Spiritual Critiques

New Thought: Problems

Introduction

Nowadays some of the most popular spiritual teachers are part of the New Thought tradition. These authors include Deepak Chopra, Terry Cole-Whittaker, Shakti Gawain, Wayne Dyer, and Neale Donald Walsch. Teachers heavily influenced by the ideas of New Thought include James Redfield, the writers of the Course in Miracles and their followers such as Marianne Williamson, and many popular Christian preachers such as Joel Osteen and Paul Yonggi Cho. Important New Thought proponents in the past were Emmet Fox, Ernest Holmes, Eric Butterworth, H. Emilie Cady and Warren Felt Evans. In other essays I discuss the origins of New Thought and the basic teaching of New Thought. In the essay below I point out some of the biggest problems with New Thought teachings.

Does it Work?

Claim: There are No Limits to Our Ability to Create Things with Our Thoughts

I do not think New Thought teachers are lying when they report stories of what people can attract to themselves by their method. The much larger question though is if it works for everyone all the time or does it work just for some people sometimes because they are special or lucky or just especially talented visualizers? Rhonda Byrne claims that “the law of attraction is a law of nature. It is as impartial and impersonal as the law of gravity is.”[i] The law of gravity works all the time for all everyone in all places. The authors are making the same claim for their idea.

Unfortunately one of the best-known authors says it does not work all the time. Neale Donald Walsch, author of the very popular Conversations with God series of books, says that when you visualize things coming into your life, you first get its exact opposite. He says that “no sooner will you call something into your reality than its exact opposite will also appear- and always first.” [ii] He says this happens because we need the opposite of what we want to appear so that we can fully experience and appreciate the positive things that will soon be drawn to us.[iii] But this is silly. People who start visualizing have already experienced the lack of the thing they are visualizing; that is the reason they are visualizing this thing. Thus they have no need to experience the opposite of what they are visualizing. Imagine if Isaac Newton said that gravity is a law except, sometimes, especially when you first test it, the opposite works. No one would believe that his supposed law of gravity is a real law.

There is a second reason to doubt that the authors themselves think it works. The authors don’t claim the law of attraction works for some things, they very explicitly claim it works for everything without limits. The basis of law of attraction is that we are one with the universal mind or God, so we have all its powers. Because we have all its powers, there are no limits to what we can create. Michael Bernard Beckwith states in the book, “Are there any limits to this? Absolutely not. We are unlimited beings. We have no ceiling. The capabilities and the talents and the gifts and the power that is within every single individual that is on the planet, is unlimited.”[iv] John Hagelin says, “We could go anywhere. We could do anything. Achieve anything.”[v] In case the reader missed the general idea of how powerful her thoughts were, Rhonda Byrne says, “You are the Master of the Universe,” and “You are God in a physical body…You are all power. You are all wisdom. You are all intelligence. You are all perfection.”[vi]

One of the most basic facts of human life that shows our limitations is that we have to die. But Robert Collier has two chapters in Secret of the Ages about how we don’t have to grow old if we have the right thoughts. He says, “the fact is that there is no natural reason for man to grow old as soon as he does, no biological reason for him to grow old at all!”[vii] In the next chapter he says: “Universal Mind knows no imperfection — no decay – no death. It does not produce sickness and death. It is your conscious mind that has decreed these evils. Banish the thought — and you can banish the effect [death].”[viii] Another basic fact of life is that other animals get sick and so it seems natural for us to get sick too. But New Thought pioneer Nona Brooks says that is not natural for other animals to get sick, they get sick because of our thoughts: “The question may be asked, ‘If disease is a mental condition, why should animals be ill?’ It is a case of the higher influencing the lower; animals respond to the thoughts of men; they do not originate mental images of imperfection, but they follow ours.”[ix] Many other authors in this tradition say similar things indicating that they mean, in a literal way, these statements about no limits to our powers.

