Joseph Murphy

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963).

Two minds

Joseph Murphy teaches that a person has two minds, or two workings of one mind. The conscious mind reasons, weighs, chooses and decides. The subconscious mind does not argue: it accepts as true whatever the conscious mind accepts, and gives it form, in the body and in the events of a life. He likens the conscious mind to the captain of a ship and the subconscious to the crew, who carry out the captain's orders without question, right or wrong; and to a gardener and a garden, which grows whatever is planted in it, weeds as readily as flowers.

The law of belief

The law of life, in his teaching, is the law of belief, and a belief is simply a thought accepted as true. What a person believes is impressed on the subconscious and comes back to them as experience. He reads the Bible as stating this law: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he”; “According to your faith be it unto you”; and the verse he returns to most, “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” The work of prayer is therefore not to persuade God but to change one's own belief.

No effort

Force defeats the method. When the will and the imagination are at odds, he teaches, the imagination wins, and straining to make something happen only impresses the fear that it will not. The subconscious answers calm, relaxed and confident expectation, so the student does not fight a bad belief with clenched will but quietly puts a better one in its place.

The door of drowsiness

The best time to impress the subconscious is the drowsy state on the edge of sleep, when the conscious mind is quiet and offers little resistance. Murphy gives several techniques for it. In the passing-over technique the student relaxes into drowsiness and then quietly accepts the idea as true. In the technique he takes from Charles Baudouin, the wish is condensed into a short phrase, easy to remember, and repeated softly as a lullaby while falling asleep. In the mental movie the student runs, like a short film, a scene that would follow the wish fulfilled. In the thank-you technique the student gives thanks, over and over, as though the good were already received. In the decree method a plain statement is made with quiet authority, after the verse in Job: “Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee.”

He brings sleep to problems too. A question put clearly to the subconscious before sleep, he holds, is often answered on waking, as an idea or an impulse to act.

Riches and envy

Riches, he teaches, are first a state of mind. The student is never to speak ill of money or envy another's wealth, since in his teaching to condemn what one wants is to drive it away; instead they rejoice in the good fortune of others, and dwell before sleep on the idea of wealth and success, repeating the word quietly until it feels natural. The house teaches the habit of generosity and holds the promise lightly: nothing shows that thought alone brings money.

Forgiveness

Resentment, he holds, poisons the one who keeps it. To forgive is to wish the other well, sincerely, each time they come to mind, until the memory comes without a sting; that absence of the sting is his test that forgiveness is complete. He asks the same toward oneself: to stop condemning the past, and to give the subconscious a new picture of the person one is becoming.

Healing, and its limit

Murphy teaches that the subconscious, which builds and runs the body, can heal it when it is given an idea of health, and he fills his books with stories of cures. Those stories are his own telling, without medical records, and nothing shows that belief alone cures illness. The house gives his methods as prayer and as care for the mind, never in place of a doctor, and never as a reason to think that a sick person caused their illness by what they believed.