Meditation techniques and formulas which promise to fulfill our wishes, to still our thoughts, and to make us “like” God are positive thinking’s legacy of automanipulation.
This article examines the problems with the cultivation of positive thinking mind cure and it’s connections with meditation practices. In Gurus on the Financial Plane I explored how positive thinking mind cure, specifically the influence of best-selling book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, led to my adoption of meditation practices and beliefs in spiritually enlightened masters.
In the present article I examine: What specifically about positive thinking mind cure led me to practice meditation techniques? What’s the problem, if any, with positive thinking and the practice of meditation techniques, yoga, and yogis? How does positive thinking mind cure manipulate and harm individuals and society?
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Before I address the questions and problems of positive thinking as they relate to meditation techniques and beliefs in the powers of yogis, let’s first define what we mean by positive thinking.
Positive Thinking Mind Cure Movement
Positive thinking is a concept popularized by Norman Vincent Peale (1898 – 1993). He was an American Protestant minister and author known for popularizing the concept of positive thinking through his best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Peale served as the pastor of Marble Collegiate Church, New York, from 1932 until his death, leading a Reformed Church in America congregation. Peale was a personal friend of President Richard Nixon. President Donald Trump attended Peale’s church while growing up, and there married his first wife Ivana. Peale’s ideas and techniques were controversial, and he received frequent criticism both from church figures and from the psychiatric profession.1
To address our questions above (to identify the connections between the positive thinking mind cure movement, Eastern enlightenment, and meditation techniques) my primary source was Donald Meyer’s book The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan (1985). Donald Meyer (b. 1923) was professor at Harvard and UCLA and is an award-winning (Guggenheim Fellowship) author of Protestant Search for Political Realism (1960) and Sex and Power: The Rise of Women in America, Russia, Sweden, and Italy (1987).
Positive Thinking: Theology as Psychology
What is positive thinking mind cure? We shall soon see that among other things that it is theology as psychology.
Before Peale the concept of positive thinking had its origins and expressions in Protestant ethic and New Thought Movement.
Protestant ethic
The Protestant ethic, supplementing the standard “religious” virtues of faith, hope, and charity with the “secular” virtues of industry, thrift, practicality, and rationality was not, wrote Meyer, a direct offshoot of religious theology. 2
Surveying the American development of the Protestant ethic, positive thinking and New Thought movements we can see a progressive process for the practitioners to be “like” God.3
New Thought Movement & “like” God
New Thought (aka Mind Cure or Mind Science) movement avowed that men are “individualizations” of God.4 “But ordinarily,” Meyer wrote, “[Western] theology and psychology have not abided in such oneness.” [For an explanation of “individualizations” of God, read my post “I Am God” Belief]
In the U.S., beginning in the early twentieth century, positive thinking and New Thought (aka Mind Cure) concepts were popularized in many best-selling Self-Help, pop psychology, motivational books, tapes, and workshops.4
Thoughts are things.— Attributed to Norman Vincent Peale (and parroted by best-seller authors Napoleon Hill in Think & Grow Rich and Rhonda Byrne in The Secret)
Thoughts Are Things & Meditation Techniques
If thoughts are things, then having no thoughts means the mind or consciousness could be freed from things. That is, we are a blank slate and can deprogram ourselves from worries, diseases, and financial or relational problems. The thoughts are things motif underlies and motivates practitioners of meditation techniques. Meditation techniques are then methods of stilling or quieting thoughts, treating thoughts as “things”, for the purposes of gaining health, wealth, and divinity–to be “like” God.
If the underlying premises of mind cure are true–that thoughts are things and that positive thinking mind cure is the responsibility of each individual–then we’d expect:
The flip-side of mind cure, which is mind sick. That is the belief, for example, that if our dear Aunt Sally is diagnosed with cancer that somehow Auntie Sally deserves the cancer: her thoughts are things that brought it to her.
If positive thinking mind cure were valid then we’d expect to see that negative thinking or wrong thoughts inflict punishment, suffering, and ultimately death on the thinker. Yet, we find no statistically significant connection between thoughts creating disease. In the U.S. we can see positive thinking mind cure’s dark-side in the widespread indifference and blaming of victims for being the cause of their disease and poverty.
I argue that positive thinking mind cure’s dark-side is the state of fear or denial. Positive thinkers deny anything considered “negative” (or perhaps realistic). Hence positive thinkers treat “mind sick” (negative thought) conditions with autohypnosis, affirmations, and meditations techniques. It may be subliminal (unconscious), this swapping out of “negative” with positive labelled thinking.
If the problem is you, inside you, then positive thinking’s premise is the cure is inside you. Your mind, your thoughts can cure you and bring you every imaginable wish you could wish. The dark-side is that all your problems are your fault, no one else’s.
“Telling legitimately discontented people,” wrote Meyer, “to find the source of their discontent in themselves was to tell them to shrink further from testing their powers in the society around them.”5
Positive thinking mind cure on the whole has been harmful to individuals and societies. Why? It’s turned people into passive consumers of positive thinking and the underlying beliefs that all our wishes, successes, and problems are self-created, are our fault. Positive thinking mind cure offers techniques which are automated and embedded within the American Protestant ethic, consumer psychology, and fundamental and New Thought theology.
Unselfish Consumer? Unselfish Meditator?
