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Mob Mentality on a Cosmic Scale

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BY HARV BISHOP

In collective consciousness – which is mob mentality played out on a cosmic scale – history’s angels and badasses never really go away.

A strange brew of fact and fiction results when the idea that all minds are linked outside space and time is combined with the Law of Attraction – the belief that our thoughts create our reality – says Mitch Horowitz. Horowitz is the author of “One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life.”

Let’s play with a quick thought experiment.

Here’s some background. The Law of Attraction – what you focus on creates your life – is said to have a collective dimension. In other words, what happens to us is not only influenced by what we think individually, but also what everybody else thinks. So, do the thoughts of history’s angels and badasses and regular folk floating around loose in the ethers still have the power to rebound and create our reality?

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Now for the thought experiment. Let’s say some Viking sailor dude rowing a boat 800 years ago in preparation to pillage is having (no surprise) some negative thoughts about the mayhem to come. Could those negative thoughts (which were probably considered culturally appropriate for their time) cause you to get cut off in traffic or get sick today?

Horowitz says the answer is both yes and no. Yes, we are potentially influenced, at least to some degree,  by the cumulative thought energy and experience of humanity. No, he does not believe that a single individual thought from our Viking of 800 years ago can impact you today.

Joseph Murphy

An argument much like our thought experiment was made by New Thought notable Joseph Murphy (1898-1981, both a Divine Science and Religious Science minister). That argument carried to its logical conclusion, says Horowitz, strains credibility and diminishes the important strengths and wisdom New Thought brings to the world.

While Horowitz finds much to praise in Murphy’s works, he says that believing that a single thought from history can harsh our mellow today raises important larger questions about how people interpret the impact of collective consciousness and the Law of Attraction.

Randomness Vs. the Law of Attraction

“Sometimes people will take the collective thought argument to such an extent that it’s a different way of explaining away randomness,” says Horowitz [pictured below].  “I write about about this in [“One Simple Idea”] where Murphy, in one of his books, made the claim that a person living today could be sick or experience a tragedy because of something embedded in the collective thought stream maybe even thousands of years ago.

Mitch talking

“And I thought, ‘How is that any different from saying and describing randomness?’ It basically becomes the same thing.”

“If something that someone thought or interjected into the Universal Mind 2,000 years ago can affect my neighbor Mike today, is that not just another way of saying life is random?

“I agree very much with the idea that collective thought influences how we create [unjust] social structures, but when people take that to an extreme to buttress rather than critique the Law of Attraction in the face of life’s randomness it can become kind of a dodge.

“If an individual lives upon an earthquake fault they may at some point get hurt and I don’t think that has anything to do with their karma, or with collective race thought as the term used to go, or with what they have subconsciously thought before. I think it is very possible that we live under physical laws that are limiting to us. These things will eventually result in our final demise.”

Expanding our view of New Thought

Horowitz believes we have to broaden our view of New Thought. “We need to explore the mind as one force among others and try to work with, experiment and deepen the questions around what that means for us as thinking creative beings.”

If someone like Murphy points to collective consciousness as a causal explanation for events in an individual’s life, have they admitted that we are not always individually responsible for our reality? If so, it would seem a much shorter leap toward Horowitz’s point that we live under many laws.

“That’s a very interesting question,” Horowitz reflects. “Right now I’m writing a new introduction to Murphy’s classic ‘The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.’ As much as I support the general thrust of Murphy’s ideas, I do believe that his thought system has dead-ends and incompletions.

“For example, in his book ‘The Miracles of Your Mind’ he writes that insulin, which has saved or improved the lives of countless diabetics, works only because the subject places his belief in it. Now there’s obviously some truth to that; we see that validated in placebo studies and in our own inner experience. But in making this point as an absolute, one could also conclude that chicken feathers, according to his logic, are no better or worse than insulin if they are an object of sustained belief. In seeking to elevate the human station, this line of reasoning ultimately denigrates it by reducing all invention or genius into little more than a vested belief, rather than a complex interplay of laws, including physical, mental and metaphysical laws.”

Horowitz challenges that kind of thinking.

