One Simple Idea (33 page)

Howard’s psychology pivoted on two core ideas, which ran throughout his literature. They can be summarized this way:

Howard eventually attracted a circle of fifty or so students in the Boulder City area. “We send our message out but we have no concern for the results,” he told a reporter. “What does the size of our audience have to do with the truth?” He only occasionally ventured out of the Nevada town to deliver talks in Southern California.

Howard did, however, reach a national audience through a prodigious output of writings, tapes, and talks, which his students videotaped and broadcast through the early medium of cable television. Many of his presentations are today preserved on DVDs and the Internet. In his lectures, Howard appeared exactly as he did in daily life: casually dressed in a polo shirt or short-sleeved button-down, physically robust though slightly paunchy. He looked like any ordinary, late-middle-aged man—not quite professorial (his edges were too rough), more like an
avuncular gym teacher. But Howard’s voice and gaze were those of a distinctively poised and purposeful individual: a simple man with a profound message—namely, that inner freedom awaits you at any moment you turn to it, provided you learn to mistrust the attachments of outer life.

In a carryover from years as a success writer, Howard gave his books sensationalistic titles, such as
The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power; Esoteric Mind Power; Secrets for Higher Success;
and
The Power of Your Supermind
. His ever-practical pamphlets—with titles such as
Your Power to Say No
and
50 Ways to Escape Cruel People
—were advertised in popular psychology magazines and in the grocery tabloid
The Weekly World News
. A typical ad for one of his pamphlets read: “
Worried?
50 WAYS TO GET HELP FROM GOD
.” The ads were in no way cynical. Tucked amid competing advertisements for weight-loss programs and wrinkle creams, Howard’s ads, like those of mail-order prophet Frank B. Robinson, reflected the dictum to
go out to the highways and hedges and bring them in
. Howard knew how to reach people in need.

In a mark of Howard’s virtuosity, his writing could be picked up almost at random—any chapter, any page, any pamphlet or book—and the reader could fully enter into his philosophy. There were no prerequisites involved, no partially thought-through idea to be sat through. Howard’s gift was to fully and continually illustrate and restate core truths in dramatically fresh ways, a talent possessed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, but very few contemporary writers.

Although Howard could not be plainly classified, his psychological insights coalesced with ideas found in the work of spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti and, at times, with the distinctly important twentieth-century spiritual philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. But Howard’s language and methods possessed a down-to-earth, hands-on immediacy that perhaps no other contemporary spiritual figure displayed. He insisted that a program of self-development had to manifest real change in the ordinary hours of a person’s life. He was absolute on that point.

“Will you trust a religion or philosophy,” Howard asked, “that does not produce a truly poised and decent human being?”

Howard’s question is one to which every spiritual system must ultimately submit. It has special poignancy for New Thought and positive thinking. Since positive thinking promises achievable, practical results, it cannot sidestep the demand:
prove it
.

This returns us to William James’s philosophy of pragmatism. The only viable measure of a private belief system, James believed, is its
effect on conduct
. And that, finally, is the one meaningful assessment of the legacy and efficacy of positive thinking.
If it works
, it doesn’t matter much what its detractors say. And
if it doesn’t
, then the philosophy has no claim on sensitive people—like the misguided instrumentalities of “heroic” medicine, it belongs in books of social history and museum cases but not in the folds of daily life.

Most contemporary critics begin from the following perspective:
well, of course
positive thinking
doesn’t
work; to suggest otherwise is akin to believing in unicorns. Granted, they say, a determinedly positive outlook may make you a nicer carpooler, but it has nothing to do with negotiating the real demands of life, and in many regards it blinds you to them.

Pragmatism, however, requires judging a personal system of conduct not by whether it squares with the general conception of what
ought
to work, but by whether it
does
work. Empiricism, in James’s view, means measuring an idea without reference to how it stands or falls in comparison to widely held reasoning, but by what an individual can perceive of is nature, its consistency, and its effects. Pragmatism requires inspecting an ethical or religious idea by the
experience of its use
, including within oneself.

We will now submit positive thinking to that test.

From the earliest experiments of Phineas Quimby up through the popularity of
The Secret
, the movements of mind-power metaphysics have sought to explain evil, suffering, and illness as an illusion—as the result of an individual’s inability to understand and experience the ultimate reality of the universe: a beneficent, creative intelligence whose divine inflow permeates all of life. Evil is said to appear like darkness in a room once the light is blocked out.

When life is viewed from this perspective, a person visits hardship,
disease, or catastrophe upon himself through wrong thoughts and flawed self-conception. Sensitive people rightly object: How could such a notion possibly account for the victims of mass murder, infant mortality, and natural disaster? And, on an intimate level, what mature person has not witnessed a life extinguished, even in surroundings of hope and love? No movement can aspire to moral seriousness without convincingly resolving such questions.

This brings us, finally, to the positive-thinking movement’s most serious and lingering dilemma: What are the ethics and moral credibility of a movement that considers the outer world nothing more than a reflection of an individual’s private outlook?

