The incredible historical accident that created the belief that there are no accidents
BY HARV BISHOP
The unalterable New Age belief that there are no accidents ironically began as an historical accident of sorts, Mitch Horowitz writes in his book “One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life.” This belief has been popularized by everyone from Deepak Chopra to Kung Fu Panda.
In 1886, mental healer Warren Felt Evans misinterpreted a book passage by Emanuel Swedenborg and that chance event rolled unquestioned all the way into the New Age and the embrace of an all-encompassing Law of Attraction.
Here’s how it happened:
1771 – Swedenborg says, “There is not anything in the mind to which something in the body does not correspond.” In context, Swedenborg was saying that ideas without works become dead.
1886 – Warren Felt Evans misinterprets Swedenborg to say any conditions in the world stems from “the principle of thought.”
1886 – Prentice Mulford then misinterprets that idea as “in nature’s laws there is no chance or accident.”
TODAY: “There are no accidents,” say many New Thought teachers including Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra. A man who channels a collective said when speaking of 9/11: “A person who has experienced something we may consider to be terrible has chosen that experience and brought it upon themselves.”
Are We Victims or Volunteers?
That accident created the tenant that there are no accidents expressed today as “there are no victims.” Horowitz says some people look to the Law of Attraction as a way to avoid vulnerability in the face of life’s tragedies and can judge others for “creating” their own illness and misfortune
“I place great stock in the work of Neville Goddard (1905-1972), perhaps New Thought’s most radical voice,” Horowitz says. “Neville maintains that the human imagination is God. I agree with Neville’s premise that self-conception is destiny. I think that’s true in terms of relationships, personal agency, a sense of well-being and many aspects of life.
“At the same time, I think that Neville is on weaker ground when exploring physical limitations, such as illness, disability and death, or circumstances where a person falls victim to violence or accident. In such instances, his and others’ examples grow weaker, their reasoning more circuitous, and their claims less evident.”
Neville influences the work of Wayne Dyer and Gregg Braden.
“For all of Neville’s genius and beauty,” says Horowitz, “and he’s one of the New Thought teachers I most love – he and contemporaneous thinkers ruled out the possibility that we live under a complexity of laws, and that thought is one extraordinary aspect of being, but only one.
Thoughts & Accidents Can Co-Exist
“Seen in another way, Neville (seen at right) could be absolutely right that the mind is the ultimate reality; but, while that may be true in the ultimate sense, we men and women still live, or experience life, in a world of physical laws and mechanics. In this alternate view, Neville’s mind-law is still consistent, but we are bound, in most moments of life, to experience this law in mediated ways, such as how we experience gravity differently on Earth than we do on the moon. The law is ever-operative, but we exist on a scale of creation that still binds or limits us in certain ways. Creation has placed us in bodies that experience constraints and eventual demise.”
Horowitz is not alone in believing that both thought power and accidents influence our lives. Dr. Joe Dispenza, who found fame in the movie “What the Bleep?” wrote in his 2014 book “You are the Placebo” that “not all sickness and disease starts in our minds” citing the example of babies born with genetic defects. “Trauma and accidents do indeed happen,” Dispenza continues, adding that exposure to environmental toxins “wreak havoc in the human body.”
Horowitz admires the remarkable early New Thought proponent Horatio Dresser, a protégé of William James who is considered the father of contemporary psychology and the first academic to seriously address spiritual experience. Dresser, in his 1899 book “Voices of Freedom,” made room for a worldview that embraced New Thought, free will, chance, accidents, evolution, creativity and the deepest levels of intellectual inquiry. Dresser was an early influence on Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science. In decrying an 1895 massacre of at least 100,000 Armenians by Turks in 1895, Dresser wrote “Why should one try to find any [Divine] purpose in the Armenian atrocities? Must every crime have meaning?”
Does ev
ery misfortune have meaning?
People in New Thought and other forms of alternative spirituality also use concepts of karma and soul growth, in addition to the Law of Attraction, as an explanation for human suffering. I ask Horowitz about this.
“In our first discussion,” he said, “one reader made a very good observation in a comment about the need to understand karma – and not to cherry pick this concept in order to explain away tragedies that don’t evidently fit into the classic New Thought paradigm. I encourage the study of other traditions – in which we are bound to find intimate connections with our own – but I believe our theology should also be able to stand on its own feet. One has to go pretty deeply into Vedic or Buddhist thought before applying concepts of karma and reincarnation/soul growth. These concepts are immensely valuable, but they shouldn’t be deployed casually when faced with an apparent tragedy or contradiction.”
Next week Horowitz shares some ideas about the future and evolution of New Thought. This dialogue also includes you! Since the series began we have encountered both praise and push back and many thoughtful comments. Share your ideas about New Thought- what works, what doesn’t doesn’t and what (if anything) you would change in the comments section next week. We look forward to hearing from you.
For previous interviews in this series:
Part 1: What death can tell us about the Law of Attraction
Part 2 and Part 2 continued: How collective consciousness does and does not influence our lives
Part 3: Can the Law of Attraction account for tragedy and misfortune?
