The Power of a Single Wish
The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Mitch Horowitz’s groundbreaking book about New Thought and the causative powers of the mind, Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind
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BY MITCH HOROWITZ
I have often argued that reaching an absolutely clarified idea of what you want in life and to which your life is dedicated—success writer Napoleon Hill called it a Definite Chief Aim—is vital to activating the fullest qualities of your psyche, including the selective capacities for which I argue. For full mental-emotive potential to be reached absolute focus is required. This is true of all measurements. It also mirrors a natural law: focus produces force. Depending on density, currents of air or water can be waved away or navigated—but if channeled into a concentrated stream the same forces may grow irresistible.
Light photons are indetectable to the eye—but if condensed into a laser they can bore through rock. There is no reason to assume that the efforts of the psyche, whether psychological, metaphysical, or both, form an exception. The fields of placebo studies and neuroplasticity alone tell us that expectancy or conviction is physically measurable. Not always and not in every case; but enough so that we know this as a circumstantial law. This data is not controversial. Only its implications are. All of this suggests not only the validity of the New Thought or mind-causation thesis, but also a different way of working with it.
As noted in the introduction, a longstanding belief found and argued for in New Thought literature is that the “master key” to mental causation is adopting the feeling state that you have received your desire. Hence, countless spiritual writers, including my intellectual hero Neville Goddard, have argued that if you can assume the emotional conviction of your wish fulfilled, often through using a mental scene or picture, you are enacting the selective forces that I have just described. I honor that idea. I have long experimented with it and found it possessed of validity, if unevenly. But I also have a serious problem with that approach. And since I cannot imagine that my life or experiences are exceptional, you may recognize this same problem in your own practice.
When I am in a state of anxiety, such as that surrounding the adolescent events I described earlier, I find it nearly impossible—and sometimes even ethically undesirable—to assume the emotive state opposite of what I am experiencing. I cannot always picturize or persuade myself—and, perhaps more importantly, I do not always want to persuade myself—of a different feeling state. Happiness is not the only emotion toward which I strive. The passion that arises from the drive to correct a sense of injustice may, for example, convey the same vigor of life that happiness does. The reparative impulse is an impassioned force. Its myriad forms are not always to be tamed or contented through amending moods. Hunger commands variegated satiety. You would not eat the same meal every day and expect to find it satisfying.
Since I am discontented with, and sometimes even opposing of, adopting a feeling state that may run counter to where emotion finds me, I wondered: Can a wish—even though expressed in future versus present terms—activate the mental selectivity I am describing, and thus heighten the prospect of desired ends?
Now, in New Thought philosophy we often hear that desire, while a positive goad to the seeker, is itself not the royal road to victory—and that desire may, in fact, deter victory. A state of desire, it is often said, displaces your need into the future. And there it remains. Hence, a desire, if over-indulged, is a self-perpetuated state of want. You will always feel hungry and never full. This justifies the need to assume a feeling state of fulfillment. That is the traditional New Thought reasoning. I find that outlook valid up to a certain point; but in some cases, it is limiting and even restrictive to the individual who is emotionally distraught or physically in pain, which are basic crises of the human situation.
In 2016, PiPS and collaborating researchers published a second paper on the transparent placebo, this time among 97 sufferers of lower-back pain in Portugal. Once more, the subjects, 76 of whom completed the trial, were divided into two groups: a no-treatment or control group and a group administered a transparently inert substance with the understanding that a placebo response was being tested for.
“There was,” the researchers wrote, “a clinically significant 30% reduction in both usual and maximum pain in the placebo group compared to reductions of 9% and 16% in usual and maximum pain, respectively, in the continued usual treatment group.” Moreover, “honest placebo” subjects reported a 29% reduction in “pain-related fit can be triggered without the benevolent deception generally relied upon in placebo trials. The success of the transparent placebo experiments heightens my interest in whether we can enact the creative agencies of the psyche without attempting to dramatize, picturize, or otherwise imaginatively construct an idealized outcome. I ask us to consider whether belief in mental-emotive agency is by itself sufficient to tap greater energies of self.
Here is what happened when I challenged the truism of experiencing the wish fulfilled—when I instead substituted an impassioned wish for a feeling of gratification.
One Monday afternoon recent to this writing, I felt defeated. I was experiencing a sense of career stagnation. My emotions were tormented. The previous week I appeared in a major piece of media, but the project did not receive the support I expected and, for various reasons, I felt dejected. That was not all. I wrote a publisher I admire to gauge his interest in a new project and heard nothing back. After all these years, I wondered, why do I still have to weather this kind of thing? Various other issues were weighing on me.
I took a nap and slipped in and out of consciousness. This “in between” state, as I have often written, is a supple frame of being called hypnagogia. During that period, your body is extremely relaxed and your psyche is open to suggestion. You may, for example, experience dreamlike visions or even hallucinations. During hypnagogia, however, you retain control over cognition. For that reason, hypnagogia is considered “prime time” for mental suggestion. As I explore in chapter twelve, psychical research has also correlated hypnagogia with heightened evidence for anomalous perception and telepathy.
While I laid there, my mind returned to the question of wishes. I was not in the right state to assume an emotive sense of outcome. I was too emotionally tense, frazzled, and vulnerable. I could not adopt a feeling state of victory. But—I was in a state of deep desire. Rather than attempt to transmute that desire into something else I instead framed it into the wish of what I wanted. What did I wish for? It was at once too broad and too intimate to reveal. But my wish encompassed resolutions to the dilemmas just referenced.
In about a half hour, I arose from my bed and found in my email inbox a satisfying reversal to my disappointment with the media appearance; my hosts were now promoting it. The following morning, I heard from an author I admire who asked for my personal help on a project. I also found a collaborator who could assist me with a major technical problem, which in turn opened a path to a new media opportunity. I reconnected with another publisher I respect and with whom I had long been out of touch. (In the months ahead, that relationship rekindled and resulted in an important contract.) I heard from a podcast producer who extended an offer to me. Most of this occurred within the first two hours of awakening.
It seems to me a worthy personal experiment that a wish, even if expressed as a longing, which is, after all, the nature of any wish, may be a natural, powerful means of mental selectivity. Powerful because it is unforced, focused, and possessed of similar qualities as picturizing. A wish clarifies.
And a wish is never “just” a wish. A true wish is not a formula for passivity or a license to idle. write this observation because I recognize that emotions are seismically powerful. Emotions do not always want to be “controlled.” Nor can they be. But an impassioned wish—focused, inwardly stated, possibly spoken aloud, and written down (more on which shortly)— employs extant emotions rather than attempts to restructure prevailing ones.
#CommissionsearnedMitch Horowitz is a Penn-Award-winning historian of alternative spirituality, author, narrator, and speaker. His newest books are Daydream Believer and the forthcoming Uncertain Places to be published in fall 2022.