An eccentric but surprisingly well-thought-out book from 1954,
Three Magic Words
, sought to take on this problem. In defending the perspectives of New Thought and Christian Science, writer U. S. Andersen argued: “Now it must be thoroughly understood that we are not denying the existence of evil; we are simply denying the
reality
of evil, naming it illusion as it surely is.” Andersen made the allowance that sometimes we succumb to this illusion simply through the weight of conditioned thought, which gets “indelibly recorded” in the psyches of successive generations. “It is also true,” he wrote, “that thought conceptions of other persons than ourselves, nay even every person who has ever lived, may show themselves in our experience.” Hence, human consciousness is burdened by a kind of collective neurosis, which can block out the generative and positive flow of creative thought. Are we thus trapped in a world of illusory evil? No, Andersen insists: “For evil befalls the righteous and the unrighteous,
but it cannot visit him who sees and is convinced of nothing but good
.” Here we see the familiar belief that mental therapeutics—prayer, affirmations, visualizations, inspirational literature, and conversion experiences or moments of illumination—can reveal the true good within and all around us.

For all the limitations of his arguments—about which more will be heard—Andersen does as good a job as any twentieth-century thinker in attempting to defend the ideas of New Thought. And his perspective also highlights a key difference between various creative-thought
movements and traditional mysticism. To understand this difference, and how it separates the mind-power culture from the mystical traditions, requires exploring the foundations of traditional mysticism. From this vantage point, we will be better able to confront the problems—and possibilities—of positive thinking.

An identifiable mystical tradition appears within the teachings of all historic faiths, from Christianity to Sufism to Hinduism. This thread of mystical teaching has traditionally taught that human beings live in a state of ego illusion. In this state, we seek gratification in the form of power, flattery, toys, sex, and money—unconsciously using these things to prop up the needs and hungers of the ego. For most of us, most of the time, desire-fulfillment is our only experience of existence. Absent a connection to any sense of higher purpose, or to some greater principle of life, our pursuit of possessions and attachments, both directly and indirectly, forms our primary feeling of aliveness. The momentary thrill of attainment is also our chief means of avoiding the fear that bodily death spells our complete annihilation.

This critique of human life, as seen in comparable systems of mystical thought, seeks to explain our inability to loosen the bond of worldly attainments and to become aware of the greater truth of existence: Namely, that each individual is part of a larger whole and is a fragment of intelligent creation, or God. Only this awareness, so it is taught, can free us from both the repressed fear of death and the frantic consumption of daily life. Unaware of our true nature, however, we are stuck perpetually consuming—but never to satisfaction. Every gain, promotion, or advancement is a cause for further fear and craving because our attachments are always prone to slipping away. And, ultimately, at our life’s end, they will slip away.

In terms of human neurosis, the mystical tradition describes our psychology with parables such as “The Snake in the Road,” derived from
a Vedic teaching but found in many faiths. It goes this way: A traveler is walking down a road and suddenly gets frightened by the sight of a snake up ahead. The traveler fears he’s going to get bitten. But on closer inspection he sees that what he thought was a snake is only a harmless piece of rope. This is how the ego-driven man lives: constantly projecting his fears, then experiencing temporary solace, only to reimagine another snake just ahead. The mystical tradition doesn’t deny the reality of suffering: sometimes the snake
is
real. Rather, this tradition attempts to summon men and women to seek a state of awareness in which the barriers between the individual and whole, the perpetrator and the victim, the giver and the taker, can be seen to fade. From this perspective, ultimate reality reveals that the barriers we see between “good” and “bad,” or sickness and health, are themselves illusion. In all things, so the tradition teaches, man is at one with the whole, and everything figures usefully and necessarily into the order of existence.

Let’s not delude ourselves: At almost every moment of existence, this sense of oneness is impossibly distant, especially when we are facing an immediate need. And yet this higher truth can also reveal itself in moments of transcendent joy, such as the birth of a child, as well as in moments of true crisis, such as when confronting the untimely death of a loved one. Such tragedies drive us to the limits of our conditioned responses to life, as well as to the limits of our belief in our ability to change conditions. In times of tragedy or joy, when our human will is suspended, and when grief does not crush us or euphoria sweep us away, a more expansive view can settle over us. Again, this experience of oneness can appear hopelessly far away. Yet its occurrence is long recognized not only in spiritual literature, but in the testimony of many modern individuals who experience such a state, albeit briefly, at times of acute need or intense joy.

The Christian Science and New Thought views share commonalities with the mystical tradition—but only up to a point. While Christian Science specifically denies the reality of illness, it also promises a
change in condition from illness
; or, as Christian Scientists put it,
a revelation of truth
.
Christian Science testifies that if you realize higher truth, in understanding the absolute permeation of all things by the beneficence of God, you will experience that goodness as freedom and true healing. In Christian Science this often involves sickness yielding to health; in New Thought it typically means poverty transforming to plenty. This
change in outer circumstance
is the central promise of the psycho-metaphysical philosophies. It is what distinguishes them from mysticism, Transcendentalism, and various strands of existential or meaning-based psychology.
^*1
The traditional mystical philosophies recognize the
problem of illusion
, but they also recognize the realness of suffering and evil—and they offer the same corrective: A higher or inner perspective that can dispel our conditioned ideas of separateness between the individual and the whole, and, ultimately, between deprivation and satisfaction.