One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  Some quantum physicists are attempting to deal with this predicament by replicating “superposition” experiments on a larger scale, using molecules rather than atoms. Some are attempting to devise experiments with macro-sized objects, such as proteins. Only future experiments will determine whether the implications of “leakage” keep us from seeing reality. For now, however, decades of quantum data make it defensible to conclude that observation done on the subatomic scale: (1) shapes the nature of outcomes, (2) determines the presence or absence of a localized object, and (3) possibly devises multiple pasts and presents. This last point is sometimes called the “many-worlds interpretation,” in the words of physicist Hugh Everett. This theory of “many worlds” raises the prospect of an infinite number of realities and states of being, each depending upon our choices.

  The concept of multiple worlds and outcomes finds its closest New Thought analog in the ideas of Neville Goddard, who reasoned that our thoughts create an infinitude of realities and outcomes. Neville argued that everything we see and experience, including one another, is the product of what happens in our own individual dream of reality. Through a combination of emotional conviction and mental images, Neville believed, each person imagines his own world into being—all people and events are rooted in us, as we are ultimately rooted in God. When a person awakens to his true self, Neville argued, he will, in fact, discover himself to be a slumbering branch of the Creator clothed in human form, and at the helm of infinite possibilities.

  Most quantum physicists wouldn’t be caught dead/alive as Schrodinger’s cat reading an occult philosopher such as Neville. Indeed, many physicists reject the notion of interpreting the larger implications of quantum data at all. “Shut up and calculate!” is the battle cry popularized by physicist N. David Mermin. The role of physics, critics insist, is to measure things—not, in Einstein’s phrase, to lift “the veil that shrouds the Old One.” Leave that to gurus and philosophers, but, for heaven’s sake, critics argue, keep it out of the physics lab. Others adopt the opposite position: If physics isn’t for explaining reality, then what is it for?

  The latter principle may carry the day. A rising generation of physicists, educated in the 1960s and ’70s and open to questions of consciousness, is currently reaching positions of leadership in physics departments (and gaining authority in areas of grant making and funding). This cohort was educated in a world populated by Zen and motorcycle maintenance, psychedelic experimentation, and Star Trek; they tend to be open to philosophical questions and meta-analysis. As scientists they are every bit as rigorous as the past generation of classical empiricists. Hence, we could be on the brink of a renaissance of inquiry into the most remarkable scientific issue since Newton codified classical mechanics. As more data is known, purveyors of quantum physics and metaphysics may be headed for a new and serious conversation.

  But the pitfalls are too important not to consider before waltzing off into the world of “both/and” realities. To the frustration of scientists, spiritual seekers often prove overeager to seize upon the implications of quantum data, declaring that we now have proof that the universe is the result of our minds. The correlation between the events of the micro world and those of the daily life that we see and feel is far from clear. Spiritual seekers should resist the temptation to cherry-pick from data that seems to confirm their most deeply cherished ideas. Likewise, physicists should be patient with lay seekers who want to ponder the possibilities of quantum physics. If the right balance can be struck, serious and thoughtful people from both worlds, science and spirituality, have something to talk over.

  Changing the Brain

  Since the 1990s, an intriguing courtship has emerged between certain branches of quantum theorizing and psychology. Neuroscientists and research psychiatrists, notably Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D., of UCLA, have been studying what has been termed neuroplasticity. Brain scans show that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) who repeatedly and effectively redirect their thoughts from intrusive or ritualistic impulses not only alleviate symptoms, but over time can actually change their brain biology by “rewiring” neural pathways.

  The necessary formula is this: When an obsessive thought or ritual begins to take hold, the individual immediately redirects his thinking to something else that is pleasurable and diverting, such as listening to music, watching a favorite TV show, or performing a desirable physical activity. After a time, researchers find, the repeated diversions actually create new nerve-cell structures in the brain, which replace the electro-neural pathways associated with OCD.