“One Simple Idea” is available at Amazon. My interview with Horowitz, “The Hidden History of New Thought,” is in the September issue of Science of Mind: Guide for Spiritual Living Magazine available mid-August at Barnes & Noble booksellers. To visit Horowitz’s website click here.
I always appreciated Joel Goldsmith’s take on disease. He said he didn’t believe people’s thoughts were so bad to create something like cancer. Simply by being born into a dualistic world we are subject to the positive and negatives of living in this world. No blame, just a fact of living on earth. He wasn’t interested in finding a cause for the problem other than being alive in duality and the only response was to heighten our thoughts and vibration to Oneness for all problems of duality – including our desire for good things.
Interesting, thanks Harriet.
Hi Harriet,
I inherited a love of Goldsmith from my mother who read all his work. I will have to take a second look at his writings with an eye towards issues of theodicy.
Best,
Harv
“At the same time, I think that Neville is on weaker ground when exploring physical limitations, such as illness, disability and death, or circumstances where a person falls victim to violence or accident. In such instances, his and others’ examples grow weaker, their reasoning more circuitous, and their claims less evident.”
It is an interesting point. For me though, the message has never been about blame so much as it is about responsibility and conscious awareness of self. There are a couple of points in New Thought that I think are very difficult to refute. One is that the Subconscious Mind does not argue controversially. It doesn’t tell you what you can or can’t do. It builds your reality based on your own personal beliefs and, somehow, intertwines all that with the world we’re in. With modern technology we see extreme examples of this everyday played out on the daily news.
The second point is that the beliefs we hold create the dance we’re going to dance. Dr. Joseph Murphy writes in “The Miracle of Mind Dynamics” that:
“Your mental beliefs are the only cause, and whatever you think, feel, believe, and accept as true in your mind is the only cause in your world.”
Though I am certainly no master of these things I do have to agree with this because of results in my own life. But I also don’t think it means that we should ignore the things going on around us. I am very much a New Thought person and yet I work in politics, a field many would argue is the very definition of imbalance. I do think that we can’t not be involved on some level in our world. The consequences of that are evident everywhere.
Dr. Murphy tells the story on one of his radio talks of a shop owner who’s liquor store is in a rough area. He would continually recite the 23rd Psalm to himself over and over. Though he was robbed many times he was never hurt. For me, this is maybe the way to look at the question you pose. Things do happen in life. People do suffer horribly. I don’t think you can ever justify a horrible act, especially those that are done by human beings upon other human beings. But maybe there are things to learn from people who come through such events and not just survive but flourish? Maybe?
Thanks, Rob — I agree with a lot of that, particularly that the subconscious neither reasons nor refutes. It acts on emotion as much as thought, and I think our memories actually get shaped by emotion. So it’s a very delicate filament. The great question is whether through self-suggestion we can alter its impressions. I like the story about the 23rd Psalm. That’s the kind of thing I practice all the time.
Hi Rob,
Good points raised. I do think there are people such as yourself who can hold these teachings as one of personal empowerment rather than blame. And then there are those that don’t and that does have real world impact as we saw in some of our reader’s comments in week one. Truthfully for a period in the 80s I was one of those people that took you create your reality very literally and I could be judgmental. I remember I was I was reading a lot of Shirley MaClaine at the time (I do admire her adventurous spirit and candor) and working for a small newspaper. There was a grizzled cynical older semi-retired reporter who walked over to my typewriter and set fire to my hard worked copy with his cigarette and said “Visualize this not burning. You must have created this moment” I must have been a a sanctimonious pain in the butt. I don’t doubt that all the things you mention can play a role. Like you I have seen results of applying these teachings. I have had powerful instances of intentions coming to be and would not be where I am today personally or professionally without it But, from my perspective, I am uncomfortable with such words as “only cause” so I would said yes all those things you mention are factors and there is more- some of it still mysterious and some perhaps yet to evolve.
It is very interesting how some occurrences seem to not make any ‘sense’ according to our reasoning
mind. I’ve found astrology offers explanation as to why the potential for life experiences manifest
according to celestial indicators and as we are all physically composed of the same elements as the
planets why not? The works of Max Heindel Rosicrucian Fellowship founder sheds a great deal of
light on the subject for those so interested.
Erick Tippett
Retired Musician/Teacher
Chicago, Illinois
Thanks, Erick. I’m very interested in Western astrology and I think it does represent a thread — frayed and broken in spots — to the ancient wisdom. Very little of the primal wisdom has reached us without some kind of corruption or dilution. It’s funny, I was once talking to friend — who was both an astrologer and a Ph.D. student in physics — about how strange it is that “newspaper horoscopes” seem to work on the basis on the solar-houses modality. Why would that be, I asked? “Well, it’s a trick,” he said. “But sometimes a trick works.” I’ve always liked that answer. PS I was going to say something about his odd life as a physics doctoral candidate and an astrologer, but then I thought better of it. I’ve been told by friends in academia today that there’s actually greater open to mystical questions in the sciences than in the humanities.
Beyond “New Thought”, Neville, Dr. Joseph Murphy is this: Attention creates reality filtered by beliefs. Don’t believe it? Proves my point.