The Secret has many reports of the authors using these ideas to get things such as a million dollars or parking spaces. It is wonderful to visualize and have the money show up. It is wonderful if you are sick and thoughts help you to get better. Thoughts are important and may effect our reality to a much greater degree than society’s conventional paradigm allows. But it is a big jump from saying thoughts are more powerful than most people think to saying that people’s thoughts have unlimited power. If the authors of The Secret really believe they are the Master of the Universe, why aren’t they doing something that manifests this total power? I would believe their ideas if these people showed their unlimited power and did something really cool like turn themselves into dolphins for a day.

Instead of believing our thoughts create everything, the authors of the book actually seem to believe the more limited idea that our thoughts help us live better within the limits of human life. So the person who visualizes parking spots is living in the normal, human world where people drive cars, but he has the added ability of getting parking spaces. Whereas if someone actually was a “God in a physical body,” it would seem he would never use a car, he would just teleport himself everywhere like on Star Trek.

Rather than stating we have power without limits, I think New Thought teachers would be more accurate if they were more modest. They should say that once we connect with God, we have much more power than we normally think we do; they should not say we have unlimited power. In its beginning, New Thought teachers were much more modest in their claims. So Warren Felt Evans, the most important systematizer of the movement’s ideas, said in 1884: “The Word of God … dwells in every as the light of life, and invests us with a creative potency, for all things are made by it. It is God’s thought, and when our minds are in unison with it in our struggle with disease, we are invested with a fraction of God’s omnipotence.” [x]

Exaggerates How Close We are to the Divine

Advocates of New Thought say we are so closely connected to the Spirit or God that we are God. Deepak Chopra says, “in reality, we are divinity in disguise, and the gods and goddesses in embryo that are contained within us seek to be fully materialized.”[xi] In another place he says we are more than just garden-variety gods or goddesses, we are one with the Spirit. He says there is an “underlying infinite diversity of life [which] is the unity of one all-pervasive spirit…. [this] is your own Self.”[xii]

Chopra and other advocates of New Thought are exaggerating how close we are to the divine. They are committing the same mistake many spiritual people make nowadays: overemphasizing our connection with God or the oneness. Our current cultural paradigm implies that we are all separate individuals with little or no connection to God. Nowadays, when many people become more aware of their connection to the Spirit or God or the Tao, they reject the dominant culture’s paradigm. Too many of them, however, go to the opposite extreme and say we are one with this divineness. This is overstating or exaggerating our connection to the spiritual reality. While we have a divine aspect to ourselves, we also have other aspects. We are connected to the divine, but we are not one with it.

No sense of karma, lower desires, or evil pulling us away from our spiritual path

Because New Thought thinks we are one with God, there is little sense that karma, or our lower personality desires or an evil force pulls us away from God. After all, we are one with God, so how could there be an aspect of us that pulls us away from ourselves? Unfortunately, we are not that close to God and so for almost everyone there are these other forces pulling us away from our spiritual path.

Blames people for their Troubles

New Thought teachers say that if you are not wealthy, it is because you are not having the right thoughts: instead of thinking prosperity thoughts, you are thinking poverty thoughts. Terry Cole-Whittaker says “the belief that there isn’t enough or that what you want is scarce lies at the heart of poverty.”[xiii] She also says “you are the generator of poverty! Give up poverty as an option or a reality. Thoughts create their own worlds. … the circumstance and conditions of your life don’t mean anything; they are simply impersonal mirrors of your awareness at this point in time.”[xiv]

New Thought teachers are thus committed to the idea that a poor person in an oppressive economic system or in bad economic times is suffering, not because of the system, but because of her thoughts. So someone poor in the old communist Soviet Union or during a famine in ancient Europe is not suffering because of the economic system or because of bad luck; instead, it is because of her thoughts. Thus New Thought teachers are blaming the victim for her troubles. It gets even worse, though, as the same principle applies to someone raped or born with a genetic disease: these things happened to the person because of her thoughts.

