Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [48]
Most purveyors of New Thought described evil as darkness in a room once the light—or the God Law—had been closed out. But, unlike the Transcendentalists in their study of the cycles of nature, these enthusiasts made no allowance for the inevitability of night following day. They made no room for the balance of life and death, illness and health, that Emerson depicted in the essays they claimed as their inspiration. Nor did New Thought acknowledge Emerson’s disdain for self-centered prayer. (“Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft,” he wrote in “Self-Reliance.”) Hence, the movement embraced those portions of Transcendentalism that spoke to affirming mental power, and ignored other complexities.
And here we reach the ultimate dilemma of this most popular of American metaphysics. Unable to come to terms with questions of tragedy or catastrophe in what believers considered a self-created world, New Thought lapsed into circular reasoning or contradiction. In one beat, Holmes described evil or illness as illusory. Yet in the next he cautioned: “The law [of mental creativity] is no respecter of persons and will bring good or evil to any, according to his use or misuse of it.”
Even the movement’s central concept—the Law of Attraction—could appear jerry-rigged. This spiritual “law” had its origins in the work of Andrew Jackson Davis, though he never quite intended for how it came to be used. In 1855, writing in Volume IV of another of his massive treatises, The Great Harmonia, Davis coined the term Law of Attraction to describe the human soul’s affinity for different spheres of the afterlife. Remade by New Thoughters—and later resurfacing as the catchphrase of The Secret and numerous motivational best sellers—the Law of Attraction meant that whatever a person or group of people dwelled upon in their thoughts would manifest in events good or bad, joyous or catastrophic, in their earthly lives, presumably whether one was a slave or a wealthy slaveholder, a person of robust health or a sickly child. Coming from a movement based in hope and limitless potential, such thinking could seem like a naively cruel calculus. While outcroppings of New Thought would appear in other nations, including South Africa and Japan (The Secret was made in Australia), this way of reasoning confined the philosophy largely to an American middle class, where the security of life was a relative given.
In what may have been a bitter irony of his life, the intellectual Holmes was on surer ground in carrying out the practicalities of building a ministry than in confronting the ultimate questions of human suffering. By the time of Holmes’s death in 1960, his robust movement encompassed more than a hundred congregations with more than one hundred thousand formal members. Indeed, Holmes’s legacy is considerable: His textbook, The Science of Mind, continues to sell thousands of copies a year; acolytes of his ideas number among the nation’s most popular inspirational writers and speakers (such as Tony Robbins and Marianne Williamson); and his United Church of Religious Science—along with a closely related offshoot called Religious Science International—actively ordains new ministers and practitioners.
Holmes did successfully bridge the gap between New Thought as a loosely conceived idea and an organized religion. Yet he also lived long enough to see his movement marred by factional splits and infighting, and he often seemed happier delivering a lecture or completing a book than contending with the demands of organizational life. Just before Holmes’s death, a student and protégé, Obadiah Harris, whom Holmes had handpicked to preach at some of his leading churches, came to the mentor’s bedside. Harris had to confess that he was leaving the movement to find his own path. “I wish I could go with you,” the teacher replied.
Behind the Power
That might be the coda of Holmes