New Thought: Origins

introduction

Some of the most popular spiritual teachers of recent years have been Wayne Dyer, Neale Donald Walsch, Deepak Chopra and Rhonda Byrne. These people, along with earlier teachers such as Louise Hay, Richard Bach, Shakti Gawain, Terry Cole-Whittaker and many others, all belong to the intellectual school known as New Thought. This philosophy teaches we can change our physical situation by changing our thoughts. It says we can become healthy or wealthy if we think healthy or wealthy thoughts. New Thought began as a healing method developed in the 1850s by Phineas Quimby. It was given its first intellectual articulation by Warren Felt Evans in the later part of the nineteenth century. This essay looks at how Quimby developed the ideas and why he did it. It also looks at Evans’ philosophical formulation of what Quimby developed. It shows how contemporary teachers use the same philosophy and argument style these two people used in the nineteenth century. This essay was written in the hopes that people who encounter New Thought ideas will become more sophisticated in their understanding of these ideas.

The Development of New Thought

Phineas Quimby, the founder of New Thought, was born in 1802 and lived most of his life in Maine. In the late 1830s, Quimby became interested in mesmerism. Mesmerisim was developed in Austria in the eighteenth century by Franz Anton Mesmer, a friend of Mozart. Mesmer said that there was a power, which he called animal magnetism, that connected together all things in the cosmos. He claimed to have developed methods to channel this power to heal people. It was so popular in France in the eighteenth century that prominent French scientists set up a commission to study it. (This commission included Benjamin Franklin, who was in France at that time.) Some people who had been mesmerized (which we would now called being put in a hypnotic state) were thought to be able to read minds, heal people and see events happening hundreds of miles away. In the Romantic period, it was thought mesmerism was scientific proof that people had hidden powers and potentials far beyond what scientists thought.

The influence of mesmerism

Mesmerism was brought to the United States in 1838 and Quimby observed someone demonstrating it. Quimby investigated mesmerism and soon started mesmerizing or hypnotizing people himself. Luckily for him, he came across a young man named Lucius Burkmar who was easily hypnotized. Quimby would hynotize Burkmar and they would then exhibit the amazing powers of mesmerism in live demonstrations. While in a mesmerized state, Quimby would communicate with Burkmar entirely through his thoughts, and Burkmar would respond aloud to everyone. As Quimby, with the help of Burkmar, became increasingly popular, they were called upon to evaluate the sick while Burkmar was in a mesmerized state. Quimby explained, “We would put Lucius [Burkmar] into the mesmeric state, who would then examine the patient, describe his disease, and prescribe remedies for its cure.”

Quimby was able to heal many people using this method. He started to wonder why and how it worked. Eventually he decided that Burkmar was not actually seeing the patient’s illness. Rather Quimby believed Burkmar was reading the thoughts of the patient or the thoughts of someone else in the room who knew the patient and his disease. Even though he decided that Burkmar was not diagnosing their real illness and giving them no medically efficacious cures, he noticed the patients often got better anyways. Quimby decided that the patient got better because he had faith in Burkmar’s diagnosis and solution. People were getting cured by the power of their own thoughts.

the power of thoughts

After seeing how the power of suggestion or thought cured people, Quimby decided he no longer needed mesmerism. At this point in his life, Quimby was actually suffering from poor health himself. But with his new found knowledge of the mind, he felt confident that disease “and it’s power over life, its curability, ‘are all embraced in our belief.’” To prove this, he experimented on his own poor health. Quimby suffered such great pains in his lower back, due to poor kidneys, he was certain he would die within the year. But once he realized that people only get sick because of their thoughts, he realized he had only been fooled into the belief that he was ill. Quimby was then able to cure himself after years of suffering.

Quimby then made a huge jump in logic. From the fact that he could cure himself by thinking positive thoughts and could sometimes cure other people the same way, he decided that every kind of disease was mental. Quimby said, “If I believe I am sick, I am sick, for my feelings are my sickness, and my sickness is my belief in my mind. Therefore all sickness is in the mind or belief. . . . To cure the disease is to correct the error, destroy the cause, and the effect will cease.”