New Thought Teachers Often Overstate How Old Its Tradition Is and How Many People Taught It

New Thought teachers often claim its traditions are based on principles that all the great people and teachers of history knew and practiced. For example, in The Secret they claim the Greek philosophers Plato and Socrates taught this law as well as Shakespeare, Beethoven, Newton, Goethe and da Vinci. They also say that all the religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and ancient Egyptians knew this law. Rhonda Byrne says that “recorded throughout the ages in all its forms, the law [of attraction] can be found in ancient writing throughout all the centuries.”[xv]

I wrote my Ph. D dissertation on Greek philosophy and so I have read every book Plato wrote. Plato is not concerned with getting things you desire in the world, as his spirituality is part of the ascetic tradition that thinks experiencing sensual pleasures prevents us from being spiritual. Socrates was not put to death because he hounded the people of Athens to open up to their unlimited power to satisfy their desires; he was put to death because he told people to be more concerned with their souls than social success or worldly things. Nor were Buddha or Jesus interested in satisfying worldly desires like The Secret teaches. Instead, like Plato, they were part of the ancient ascetic culture that denigrated concern for worldly things. Rather than being an age-old secret all the great teachers knew, the concept of the law of attraction started at a precise moment in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1850s in Maine, Phineas Quimby discovered that he could heal people by projecting healing thoughts on their subconscious.

the Philosophy of Idealism’s influence

New Thought is not based purely on personal experience of someone’s thoughts creating her own reality. It is based partially on people’s experiences and partially on a larger philosophical worldview. (The assumptions of this worldview are elucidated in the basic teachings essay.) This philosophical worldview is known as Idealism which teaches that spiritual substances like souls or God are the only real substances. Material substances do not exist in the normal way people think they do; they only exist if we perceive them . [Refer to the discussion of Evans on the New Thought: Origins page.]

The philosophy of Idealism tremendously underestimates the importance and power of the physical world. Without this philosophical underpinning, New Thought teachers would not make the mistake of exaggerating the power of their thoughts. Even one major New Thought teacher, Horatio W. Dresser, thinks it tremendously hurts the movement to hook the movment’s insights about the power of thoughts to the philosophy of Idealism. Dresser’s father and mother were one of the closest Quimby disciples, and Dresser gave William James much of the information James wrote about New Thought in his book The Varieties of Religious Experiences. Dresser decried the linking of Idealism with New Thought, saying because of it “we are likely to acquire a psychology without a body, we are apt to think too lightly of the natural world and to make the road to salvation appear easier than it is.”[xvi]

Use of an untraditional Interpretation of the Bible

From the very beginning of its development, New Thought teachers have claimed that their principles are found in the Bible. Certainly some passages in the Bible do support their teachings. However, it should be pointed out that New Thought’s interpretations of many Bible passages are extremely different from the interpretations of the vast majority of Christians.

While there are many places where New Thought’s interpretation of biblical passages differ from traditional interpretations, the most stark difference is over how much the Bible teaches abundance. Catherine Ponder starts off her book, The Millionaire from Nazareth: His Prosperity Secrets for You!, with these words: “The word ‘gospel’ means ‘good news,’ and the good news is that there is gold in the gospel for you!”[xvii] Ponder later says that “by Jesus’ standards you are not a very ‘good Christian’ if you are poor. Poverty is a form of hell caused by man’s blindness to God’s universal abundance for him….It is a sin to be poor…. That is what Jesus stood for and taught: a philosophy of abundance that could lead to grander living than ever before.”[xviii] She also says “the Bible is the greatest prosperity textbook that has ever been written!” and “the Lord’s Prayer contains one of the greatest series of success formulas ever offered mankind!”[xix]

In the same vein as Ponder’s take on the Lord’s Prayer as a collection of success formulas, Charles Fillmore revised the Twenty-Third Psalm this way:

