Where it comes from

The teaching

As the New Thought tradition of Quimby, Atkinson, Wattles and Hill teaches it.

Mind first

New Thought begins from one conviction: mind comes first and matter follows. There is one infinite Mind, which most of its teachers call God, and every person is an expression of it and shares in its creative power. What a person habitually thinks and believes is therefore not a private matter inside the head. It goes out into the world and takes form there, as health or sickness, plenty or want, friendship or strife.

From this conviction come the movement's three practical teachings: that right thinking heals, that right thinking prospers, and that thought draws its like. Each was set out by a different hand, and each is given here as its teacher gave it.

The explanation that heals

Phineas Quimby, the healer with whom the movement begins, taught that disease is an error: a false belief, often planted by a frightening diagnosis or a fearful word, which the body then acts out. He sat with each patient, entered into their fears, and explained to them how they had come to believe they were ill. The explanation, in his teaching, was itself the cure, because a belief seen to be false loses its hold on the body.

His followers carried this into a whole philosophy of health. The house gives it as the belief it is, with its caution: it is never a reason to delay or refuse treatment, and an illness is not a mistake of thought on the part of the person who has it.

Thoughts are things

Prentice Mulford gave the movement one of its shortest creeds: thoughts are things. A thought, in this teaching, is not an idle event in the head but a real force that goes out from the thinker and acts in the world. The first discipline of the student is therefore to choose what to dwell on as carefully as what to eat.

Like draws like

William Walker Atkinson set the teaching out as a law in Thought Vibration. Thought, he holds, is a form of energy, a vibration, as light and heat are vibrations that differ only in their rate. Thoughts go out from the mind in waves, and like attracts like in the world of thought: a strong thought, or one long held, makes its thinker the centre to which matching thoughts, people and circumstances are drawn. Love draws love; anger, envy and malice draw their own kind.

The law, as he teaches it, cuts both ways. A person who fears a thing in effect expects it, and so sets going the forces that bring it, which is why his first instruction is to cut out fear and worry. He does not tell the reader to fight a fearful thought by denying it, which he calls a waste of time. He tells them to put its opposite in its place and dwell there: not to say that they are not afraid, but to say that they are full of courage, and to think, picture and act courage until it is their settled attitude. Behind the whole method stands the will, which he calls the outward face of the I AM, the real self that is master of the mind.

The house sets its caution beside this law. A fearful person does not bring misfortune on themselves by fearing it, and nothing in a reader's life went wrong because they were afraid.

The thinking stuff

Wallace Wattles, in The Science of Getting Rich, gives the doctrine its most compact form. There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, filling the spaces of the universe. A thought held in this substance produces the thing it pictures, and a person who forms a clear picture of what they want and impresses it on the formless substance can cause it to be created.

Three conditions govern the method in his book. The first is that the student must pass from the competitive mind to the creative one: never seeking to take from anyone, but to create, and giving everyone more in use value than they take from them in cash value. The second is gratitude, deep and continuous, which he holds to be the bond between the person and the formless intelligence. The third is action: the student must do, every day, all that can be done that day, each act done well, while holding the picture of what they intend.

Wattles promises his reader that riches will follow with certainty. The house teaches the method and not the promise. No practice of thought guarantees money, and the steady work and fair dealing he asks for are worth having for their own sake.

Desire, faith and a definite plan

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich arranges the teaching in thirteen steps: desire, faith, autosuggestion, specialised knowledge, imagination, organised planning, decision, persistence, the power of the master mind, the transmutation of sex, the subconscious mind, the brain and the sixth sense. All of them begin from what he calls a burning desire, a single definite aim held with an intensity that will not accept failure.

To turn desire into its equivalent he gives six steps. Fix in mind the exact amount wanted. Decide what you will give in return, since nothing is had for nothing. Set a definite date. Make a definite plan and begin at once, ready or not. Write all of this in a short, clear statement. Then read the statement aloud twice a day, on rising and before sleep, and as you read, see, feel and believe yourself already in possession. The reading is his autosuggestion, the means by which the aim is carried down to the subconscious mind.

Two of his steps reach beyond the self. The master mind is a small group who meet in a spirit of harmony to pursue a definite purpose together, pooling their knowledge and effort; Hill held that no two minds come together without creating a third, unseen force, which he likened to a third mind. Persistence is the habit of carrying on after defeat, and he gives it a chapter of its own.

Prayerize, picturize, actualize

Norman Vincent Peale carried the teaching into the churches under the name of positive thinking. His formula was to prayerize, picturize and actualize: to pray about the aim, to hold a clear picture of it achieved, and to act as the way opens. He taught his readers to empty the mind of fears each day and fill it with faith, to hold a picture of themselves succeeding, and to repeat a verse of scripture against doubt, such as Paul's words that he can do all things through Christ who strengthens him.

Ask, believe, receive

The Secret retells the whole tradition as a process of three steps. Ask: be clear about what you want and put the request out to the universe. Believe: speak and act as though it is already on its way, without doubting. Receive: feel now the joy of having it, because in this teaching the feeling is the signal the universe answers. Feelings serve as the guide: a good feeling means that the thoughts are drawing good things, a bad one that they are not. Gratitude and visualisation are its daily practices.

What the tradition asks of its students

Through all its teachers, the tradition asks the same few things of a student: one definite aim, written down; a picture of it held with feeling, especially morning and night; watchfulness over the mind, putting a hopeful thought in the place of a fearful one; gratitude; and steady, honest work. Read this way, much of it is counsel about attention and effort that any reader can use.

What the house sets aside is the claim that thought alone commands events, and the corollary some of these teachers draw from it, that a person's sickness or poverty shows what they have been thinking. That corollary is false and it is cruel. The tradition is a religious teaching and can be read and practised as one, with its promises held lightly and its demands for effort and fairness held fast.