  “I propose,” Schwartz writes, “that the time has come for science to confront serious implications of the fact that directed, willed mental activity can clearly and systematically alter brain function; that the exertion of willful effort generates a physical force that has the power to change how the brain works and even its physical structure.”

  Schwartz linked his UCLA findings to developments in quantum physics. “The implications of direct neuroplasticity combined with quantum physics,” he wrote in his 2002 book The Mind and the Brain, “cast new light on the question of humanity’s place, and role, in nature.” The co-emergence of the two fields, he argued, “suggests that the natural world evolves through an interplay between two causal processes.”

  Hence, if our thought process can alter the pathways through which electrical impulses travel in the brain, and permanently change behaviors that are produced, then brain biology can be understood as the product of thought, as much as the other way around. This process, Schwartz claims, “allows human thoughts to make a difference in the evolution of physical events.” And the method at the back of it, he writes, “is what I call directed mental force.”

  Brain imaging and several years of clinical study support the findings of neuroplasticity. Yet the same insight existed instinctively—and with virtually the same methods and exercises—in early New Thought. Between 1909 and 1911, minister and philosopher John Herman Randall issued a series of pamphlets that explored the ideas of positive thinking and the new mental therapeutics. He collected them in his 1911 book, A New Philosophy of Life, in which he described an intriguing method to escape nagging thoughts. Randall called it substitution. He wrote:

  Divert your mind from the discordant thought by thinking in other channels. Do not wait a moment, when the wrong thought gets into your mind, but turn to the magazine or the book, and read until your mind is filled with other thoughts. Or, take up some task that calls for all your energy, and forces you to concentrate your mental activities along other lines. It may be a little difficult at first, but I want to tell you, on the experience of multitudes of men and women [that this approach] if persevered in, will succeed in every life.

  Randall’s technique and terminology foreshadowed the precise method of neuroplasticity as it relates to OCD.*4 People fail to devise constructive new habits, Randall wrote, “because they are not persistent and patient enough in forming the new brain centres from whence must be permanently expressed the new life, that may in very truth be born in them …” And elsewhere: “Our thinking must be turned into other channels than those which we know will lead to the worrisome thoughts”—the remedy being to “substitute some new line of thought,” anything that gets us out of “narrow restricted grooves.” Randall’s insights anticipated the language and findings of twenty-first-century neuroplasticity.

  The Positive-Thinking Revolution

  This brings us, finally, to a convergence among the questions and possibilities probed by the contemporary psychiatric researcher, the earnest New-Thoughter, and the broad-minded quantum theorist. If overstatement or conclusion-leaping can be avoided, the questions that surround today’s studies of physical reality and the uses of the mind can be understood as extraordinary and profoundly challenging—both to students of physics and metaphysics, and for the same reasons.

  In 2009, I attended a presentation on the “quantum measurement problem” delivered by scientist Dean Radin be
fore an audience of scientists, social thinkers, and scholars of religion. I asked Radin to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room: If observation and perspective alter material on a micro level, in the world of waves and particles, might that say something about the legitimacy of the New Thought or mind-power thesis? “It’s not complete bullshit,” Radin replied. “There may be an inkling of something to it.” Another physicist and longtime military researcher was also present. “As the resident skeptic,” he said, “I concur.”

  Boston University geologist Robert M. Schoch has an expression: “Something only has to be a little bit true to change everything.” Is New Thought “a little bit true”? The experiences of the past 150 years suggest as much. Yes, positive thinking does work—but it works amid a variety of different forces: accidental, biological, natural, and psychological. We live under the accidents of fortune, illness, forces of nature, traumas of the past, and on the waves of relationships with others, who may possess conflicting needs and aims. These are lawful facts of life. But the mind also wields a shade of influence—it is an influence that we don’t fully understand, but one that is accorded steadily greater credibility by generations of study in medicine, psychology, biology, and the physical sciences. Historically, the powers of attitude, observation, and outlook become ever greater-seeming, never more-proscribed.