The Lord is my banker; my credit is good.
He maketh me to lie down in the consciousness of omnipresent abundance;
He giveth me the key to His strongbox.
He restoreth my faith in His riches;
He guideth me in the paths of prosperity for His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk in the very shadow of debt,
I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me;
Thy silver and Thy gold, they secure me.
Thou preparest a way for me in the presence of the collector;
Thou fillest my wallet with plenty; my measure runneth over.
Surely goodness and plenty will follow me all the days of my life,
And I shall do business in the name of the Lord forever.[xx]

Overstates How Much Science Supports Their Positions

New Thought proponents often claim the latest scientific research proves its ideas are true. Unfortunately, often these claims are exaggerated or distorted. Rhonda Byrne in The Secret claims quantum mechanics shows the truth of her ideas and quotes Fred Wolf and John Hagelin to back up this claim.[xxi] Hagelin says, “Quantum mechanics confirms it. Quantum cosmology confirms it. That the Universe essentially emerges from thought and all this matter around us is just precipated thought. Ultimately we are the source of the Universe… ultimately [it] is Universal consciousness that runs the Universe.”[xxii] Hagelin is a trained physicist, but he is also a very dedicated follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He is not being a careful scientist when he says science shows the universe emerges from thought and we are the source of the universe; he is advocating the ideas of his guru and exaggerating how much science supports them. Byrne just believes what Hagelin says; she breezily admits she does not know much about science (as she never studied it in school, and learnt everything she knows about it in a week).[xxiii]

Deepak Chopra is in a much different league than Byrne as he is a well-respected medical doctor. One of the reasons he is so popular is that he is well educated and knowledgeable about scientific matters. Unfortunately Chopra often acts like Wolf and Byrne because he exaggerates how much science supports his ideas.

To just give one example, he talks about pulverizing a rock and then pulverizing the rock’s atoms into even smaller elementary particles. He says, “What do we see? We see organization. We see protons, electrons, and other particles arranged in an organized manner. Before the cracking, blasting, powdering and smashing, this knowledge went about its existence coherently, automatically, and we can say, intelligently.”[xxiv] It seems reasonable to say that the rock’s elementary particles are organized. However it is a jump to say there is knowledge in the rock that exists intelligently.

He is not finished drawing conclusions from this rock. He then says that all things in the universe “are expressions of organizing power, or knowledge. Another insight from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi comes to mind: ‘Knowledge is structured in consciousness.’”[xxv] He is moving from the rock has organization to that means all things have consciousness. He does not stop there, though. While most people think that material things like rocks are the most tangible and real things in the universe, Chopra says knowledge is. He says “all things in the universe, then, arise from consciousness as knowledge….It tells us that the only thing in the universe that is real and tangible is knowledge.”[xxvi] Chopra starts off with scientific truths (the rock is composed of elementary particles) and if we are not careful we can get seduced into thinking his point about knowledge and consciousness is proven by science, when they really come from New Thought ideas.

Chopra is not done with drawing conclusions from this rock though. On the next page, he jumps to New Thought’s favorite position: “We come to the inescapable conclusion that mind or consciousness or intelligence pervades every part of the created universe. Our own minds are an expression of this intelligence; from it our human consciousness derives its infinite scope.”[xxvii] So from a rock having subatomic particles that are organized, he jumps to it has knowledge, and then he jumps to that means there is intelligence in the rock. From there he jumps to a point about consciousness and how this consciousness pervades the universe and our consciousness has infinite scope. (Both New Thought and Chopra will then jump to the further conclusion that as our own minds have infinite scope, we can create anything, without limitation). If one is pre-disposed to accept these ideas, and one thinks Chopra is a careful scientist sticking to scientific facts, one could be seduced into thinking science has shown these ideas are true. But Chopra is not sticking to careful facts; he is stretching them for his own purposes. Part of what makes Chopra so effective and persuasive is that he does have a lot of scientific knowledge and is careful much of the time. He is not like Rhonda Byrne who has only studied science for a week and thinks she can understand the essence of quantum physics. But when it comes to points that he already thinks are true because he believes in the ideas of New Thought, this carefulness gets lost; he overstretches the science to jump to conclusions he already believes in.