Disease and our thoughts

Quimby often claimed disease was really just false reasoning. Disease seems very bodily, so it is unusual to hear it called false reasoning. What could he mean by that? Quimby believed that if a person becomes too cold, she starts to feel like there is something wrong with her and then her mind convinces her that the feelings she is having is really part of a larger disease. But then because she thinks she is ill, she will become ill. This process shows the power of thoughts as one becomes exactly what one thinks. One person wrote an article that was printed in the Portland Advertiser in 1862 describing Quimby’s view of disease: “According to this new theory, disease is the invention of man. It is caused by a disturbance of the mind . . . and therefore originates there. We can call to mind instances where disease has been produced instantly by excitement, anger, fear, or joy. Is it not the more rational conclusion that disease is always caused by influences upon the mind rather than that it has an identity, comes to us, and attacks us?” Disease is not something external like germs or microbes that attack us; it has no such external identity or existence. Instead all diseases are caused by our thoughts.

Disease and the philosophy of George Berkeley

The New Thought tradition, to this very day, is characterized by very philosophical arguments for their ideas. Quimby discussed the eighteenth century idealist philosopher George Berkeley and seems to base his theory of disease on Berkeley’s idealistic philosophy. When Quimby says “for my feelings are my sickness, and my sickness is my belief in my mind. Therefore all sickness is in the mind or belief,” this is Berkeley’s idealistic philosophy. Berkeley taught that all external things in the world only have existence when they effect our mind, just as Quimby teaches that disease only exists when it effects our mind. Quimby then draws a conclusion like Berkeley’s that disease is in the mind or is my belief in it.

Summary of the power of thoughts on disease

Like later proponents of New Thought, Quimby starts with a sensible idea, but then pushes it way too far so it no longer fits the facts. If I have a minor ache, the sickness really just is the feeling and if the feeling goes away, the sickness goes away too. But Quimby leaps from that reasonable idea to the much larger idea that all sickness is just our feeling. But that does not make sense. If I have a serious illness like cancer, my sickness is much more than just my feelings, it is also an internal disease ravaging my insides whether I am aware of it or not.

In case anyone doubts Quimby is identifying my thoughts or feelings totally with my disease, he makes clear that he was taking this strong position on illnesses when he discussed vaccinations. Quimby said that the healthful powers of being vaccinated had nothing to do with the vaccination itself, but rather, was the result of one’s belief in the vaccination. Without this belief, the vaccination would simply not work; it is all just in one’s own mind. Quimby stated, “ ‘Every disease is an invention of man, and has no identity in Wisdom, but to those who believe it, it is a truth.’ Smallpox, he continues, ‘is a reality to all mankind,’ but ‘Small-pox is a lie. . . [it is] the invention of superstition.’ ”

The New Thought tradition continues this kind of reasoning. It starts with something true such as our minds have more power than mainstream science thinks it has and can influence our bodies and even sometimes the outer world. Then its proponents jump to the other extreme and say our minds influence everything in the external world and there is no limits to its power. New Thought proponents do the same thing with our connection to the divine. They start with the idea we have more of a connection to God or the Universal Oneness than traditional Christianity or modern science says, and then push it to the extreme that we are one with God and actually are God and have all the powers of God.

Quimby’s healing method

Quimby had an interesting healing method. He would usually start healing people by clairvoyantly opening himself up to the other person in order to understand what disease the other person thought he had. “Quimby would sit with the patient and become very still and passive, allowing the patient’s troubled mind to share itself with him clairvoyantly… Quimby did not make clear how this happens; he was vague and did not explain how his results were achieved. What he did say was that by clearing his mind, he could attune himself to his patient’s feelings like seeing a reflection (the word he used was “daguerreotyped”, which in modern terms would be the equivalent of “photographed”). Upon seeing this reflection, he could know this false idea of the disease.” In one of his articles Quimby explained this process more fully: “A patient comes to see Dr. Quimby. He renders himself absent to everything but the impression of the person’s feelings. These are quickly daguerreotyped on him. They contain no intelligence, but shadow forth a reflection of themselves which he looks at. This mental picture contains the disease as it appears to the patient. Being confident that it is the shadow of false idea, he is not afraid of it.”