“I do believe that we exist under multiple laws and forces, of which creative-mind metaphysics is an exquisitely important component. This doesn’t mean Murphy’s core insights are wrong; but they are, in my view, incomplete and they do not cover all the bases of life. I nonetheless recommend Murphy’s work, while acknowledging my differences with it, because he has helped a generation of people begin to use their minds in new and different ways, and that opening is very important.”

Does collective consciousness have basis in fact? This story continues here. 

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14 Comments

  1. “Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
    a medley of extemporanea,
    And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
    and I am Marie of Romania.” (Dorothy Parker)

    Gotta love Dorothy. Much of life I’ve BEEN her.

    Random thoughts:

    I love this blog. Don’t forget William James’ Varieties, which is still relevant in our discussions of New Thought, as are his speculations about “healthy souls” and also God (toward the end of the book). Maybe I’m biased after spending 30 years as a Catholic theologian and coming late (I’m 69) to the study of New Thought, but it seems there’s no substitute for a good cosmology, a “unified field theory” if you will. It can’t be simplistic (Whitehead: seek simplicity and distrust it), it must be faithful to experience, but we all wind up having one whether we admit it or not. For me, the experience of a so-called “past” life regression was quite powerful, even if there is no real “past” or “future” since time is a construction, no? But seeing my empirical reality in the backdrop of choices I made “outside of it” gave me some light and peace when I desperately needed them. It reframed things helpfully.
    Keep thinking and being true to your experience!
    Paul

    1. Thanks so much, Paul. After William James died in 1910 we largely stopped considering the intellectual basis for New Thought, with some exceptions: his protege Horatio Dresser put out some very important work (especially in the book “Voices of Freedom”) and in our time time I’ve been heartened by the work of David Spangler, which Harvey Bishop recently exposed me to. I was never completely taken with Thomas Troward, as I thought he made too may incomplete leaps. Ditto Thomson Jay Hudson. Perhaps we’ll more fully explore the legacy of James in a future discussion. I write about him at several points in my One Simple Idea. Thanks for adding a lot to this exchange! m

      1. After re-reading the last chapter of OSI, it occurred to me that there are two guys named Mitch. There’s the rigidly empirical Mitch and the Mitch who believes in fairies and leprechauns. Then it occurred to me that James was like that as well, and maybe all of us, even “the Amazing Randi”! But how get our two sides to talk to each other? Perhaps in dreams, poetry, art, music?
        (I’ll be using OSI in a college class this Fall and I’m excited to see what my students make of it, esp. that last chapter.)

        1. Hi Paul, I’m delighted you returned to the last chapter, which, in some regards, is the most meaningful for me. I don’t think there are “two Mitches” in the book (although you’re certainly right that we all contain multitudes — even Randi); rather, I think empiricism can encompass inner and outer experience, which is something that I learned from William James and is abided by today by Jacob Needleman, Charles Tart, Jeffrey J. Kripal, and other philosophers. I felt that it was important in the final chapter to draw upon personal experience insofar as New Thought and other metaphysical systems are ultimately so dependent upon the testimony of the individual. One of my true heroes is ESP researcher JB Rhine, to whom I allude in our third post; Rhine was, with James and Frederic Myers, a “radical empiricist,” even through his efforts were in the direction of topics that are generally rejected within science. Rhine placed some stock in his and others’ personal experiences and testimony, as well. I will be dealing further with aspects of my own (and others’) experience in future work, including a forthcoming monthly column in Science of Mind magazine. My aim is to approach metaphysical subjects with seriousness, even if some areas of my work, such as historicism, are more widely accepted other areas, such as the question of “does it work?” Thanks again — and very best, Mitch

      2. I’ve been impressed by Spangler’s work. He has a lot of compelling takes on these questions and at least asks the right questions.

        One thing I find intellectually dodgy in a lot of current New Thought commentary is the apparent cherry-picking from the scientific mainstream. Poor old quantum mechanics and what appears to be true at the nano-level but not much beyond that level has become the go-to scientific explanation for absolutely everything by people who don’t appear to have read a science book since grade 10. It seems to offer adherents the stock opportunity to answer “but this is scientifically supported” to just about every question or “what about?” Yet, after that, there is virtually no response to what science has generated over the past, say, 150 years.

        So in that vein let me take this a different scientific direction and give poor ol’ Schrodinger and his damn quantum cats a much-needed rest.