Often Mistakenly Thinks the Divine Wants Nothing Back From Us

Many people think of spirituality as being about a higher power that has some purpose or that you submit your will to. Many New Thought teachers, especially those in The Secret, explicitly deny the higher power has any definite purpose for individuals. Instead, these writers totally emphasize getting whatever you want through your thoughts. Neale Donald Walsch says, “there is no blackboard in the sky on which God has written your purpose, your mission in life. There’s no blackboard in the sky that says ‘Neale Donald Walsch. Handsome guy who lived in the first part of the twenty-first century who…’ And then there’s a blank. And all I have to do to really understand what I am doing here, why I’m here, is to find that blackboard and find out what God really has in mind for me. But the blackboard does not exist. So your purpose is what you say it is. Your mission is the mission you give yourself.”[xxviii] Rhonda Byrne says, “Whatever you choose for You is right.”[xxix] The other authors agree and say that you should choose what gives you joy or bliss.[xxx] Byrne wraps up this line of thought saying, “Be happy now. Feel good now. That’s the only thing you have to do.”[xxxi]

These authors misrepresent what it takes to get attuned to the divine. It takes more than just right thoughts. One also needs to give one’s will over to God/the Universe/Flow, and let God work through you to accomplish something in the world. It seems to me that we are God’s hands doing something in the world. If you are doing something the Universe wants done, then It will be on your side helping you. You are like an employee of the Universe doing Its work, and so It pays you by having Its amazing energy flow through you, giving you wonderful blessings and synchronicities. But it does not seem realistic that the Universe wants nothing more from us besides clearing away our blocks to Ferraris or expensive dinners in fancy restaurants. This seems like a one-sided relationship with humans doing all the getting and the divine doing all the giving. I think all relationships, both between humans and other humans, and humans and the divine, are based on reciprocity where each side gives something to the other or does something for the other.

Many New Thought teachers agree with my basic way of looking at spirituality. Michael Bernard Beckwith agrees with my basic point about the need to surrender to the divine and separate our real needs from our lower desires. In one of his books, he tells his life story and the troubles he went through until he had an experience of Oneness with the divine (which he calls Love-Beauty). He says, “I vowed to myself: From this moment forward my life is dedicated to serving Love-Beauty in the world…I surrendered my life completely to its luminous, transforming touch….I consecrated my life to this Love-Beauty, trusting its goodness to guide the course of my life.”[xxxii] Throughout his book, Beckwith continually emphasizes surrendering to this higher power, and the need to get through the ego’s lower desires to the higher purpose of life. He emphasizes that we have to distinguish between immature wants of the lower ego and mature wants of our true self.[xxxiii] Prentice Mulford says a similar thing. Mulford says, “Always in your individual aims and purposes defer to the Higher Power and Infinite Wisdom. The thing you most desire may prove a curse. Be always, then, in the mood of saying, ‘There is a Power which knows what will bring me the most permanent happiness better than I do. If my desire is not good, let it not come…”[xxxiv]

Beckwith and Mulford are far from the only people in the New Thought tradition who thinks this way. Emmet Fox says “We must never for a moment try to live for ourselves, or make plans or arrangements without reference to God, or suppose that we be either happy or successful if we are seeking any other end than to do His Will.”[xxxv] H. Emilie Cady says, “Let go your narrow thoughts of the Divine, cease to desire anything less than the fulfillment of God’s will in you…burst the bonds of personal desire and rise to a willingness that the Father’s will be done through us every moment.” [xxxvi] Just to cite one more important New Thought proponent who thinks the same way, Ernest Holmes says “we must realize that there is One Infinite Mind, which is consciously directing our destiny …which governs, guides and guards, tells me what to do, when to act, and how to act.” [xxxvii]