Once he had this image of why people are sick, Quimby used a couple methods of curing a person. Sometimes he would project his thoughts onto the other person’s subconscious and replace her diseased thoughts with his thoughts of health and strength. Quimby said he would project “his feelings in regard to health and strength, are daguerreotyped on the receptive plate of the patient . . . . The patient sees . . . the disease in a new light, gains confidence. This change is daguerreotyped on the doctor again . . . and he sees the change and continues . . . the shadow changes and grows dim, and finally disappears, the light takes its place, and there is nothing left of the disease.’ ”

Other times he would have long discussions, even theological ones with his patients about whether God wanted people to suffer. Why would talking to someone cure them? Quimby said he was helping the sick person to stop focusing on the physical level and instead focus on the spiritual level. “Mr. Quimby in the constructive part of his treatment addressed himself to the ‘real man,’ the spirit, who needed to be summoned into power. He held that there is a part of the soul that is not sick, that is potentially or ideally one with God in image and likeness. For God did not create man to be ill. He created him for health and freedom. Disease is the invention of man through misinterpretation of sensation, through judgments based on appearances, on symptoms, effects, externals. Health is ours by divine birthright, hence by implication in our very being in that ‘secret place’ of the soul, that part of us that can never be ill. This element of our selfhood can be summoned into activity. We can become aware of it and begin to live by it. We can throw off our bondages. We can learn to live as God would have us live.” So thinking that disease was real was focusing on the external or bodily level. We really were divine creatures and we needed to focus on our spiritual level if we wanted to get healed.

Quimby thought his method of healing had been discovered before by Jesus. He decided that “he had rediscovered the method of healing by which Jesus wrought, not his ‘miracles,’ but his highly intelligible works of healing. His work with the sick seemed to him to imply a spiritual science, a ‘science of life and happiness,’ as he called it. This science he found implicit in the teachings of Christ.”

the power of thoughts beyond healing

Quimby did not limit himself to drawing conclusions just about healing; Quimby felt that he was discovering spiritual truths about our nature that extended beyond the realm of healing. “Mr. Qiumby’s discoveries concerning the influence of belief in the cause and cure of disease was incidental to his profounder discovery that man is a spiritual being, living an essentially spiritual life in the higher world above the flesh, the eternal spiritual world of our relationship with God.” From this, Quimby made a logical and natural progression: “His reasoning was that these higher powers in the human spirit imply the existence of a guiding principle or wisdom common to us all, that this principle is God in us; hence that the soul is in immediate relation with the divine mind. Furthermore, he had concluded that, whatever the explanation offered, all healing takes place according to one principle, and this too he attributed to the divine in man. His experiments had taught him that one mind can influence another directly, the one being receptive, the other affirmative. It was but one step more to adopt the principle that as thought may influence another’s mind directly spiritual power is capable of such influence too.”

Quimby was a kind person who did not charge money for his services. His son wrote that “he kept no accounts and made no charges. He left the keeping of books entirely with his patients; and, although he pretended to have a regular price for visits and attendance, he took at settlement whatever the patient chose to pay him.” He was so dedicated to his patients that he could not turn any of them away and he died from overwork. This concern for others and the lack of concern for money and social status is not something that most teachers in the New Thought tradition have continued to practice.

Conclusion

Quimby influenced many people. The two most important were Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of the Christian Science churches) and Warren Felt Evans. Evans was a well educated man who went to Dartmouth College for awhile. He took Quimby’s methods and ideas and formed them into a philosophy whose ideas are still the basis of modern New Thought teachers such as Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra. In order to understand these teachers, it is helpful not only to understand Quimby, but also Evans.

Copyrighted 2009

footnotes

Note: Footnotes are being fixed for this section.