Mitch Horowitz

Apr 20, 2023 (mitch-horowitz-nyc.Medium.com)

A New Thought pioneer’s radical idealism

Metaphysical writer and minister Joseph Murphy (1898–1981) encouraged his readers and listeners to live by an entirely different scale of values.

Most of us born in the West grew up with the notion — almost wholly untested — that mood and outlook result from personal circumstance. Emotions are symptoms. Murphy’s work, particularly his widely impactful 1963 bestseller, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, upends that view of life.

Across thousands of lectures and dozens of books and pamphlets, Murphy described and documented a radically different and more self-determinative way of living.

Mood, thought, and mental image, he taught, are causes rather than symptoms. Murphy considered this true in the most literal and universal sense.

More so, the metaphysician reasoned, the individual is an expression and channel of the deific creative powers referenced in Scripture. Hence, you are, at this moment and all moments, constructing your world through your emotive mental images.

Beginning with his first book This Is It in 1945, the Irish minister combined principles of psychology, self-suggestion, and a cosmological theology, which he had been developing and testing for many years.

It is notable that Murphy did not step out as a writer until age 47. (I experienced a similar trajectory in my own writing career.) The seeker-mystic first sought to validate his ideas in the laboratory of personal experience. There are, of course, manifold perils of personal bias toward a favored thesis. But to restrict self-knowledge to credentialed study is to eradicate the impulse itself.

Once Murphy found his footing as a writer and speaker, his output was prodigious, as you can see from the timeline at the end of this article. His original books (not counting myriad anthologies and reissues) surpass forty.

Equally remarkable — and a lesson in itself — is that Murphy did not produce the work that made him famous, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, until age 65. His career is a reminder not to view traditional milestones of age as nonnegotiable.

Since Murphy’s death in 1981, the size of his readership — measured by reprints, multiple editions, digital and audio volumes, translations, and anthologies — has dramatically grown.

Part of the reason for Murphy’s posterity is that he adventurously and, for many seekers, convincingly married 20th century psychology with the New Metaphysics, specifically New Thought, Science of Mind, Unity, Christian Science, and Divine Science.

In so doing, the author gave generations of readers a dramatic new sense of self-potential. Interestingly, Murphy himself “requested that no funeral be held and that no obituary be written,” according to scholar of religion J. Gordon Melton in Religious Leaders of America, 2nd edition (1999).

Murphy accepted the traditional premise that we possess two minds: the rational, analytic mind called the conscious; and the inner, emotional mind called the subconscious, or what may be termed the psyche.

The subconscious is generally agreed to be the driving engine of experience — it is the hidden influence that shapes and reinforces your attitudes, affinities, perceptions, self-image, and relational patterns. But Murphy went further. He reasoned that the subconscious is programed by the conscious to function as a tool of causation: what we view and accept as valid or perceptually justified — whether sound or desirable — is acted upon and out-pictured by your subconscious in a complexity of ways.

Hence, Murphy reasoned that the mission of your conscious mind, aside from navigating circumstance, is to protect your subconscious from receiving impressions that misdirect its life-shaping energies. You must consciously filter out or temper suggestions that you do not want your psyche to uncritically accept and act on.

The stakes of this transaction are daunting. The subconscious, Murphy reasoned, mediates between individual experience and the existence of an Infinite Mind, which courses through each of us like inlets of a vast ocean. Seen differently, the subconscious or psyche is the medium through which Infinite Mind, or what is called God in Scripture and Nous in Hermeticism, creates and actualizes.

This view is largely at home in New Thought. It differs somewhat from Christian Science insofar as Christian Science theology sees the human mind not as a mediator between the individual and the Higher but as an illusion — sometimes called “mortal” or “material” mind, which must be allowed to dissolve like a mirage so that the one Higher Mind can shine through.

In effect, however, Murphy’s philosophy agrees with Christian Science and the related metaphysical schools: materialism is ultimately a delusion and the one true reality is the fullness and unsurpassed peace of the Higher Mind. In this sense, Murphy endeavored to harmonize the New Metaphysics, biblical revelation, religious symbolism, and modern psychology.