The social, political, and individual impacts are negative for positive thinking mind cure. Meyer brilliantly links positive thinking mind cure with consumerism and asceticism:
“Selfish only impersonally, the willing consumer, to be adequately integrated into the economy, was also to be the passive consumer–weaned from saving and hoarding so that he might spend, weaned from piling up possession in order to expedite planned obsolescence, weaned from ascetic discipline that he might respond to every innovation, weaned from work-identities that he might have the time for consumption. Actually still an ascetic, since he denied himself what the system did not supply him, the perfect consumer did not know he denied himself. The man of prosperity-faith was a the man whose very desires had been automated”.6
Supposedly “free” or “enlightened” peoples, according to mind cure and unselfish consumerism, were to be automated and discontented. The automation required programming with “ultimately discontent is divine” and “to invent psychologies of content was to repress the divine”.7
This “divine” discontent and the philosophy of positive thinking underwrites the theology behind the beliefs in the American dream and “unselfish” consumers who thirst for formulas and techniques to be “like” God.
But more sinister is that the perfect consumer does not know he denies himself.8 Worse yet, from the external authority (or meditation teacher’s) perspective, the perfect consumer believes her asceticism (self-denial) is spiritual, divine, or as “like” God. Meditation techniques in this context are consumer products for gain: ego-destruction, self-abnegation, and renunciation of self and world for “positive thinking” benefits or spiritual attainments.
Coming back to the root evil in positive thinking.
“The fault lay in themselves.”
The underlying premise that the fault lay in themselves (thoughts are things) bleeds not only through American religious life, but in social, political, and economic life. The belief that the fault lay in themselves feeds into our fundamental need for outside authority to provide techniques and formulas.
I argue the above is a primary reason why there’s been significant popular interest in practice of meditation and mindfulness techniques.
“They would listen with hopes to teachers of techniques for better self-management. They would invade themselves with self-hypnosis formulas.” Meyer continues: “They would anesthetize themselves against politics. They would take for granted that attuning themselves to the American market was equivalent to being in tune with the infinite.9”
The American markets, capitalism and consumerism is, for many people, a fundamentalist religion. Positive thinking and mind cure are at the heart of our passive obeisance to external authority.
“The heart of fundamentalism was of course its attitude toward authority. It granted complete authority over the mind to an outside power. So did positive thinking. Fundamentalism’s outside authority was the Bible, inerrant, complete, all-sufficient for all human need. Positive thinking’s was a psychology of automanipulation. Neither could abide in a relationship of self to outer reality in which the self remained a project, in process, engaged in unfinishable evolution. Both recoiled from opening the self to new life not already guaranteed to fit neatly in the old. Inevitable, this meant a mystified idea of God.”10
Meyer, in The Positive Thinkers, continues:
“Mind cure’s ultimate passivity was its cultivated ignorance of personal existence, of desires, impulses, reasoned hopes expressing some power of personal political thoughts, he (she) had no personal economic desires and appetites. He (she) could not be in tension with the system. It was possible to be politically indifferent, yet a free and independent soul, but mind cure systematically expelled the irreducible minimum for independence–the capacity to wish wishes of one’s own; it was the wish not to have to wish wishes of one’s own at all.
Was this not piety in truth?”11
In Summary
The concept of positive thinking is embedded in American culture, beginning with Mind Cure and New Thought movements which sprouted in America in the early nineteenth century. Positive thinking, as mind cure, is imagination (autosuggestion or autohypnosis). It presumes there’s practical techniques to translate dreams into reality in the real world. And, some external authority can teach and ensure us of success. The perfect consumer denies herself and believes asceticism (self-denial) is a virtue.
This is precisely where consumer psychology merges with meditation techniques. The brilliance of positive thinking mind cure is to reimagine a world that is within, in the imagination of the mind. And to hand over self-determination to outside authority. The evil genius of the positive thinking fraud is that we are led to believe we actually are “positively” changing our circumstances and our world. Thus I argue positive thinking is mostly about self-deception and being self-helpless.
Meditation techniques and formulas which promise to fulfill our wishes, to still our thoughts, and to make us “like” God are positive-thinking-mind-cure’s legacy of automanipulation.
NOTES
1 Wikipedia, Norman Vincent Peale. Retrieved 25 May 2018 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Vincent_Peale.
2 Meyer, D. (1985). The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. p 129
3 ibid p130
4 For readers interested in exploring New Thought movement origins and implications for New Age and Modern Yoga I recommend the online Skeptic’s Dictionary entry New Thought (aka Mind Cure or Mind Science) movement. Also, highly recommend the book The Positive Thinkers by Meyers (cited above) but Meyer doesn’t write much if any about connections with Yoga or Eastern spirituality. However, for some discussion of the latter I recommend the book by Foxen, A. P. (2017) Biography of a Yogi: Paramahansa Yogananda and the Origins of Modern Yoga. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. While I’m recommending further reading, I also suggest checking out my discussion of uses and abuses of placebo treatments, Evaluating the Credibility of Meditation Experiments with my commentary of the excellent book Snake Oil Science which critically explores the effectiveness of alternative and complimentary therapies, including meditation.
5 Meyer, D. (1985). The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. p 313
6 The psychology behind mass manipulation is not isolated to positive thinking alone and is brilliantly illustrated in Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the Self. In this multi-part film series, Curtis describes how outside authorities have used psychological manipulation and consumerism to try and control the masses in an age of mass democracy.
7 Meyer, D. (1985). The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. p 390
8 ibid p 205
9 ibid p 390
10 ibid p 392
11 ibid p 207