Selfishness: Emphasis on Material Things and desires

As the previous problem showed, many New Thought teachers emphasized giving your will over to the Divine, and as part of this process, learning to separate your mature wants from your immature desires. Many other New Thought teachers, however, are not mature enough spiritually to understand this point about desires. Instead they say that we should indulge all of our desires. Deepak Chopra thinks God has a purpose for us; it is just that this purpose is to satisfy our desires because he gave us these desires. Chopra says, “Honor each and every desire you have. Cherish those desires in your heart. Do not struggle to get what you want; trust that your higher spirit has put the desire inside you, and leave it to spirit to make your wishes come true.”[xxxviii] For Chopra, this is such a great universe that there that is no more direct path to God than following your desires. “Desire is the direct path, for there is no quicker way to God than your own wishes and needs.”[xxxix]

Because of teachings like these, in the common person’s understanding of the movement, New Thought becomes a way to get money and success, not a spiritually-based philosophy of becoming closer to the Divine. Even other New Thought teachers bemoan this. One of the earliest prominent New Thought writers, Henry Wood, said, “The idea of ‘success vibration’ has been overworked in the name of the New Thought. …no one can sit down and think money into his pocket. … The legitimate New Thought contains wonderful orderly power but no charm or magic. Material advantage must be incidental and subordinate. The law is: Seek first the highest, and that which is lower in rank will be ‘added.’ It is legitimate to ‘make money’ in an honorable way, but it is a degradation to make the new philosophy a money-making scheme.”[xl]

Encourages Irrational and Irresponsible Behavior

The key belief in New Thought is our thoughts create our reality. So if we want to be rich, we need to think we are rich and really believe it. This means we should also act like we are rich. Based on this philosophy, Rhonda Byrne says, “If the words ‘I can’t afford it’ have passed your lips, your power to change that is now. Change it with, ‘I can afford that! I can buy that!’ Say it over and over. Become like a parrot.”[xli] Anyone who listens to this advice will start buying more things which, unless she is lucky or an extremely good visualizer, will not help her financial situation as she will have more bills.

If you are overweight, Rhonda Byrne says the problem is not that you are eating too much food, or that you just had a second baby, it is your fat thoughts. She says “food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can.” So she says eat what you want, don’t weigh yourself, and constantly visualize yourself as being thin, and you will be thin. [xlii] Ms. Byrne says this method helped her become thin. She was 143 pounds after she had her second baby and went down to 116 pounds.[xliii] I do not doubt that it worked for her. But for the vast majority of people, this is a recipe for disaster.

One of the earliest prominent advocates of New Thought, Henry Wood, disparaged this way of thinking. In the 1904 book, The New Thought Simplified, he said such ideas are “an assumed contempt for reasonable prudence and hygienic observance. ‘Eat and drink whatever you please, and do what you please, and all is right, provided you think right.’ Absurd!”[xliv]

Based on Unsound Arguments

New Thought teachers often make very bad arguments where they jump from a reasonable position to a much larger conclusion that just is not warranted from the beginning position. This style of argument is seen right at the very beginning of the tradition. So the founder of New Thought, Phineas 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.”[xlv]

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.

Quimby’s argument only makes any sense if you assume the truth of Berkeley’s idealistic philosophy. Berkeley taught that all external things in the world only have existence when they affect our mind. With this assumption, it is a reasonable conclusion for Quimby to draw a conclusion similar Berkeley’s that disease is in the mind or is in my belief in it. But without assuming Berkeley’s Idealism, which there is little reason to think is true, the argument is really poor.

Ernest Holmes sometimes also shows the same style of argument: he starts out small and makes a giant leap to an unwarranted conclusion. He says, “It has also been proven that thought operates in such a manner as to make it possible to convey mental impressions from one person to another, showing that thiere is a mental medium between all people. When we think of it, how could we talk with each other unless there were some kind of a medium through which we talked?…This opens up a far-reaching theory, for it leads to the conclusion that we are surrounded by a Universal Mind which is the Medium of the communication of our thoughts. Perhaps this is the Mind of God!”[xlvi]

Copyrighted 2009

FOOTNOTES

[i] Rhonda Byrne, p. 27.

