, or someplace. The only thing you really knew was that Neville was here and that he might be back next week, but then again …

  “There was,” she concluded, “a certain power in that position, an appealing kind of freedom in the lack of past and Carlos knew it.”

  Both Neville and Castaneda were dealing with the same basic idea, and one that had a certain pedigree in America’s alternative spiritual culture: tutelage under hidden spiritual masters. It was a concept that the Russian mystic Madame H. P. Blavatsky ignited in the minds of Western seekers with her late-nineteenth-century accounts of her mentorship to unseen Mahatmas, or Great Souls. Blavatsky aroused a hope that invisible help was out there; that guidance could be sought from a difficult-to-place master of wisdom, someone who might arrive from an exotic land, or another plane of existence, and who could dispense illuminated knowledge. Indeed, the Abdullah story as told by Neville might be dismissible as a tale borrowed and retouched from Blavatsky—except for another, better-known figure in the positive-thinking tradition who, toward the end of his life, made his own claims of mentorship under the turbaned Abdullah.

  The Irish emigrant writer Joseph Murphy arrived in New York City in the early 1920s with a degree in chemistry and a passion to study metaphysics. Murphy is widely remembered for his 1963 megaseller The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. The book remains one of the most engaging and popular works of mind-power philosophy. Shortly before his death in 1981, Murphy, in a little-known series of interviews published by a French press in Quebec, described his own encounter with the mysterious Abdullah. Interviewer Bernard Cantin recounted the tale in his 1987 book of dialogues with Murphy:

  It was in New York that Joseph Murphy also met the professor Abdullah, a Jewish man of black ancestry, a native of Israel, who knew, in every detail, all the symbolism of each of the verses of the Old and the New Testaments. This meeting was one of the most significant in Dr. Murphy’s spiritual evolution. In fact, Abdullah, who had never seen nor known the Murphy family, said flatly that Murphy came from a family of six children, and not five, as Murphy himself had believed. Later on, Murphy, intrigued, questioned his mother and learned that, indeed, he had had another brother who had died a few hours after his birth, and was never spoken of again.

  Was there a real esoteric teacher named Abdullah who taught Neville and Murphy? A plausible candidate exists. He is found in the figure of a 1920s- and ’30s-era black-nationalist mystic named Arnold Josiah Ford. Like Neville, Ford was born in Barbados, in 1877, the son of an itinerant preacher. Ford arrived in Harlem around 1910 and established himself as a leading voice in the Ethiopianism movement, a precursor to Jamaican Rastafarianism. Both movements held that the East African nation of Ethiopia was home to a lost Israelite tribe that had preserved the teachings of a mystical African belief system. Ford considered himself an original Israelite, and a man of authentic Judaic descent. Like Abdullah, Ford was considered an “Ethiopian rabbi.” Surviving photographs show Ford as a dignified, somewhat severe-looking man with a set jaw and penetrating gaze, wearing a turban, just like Neville’s Abdullah. Ford himself cultivated an air of mystery, attracting “much apocryphal and often contradictory speculation,” noted Randall K. Burkett, a historian of black-nationalist movements.

  Ford lived in New York City at the same time that Neville began his discipleship with Abdullah. Neville recalled his and Abdullah’s first meeting in 1931, and U.S. Census records show Ford was living in Harlem on West 131st Street in 1930. (He was also at the same address in 1920, shortly before Joseph Murphy arrived.) Historian Howard Brotz, in his study of the black-Jewish movement in Harlem, wrote of Ford: “It is certain that he studied Hebrew with some immigrant teacher and was a key link” in communicating “approximations of Talmudic Judaism” from within the Ethiopianism movement. This would fit Neville’s depiction of Abdullah tutoring him in Hebrew and Kabbalah. (It should be noted that early-twentieth-century occultists often loosely used the term Kabbalah to denote any kind of Judaic study.)