        Let’s assume, as I do, that the theory of evolution is accurate. Then, it must follow that the power of the mind (and like you Mitch, I see it as an important and valuable power but not quite The One and Only All-Encompassing Power with the Full Force of Law Itself!) itself emerged along the evolutionary path toward homo sapiens. Put a different way, we got the homo down early and we’re still working on the sapiens, with tapping our mental powers as one part of that. But if you ask someone how they square evolution with the idea that there is this All Encompassing Single Law that always was (by definition even when there were just one-celled organisms or dinosaurs), I’m guessing we’re deep into blank stare territory. That’s not really good enough if we want New Thought to be taken seriously by more people.

  2. I’m not sure Dr. Murphy ever said anything about a single thought from collective consciousness effecting an individual the way that is suggested here. He did talk about the Race Consciousness controlling you if you don’t control your own thinking. He also said that family, teachers, etc. have a stronger influence on our individual belief systems more directly. I think there is an argument to be made in support of this line of thinking. Whatever the Viking thought is a part of the collective consciousness, to be sure, though I don’t think it has that much power all by itself.

    1. Hey Chris, Thanks for these wonderful observations. I agree that the New Age is hasty to seize upon quantum physics findings as some kind of “proof” of its most cherished concepts. I do think that New Agers (and I use that term with respect — I apply it to myself) ought to have a decent lay-knowledge of quantum physics, and not one gotten just from New Age seminars. The implications of quantum physics are so question-begging, and the workaday world that we experience is so evidently Newtonian, that I don’t think anyone should dive headfirst into that pool. At the same time, I also encourage physicists to be patient with serious seekers who do want to consider whether there’s an intersection between the inner search and the extraordinary outcomes of quantum physics experiments. Many scientists and students of science have come to regard spiritual queries with contempt, and I think that’s a mistake. The serious seeker and the good-tempered scientist have a lot to talk over. Once an Irish radio host exploded at me for saying that quantum physics has existential implications, and I repied, “Look, it’s a conversation — I don’t want to be the guy who shuts down that conversation.” That’s my real beef with Randi and the super-skeptics; it’s not that they’re necessarily wrong or that have some obligation to accommodate my point of view — rather, it’s that they want there to be no debate; they want certain lines of inquiry, such as academic ESP research, to be ridiculed and written off. I’d rather be wrong about ESP than have there be no discussion. As far as evolution — wow, it’s big consideration. One of the areas where I really break with the New Age is the general belief that our consciousness is experiencing some kind of evolutionary expansion. I’m not really sure that’s true or verifiable. People felt the same way in the late nineteenth-century, just on the eve of Europe undergoing WW I and the terrible historic spasms that followed for the rest of the century. We certainly are more adept scientifically and technologically; but I don’t know that I have perspective enough to be hopeful about any kind of evolutionary consciousness. But I’ve strayed from your point: which is how New Thought can harmonize a belief in mental law with evolution. And, in a sense, I think you have resolved it: if one believes (as I do) that the intellect has nonphysical aspects — which may be elusive but are as real as our sense of smell — but doesn’t turn that into that into a “super law”, I think New Thought has no contradiction to evolution. I think you’ve pointed out the pitfalls of a solitary-law approach, which is very helpful. All best! Mitch

      1. We’re on the same page here. I have no problem with skeptics because some claims do prove to be bogus and quality skepticism can help to bring those to light — and they do challenge us on the questions of “how do we explain this and does our explanation make even some sense”. However, when they work from the dogmatic starting points of “It’s all BS” and “There’s nothing that can be answered by either the law of large numbers or sheer randomness”, then we’re in the world of just plain intellectual laziness — and that’s worth us calling them out too. That thoughtful and open spot in between is clearly where we want to be — and are.

    1. Thanks for the recommendation Bobbi. My wife. also a practitioner, has worked with some of those Virtues Project materials. Part of embodying the idea that thoughts create reality is embodying our ideals and virtues in the world. In One Simple Idea, Horowitz says that that was original meaning behind Sweedenborg’s statement “There is not anything in the mind to which something in the body does not correspond.” This statement, he says, out of context was expanded and misinterpreted by others to mean there are no accidents and all causes are mental.

    1. Hi Melinda,
      Thanks so much for your interest! A subscription box has just been added at the top of the right sidebar.
      Best,
      Harv

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