  In medicine, the positive-thinking movement, long before any other thought school, anticipated our still-expanding conception of how a patient’s mind can be used to manage illness and discomfort. In psychology, positive thinkers foresaw the potential for behavior modification, autosuggestion, hypnotherapy, and reconditioning as a means to relieving dysfunction. In the emergent field of neuroplasticity, in which thoughts are seen to alter aspects of brain biology, the protocols prescribed to patients echo methods that positive thinkers devised over a century ago. And, finally, before the foundations of quantum mechanics were laid in the early twentieth century, the positive-thinking movement struggled to express a ragged, rough-hewn instinct for one of the remarkable challenges being considered in some of today’s quantum physics labs: Namely, if the presence of an observer not only affects the thing being observed, but actually localizes an object or brings it to its resting place when an observation or measurement is made, then what is the nature of the mind and observation, and what is meant by creation itself?

  On a personal scale, at those moments when the mind and emotions are at one—at such times it may be better to speak of a psyche than a mind—the experience of generations of self-aware individuals testifies that our focus adds something extra to our experience. This is not strictly a matter of rewiring the brain or making suggestions to the subconscious. “Psi studies,” Radin related to me, “go one step further and suggest that all this positive thinking also tweaks the world at large in small but measurable ways we still don’t understand.”

  Returning to Krishnamurti’s dialogues with Indian youths, the spiritual teacher responded this way to a student who feared being thrown out of his home if he violated his father’s wishes and pursued an engineering career:

  If you persist in wanting to be an engineer even though your father turns you out of the house, do you mean to say that you won’t find ways and means to study engineering? You will beg, go to friends. Sir, life is very strange. The moment you are very clear about what you want to do, things happen. Life comes to your aid—a friend, a relation, a teacher, a grandmother, somebody helps you. But if you are afraid to try because your father may turn you out, then you are lost. Life never comes to the aid of those who merely yield to some demand out of fear. But if you say, “This is what I really want to do and I am going to pursue it,” then you will find that something miraculous takes place.

  Yet the exertions of the psyche and the determinations of the soul cannot be seen in isolation from the forces around us. When we suffer—as we inevitably will, probably in a fifty-fifty mixture with our joys over the course of a lifetime—we can aspire not to glibly affirm away our suffering, which can lead to desperation and frustration, but rather to see ourselves as thinkers who have charge over a certain range of circumstances, which may variously loop and weave within and without our control. From such a state, we can face life finally and fully as ourselves, possessed of soul desires that will, if persisted in and within natural parameters, be reflected in the folds of our experience.

  The act of questioning, probing, and affirming the fullness of our possibilities can avert the psychological pain of feeling that we haven’t faced life as we should, which is actually the chief cause of shame and anger. The wish to authentically search for the self and its true aims is, perhaps, the greatest form of mental affirmation to which a person can aspire, and the one that brings the most help.

  The pioneers of the positive-thinking movement, acting with deep practical intent, probed the possibilities and capacities of our psyches earlier than any scientists, theologians, or psychologists of the modern industrialized age. The founders of New Thought and affirmative thinking created a fresh means of viewing life, one that was rough and incomplete, rife with mistakes and dead ends, but also filled with possibility and practical application. These pioneers, whose work commenced only in the latter half of the nineteenth century, began an extraordinary conversation and experiment about the power of thought to shape the experience of the individual. There exists an authentic and efficacious beginning in their ideas, which remain relatively new. In that sense, the positive-thinking movement created the genuine and still-unfolding Reformation of the modern search for meaning for which William James had hoped.

  * * *

  *1 Apart from the belief in a change of conditions, the New Thought and Christian Science perspectives diverge. As noted earlier, Christian Science does not see the mind as an instrument of good but as a tool of illusion. New Thought, by contrast, views the mind as a divine and empowering agency. For the remainder of this chapter I focus chiefly on New Thought, which undergirds the positive-thinking culture.

  *2 Evans used an 1875 English translation.

  *3 UCRS has since merged with Religious Science International, the other major Holmes ministry, to form United Centers for Spiritual Living.