  More still, Ford’s philosophy of Ethiopianism possessed a mental metaphysics. “The philosophy,” noted historian Jill Watts, “… contained an element of mind-power, for many adherents of Ethiopianism subscribed to mental healing and believed that material circumstances could be altered through God’s power. Such notions closely paralleled tenets of New Thought …” Ford was also an early supporter of black-nationalist pioneer Marcus Garvey and served as the musical director of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey, as noted earlier, suffused his movement with New Thought metaphysics and phraseology.

  The commonalities between Ford and Abdullah are striking: the black rabbi, the turban, the study of Hebrew, mind-power metaphysics, the Barbados connection, and the time frame. All of it point to Ford as a viable candidate for the mysterious teacher Abdullah.

  Yet there are too many gaps in both Neville’s and Ford’s backgrounds to allow for a conclusive leap. Records of Ford’s life grow thinner after 1931, the year he departed New York and migrated to Ethiopia. Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, after his coronation in 1930, offered land grants to any African Americans willing to relocate to the East African nation. Ford accepted the offer. The timing of Ford’s departure is the biggest single blow to the Abdullah-Ford theory. Neville said he and his teacher had studied together for five years. This obviously would not have been possible with Ford, who had apparently left New York in 1931, the same year Neville said that he and Abdullah first met.

  In a coda to Ford’s career, he journeyed to Africa, along with several other American followers of Ethiopianism, to accept the land grants offered by Haile Selassie. Yet Ford’s life in the Ethiopian countryside, a period so sadly sparse of records, could only have been a difficult existence for the urbane musician. Here was a man uprooted from metropolitan surroundings at an advanced age to settle into a new and unfamiliar agricultural landscape. All the while, Ethiopia was facing the threat of invasion by fascist Italy. Ford died in Ethiopia in September 1935, a few weeks before Mussolini’s troops crossed the border.

  While Ford’s migration runs counter to Neville’s timeline, there are other ways in which Ford may fit into the Abdullah mythos. Neville could have extrapolated Abdullah from Ford’s character after spending a briefer time with Ford. Or Abdullah may have been a metaphorical composite of several contemporaneous figures, perhaps including Ford.*4 Or, finally, Abdullah may have been Neville’s invention, though this scenario doesn’t account for Murphy’s record.

  The full story may never be k
nowable, but the notion of two young metaphysical seekers, Neville and Murphy, living in pre–World War II New York and studying under an African-American esoteric teacher, whether Ford or another, is itself wholly plausible. The crisscrossing currents of the mind-power movement in the first half of the twentieth century produced collaborations among a wide range of spiritual travelers. Such figures traversed the metaphysical landscape with a passion for personal development and self-reinvention.

  Success and Setback

  All of these determined seekers compelled mainstream spiritual culture to adapt itself to New Thought’s innovations. But the positive-thinking movement failed in one key respect. And that was in the ideal hoped for by Richard C. Cabot: To marry the possibilities of mind-power methods to rationalism; to devise a metaphysical therapeutics that could find allies among medical authorities and scientists.

  The possibilities had once seemed promising. In the early 1950s, Ernest Holmes shared a congenial dinner with Albert Einstein at Caltech. Holmes said that Einstein agreed with his premise “that permanent world peace is not an illusion but a potential possibility and an evolutionary imperative, and that science will aid in that evolution.” As late as 1969, the New York Times respectfully covered a meeting of the International New Thought Alliance under the headline “Mental Power as Force for Peace Tied to Man’s Triumph in Space.”

  But the push to find common ground between mind-power and science puttered out, and would not be heard again for another generation. New Thought books were considered too miraculous in tone, and too magical in their claims, to win attention from scientists, physicians, or literary and journalistic arbiters of opinion.

  Medical researchers, however, did begin turning new attention to the placebo effect after World War II. The impetus arrived when caregivers at an Allied battlefield hospital in southern Italy eased pain among injured soldiers by telling them that the saline solutions they were receiving were morphine, a substance of which the hospital had run short. Yet even as civilian researchers reconsidered the possibilities of mind-body medicine, they did so without a nod toward, or even any historical awareness of, the claims of the mental-healing movement. No new intellectual champion, akin to Cabot or William James, emerged to draw correlations between modern medical questions and the experiences that mind-cure advocates had reported since the late nineteenth century.