[ii] Neale Donald Walsch, Happier than God: Turn Ordinary Life Into Extraordinary Experience (Ashland, Oregon: Emnin Books, 2008), p. 73.

[iii] Walsch, p. 74-7.

[iv] Rhonda Byrne, p. 170.

[v] Rhonda Byrne, p. 181.

[vi] Rhonda Byrne, p. 46 & 164.

[vii] Collier, p. 133.

[viii] Collier, p. 137.

[ix] Nona Brooks, Mysteries, (Denver, n.p., 1924), p. 44-45. The book is online at the New Thought Library and they say their version has the original pagination.)

[x] Warren Felt Evans, The Divine Law of Cure (Boston, H. H. Carter & Co.: 1885), p. 265.

[xi] Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams, (San Rafael: Amber Allen Publishing, 1994), p.3.

[xii] Deepak Chopra, p. 10.

[xiii] Terry Cole-Whittaker, How to Have More in a Have-Not World, (NewYork: Fawcett Crest, 1983), p. 132

[xiv] Cole-Whittaker, p. 150.

[xv] Rhonda Byrne, p. 4-5.

[xvi] Horatio W. Dresser, A History of the New Thought Movement (Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision Publications, 2008), p. 49

[xvii] Catherine Ponder, The Millionaire from Nazareth: His Prosperity Secrets for You! (Marina del Rey: De Vorss & Company, 1979), p. 1.

[xviii] Ponder, p. 28.

[xix] Ponder, p. 6 & 107.

[xx] Charles Fillmore, Prosperity, p. 6. This book was accessed online at http://websyte.com/unity/PROS1.HTM. There was no bibliographical information on the title page of the book.

[xxi] Rhonda Byrne, p. 156, 21-2, 160, 167-8, 181.

[xxii] Rhonda Byrne, p. 160.

[xxiii] Rhonda Byrne, p. 156.

[xxiv] Deepak Chopra, Creating Health: How to Wake up the Body’s Intelligence, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p. 91.

[xxv] Deepak Chopra, p. 91.

[xxvi] Deepak Chopra, p.92.

[xxvii] Deepak Chopra, p. 93.

[xxviii] Rhonda Byrne, p. 177.

[xxix] Rhonda Byrne, p. 179.

[xxx] Rhonda Byrne, p. 178-180.

[xxxi] Rhonda Byrne, p. 179.

[xxxii] Michael Bernard Beckwith, Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul’s Potential (NY: Atria Books, 2008), p. 7-8.

[xxxiii] Beckwith, p. 54 and 70-1.

[xxxiv] Prentice Mulford, The God in You, in Thoughts Are Things & The God in You (Radford, VA; Wilder Publications, 2007), p. 113-4.

[xxxv] Emmet Fox, Power Through Constructive Thinking (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), p. 22.

[xxxvi] H. Emilie Cady, How I used Truth in The Complete Works of H. Emilie Cady (Unity Village, Mo: Unity House, 2009), p. 211-2.

[xxxvii] Ernest Shurtleff Holmes, The Science of Mind (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications), 2008), p. 136.

[xxxviii] Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life you Want, (New York: Harmony Books, 1995), p. 131.

[xxxix] Deepak Chopra, p. 132.

[xl] Henry Wood, New Thought Simplified, 2nd edition (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1904), p. 94-5.

[xli] Byrne, p. 102.

[xlii] Byrne, p. 59.

[xliii] Byrne, p. 59-62.

[xliv] Henry Wood, New Thought Simplified, 2nd edition (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1904), p. 93

[xlv] As quoted by Phineas Quimby in Charles S. Braden, Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought, (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963) p. 58

[xlvi] Holmes, p. 32.