  *4 In 1904 the Nobel-winning Spanish neuro-anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal also had the insight that thoughts repeated by “mental practice” would reinforce neural pathways, though the brain imaging that would prove his point did not yet exist.

  Notes on Sources

  These notes are intended to supplement attributions that appear in individual chapters. When a source is already cited within a chapter, it is not generally repeated here.

  CHAPTER ONE:

  TO WISH UPON A STAR

  Emerson is quoted from his 1870 essay “Success.” The Talmudic precept is from Pirkei Avot (“Ethics of the Fathers”), chapter 1:15.

  William James used the term “the religion of healthy-mindedness” in The Varieties of Religious Experience (Longmans, Green & Co., 1902). In his memoir Manifest Victory (Harper & Brothers, 1941, 1947), religious scholar J. R. Moseley recalls James’s conviction that New Thought “constituted, together with Christian Science, a spiritual movement as significant for our day as the Reformation was for its time.” James referred to “a wave of religious activity” in his essay “The Energies of Men,” Philosophical Review, January 1907.

  Thomas Jefferson’s statement about Unitarianism is from his letter of June 26, 1822, to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse. Mark Twain’s explorations of Christian Science date back to Cosmopolitan magazine of October 1899 and appeared in their fullest form in his book Christian Science (Harper & Brothers, 1907).

  My reference to the work of Barbara Ehrenreich is from her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (Metropolitan Books, 2009). Richard Hofstadter’s observations are from his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, 1963). The X song “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” appeared on the band’s 1983 album, More Fun in the New World.


  The quoted correspondence is from Christy Croft, written to me in an e-mail of March 5, 2012. I am grateful for her permission to quote from it, as well as for her broader insights into the ethical issues of positive thinking.

  Gary Ward Materra is quoted from his dissertation, Women in Early New Thought: Lives and Theology in Transition, From the Civil War to World War I (Department of Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara, 1997).

  CHAPTER TWO:

  POSITIVE NATION

  Historian John K. Simmons highlighted the positive-thinking roots of popular advertising slogans in his “Christian Science and American Culture,” America’s Alternative Religions edited by Timothy Miller (State University of New York Press, 1995).

  George Berkeley’s passages are from his 1710 work Principles of Human Knowledge (Penguin Classics, 1988, 2004).

  On the excesses of heroic medicine, and related topics in early American medicine, I have benefited from Wakoh Shannon Hickey’s dissertation, Mind Cure, Meditation, and Medicine: Hidden Histories of Mental Healing in the United States (Department of Religion, Duke University, 2008). Also helpful on the issues of nineteenth-century American medicine are Materra (1997); Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America edited by Norman Gevitz (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America by James C. Whorton, Ph.D. (Oxford University Press, 2002), from which Benjamin Rush is quoted.

  Of the many volumes that survey Phineas Quimby’s life and writing, a uniquely helpful resource is Ronald A. Hughes’s Phineas Parkhurst Quimby: His Complete Writings and Beyond (Phineas Parkhurst Quimby Resource Center, 2009); Hughes’s collection identifies errors that have persisted in earlier collections. Also valuable is The Complete Collected Works of Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby edited by Rev. Lux Newman and the Phineas Parkhurst Quimby Philosophical Society (Seed of Life Publishing, 2008, 2012). Quimby’s recovery story is drawn from “My Conversion,” January 1863, as published in Phineas Parkhurst Quimby: The Complete Writings, vol. 3, edited by Ervin Seale (DeVorss, 1988). Details on Quimby’s life are also from a biographical treatment written by Quimby’s son George and published in the March 1888 edition of The New England Magazine, as reprinted in the Belfast (ME) Republican Journal of January 10, 1889. Other aspects of Quimby’s early career are drawn from commentary by Hughes (2009) and Seale (1988); The Quimby Manuscripts edited by Horatio Dresser (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1921, 2nd edition); and The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby by Annetta G. Dresser (Geo. H. Ellis, 1895).