Whether by intent or happenstance, in no book did Murphy succeed more fully than The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, which combined self-suggestion, historical and anecdotal portraits, psychological insights, and the cosmic theology Murphy had been developing and testing since he began his career as a metaphysical philosopher almost twenty years earlier.

Murphy produced many potent essays, sermons, and books, but this one was his culminating and most powerful statement. It is one of the two or three modern landmarks of creative-mind philosophy, perched in timing and influence between Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking and Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 The Secret.

Unlike those books, however, which might be found in homes with few other works of popular metaphysics, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, as with Murphy’s other writings, brought him a following among readers who, like the minister himself, were not casual toe-dippers but lifelong seekers.

Murphy was born on May 20, 1898, to a devout Catholic family on the Southern Coast of Ireland in Ballydehob, County Cork. He was the fourth of five children, three girls and two boys.

Murphy’s father worked as headmaster of a local boys high school. His parents urged him to join the priesthood. But the young seminarian found religious doctrine and catechism too limiting. Eager to gaze more deeply into the internal mechanics of life, he left his Jesuit seminary to dedicate his energies to chemistry, which he studied in Dublin both before and following his religious training.

In the early 1920s, married yet still searching for his place in the world of career and commerce, Murphy relocated to America to seek employment as a chemist and druggist. After running a pharmacy counter at New York’s Algonquin Hotel, Murphy renewed his study of mystical and metaphysical ideas.

He read works of Taoism, Confucianism, Transcendentalism, Buddhism, Scripture — and, most fatefully, New Thought. The seeker grew enamored of the New Metaphysics sweeping the Western world. The causative power of thought, Murphy came to believe, revealed the authentic meaning of the world’s religions, the deeper mechanics of psychology, and the eternal laws of life.

In reaching his matured spiritual outlook, Murphy told an interviewer that he studied in the 1930s with the teacher who tutored his contemporary New Yorker and friend, mystic Neville Goddard (1905–1972). Murphy said the seekers shared the same guide: a turbaned man of black-Jewish descent named Abdullah.

Shortly before his death in 1981, Murphy sat for a little-known series of interviews with French-Canadian writer Bernard Cantin who in 1987 published the French language work Joseph Murphy se raconte à Bernard Cantin [Joseph Murphy Speaks to Bernard Cantin]. It has never appeared in English. Murphy described his encounter with the mysterious Abdullah, as recounted by Cantin:

It was in New York that Joseph Murphy also met the professor Abdullah, a Jewish man of black ancestry, a native of Israel, who knew, in every detail, all the symbolism of each of the verses of the Old and the New Testaments. This meeting was one of the most significant in Dr. Murphy’s spiritual evolution. In fact, Abdullah, who had never seen nor known the Murphy family, said flatly that Murphy came from a family of six children, and not five, as Murphy himself had believed. Later on, Murphy, intrigued, questioned his mother and learned that, indeed, he had had another brother who had died a few hours after his birth, and was never spoken of again.

In a letter of June 1987, reproduced below, Murphy’s second wife Jean, told Cantin that his interviews with her husband were the only to have received the metaphysician’s approval in the past thirty years.

Following the period described to Cantin, Murphy in the late-1930s began his climb as a minister and writer, soon lecturing over radio and speaking on both coasts. He wrote prolifically on the autosuggestive and causative faculties of thought — and finally, at 65, reached a worldwide audience in 1963 with The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, which went on to sell millions of copies and has remained one of the most enduring books on mind-power metaphysics.

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind boasts an unusual range of admirers, including actors David Hasselhoff and Victoria Principal. (Murphy’s 1953 book The Miracles of Your Mind sat in Marilyn Monroe’s library.) Parents have told me that they raise their children on the methods and ideas explored in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. I’ve heard from committed spiritual seekers who report that this popular how-to has proven one of the deepest influences in their search. The success and longevity of Murphy’s landmark rests, in part, on how it affirms and organizes some of our deepest instincts about the radical possibilities of thought and marries a range of psychological and spiritual suppositions. Among Murphy’s key ideas:

1.Every religious, psychological, and ethical philosophy agrees: What you think dramatically affects your quality of life.

2.Your subconscious mind harbors insightful and creative power — if properly harnessed, this suggestive power can solve problems and shape circumstances in ways that you never considered possible.

3.The power of your mind is indifferent: Your subconscious picks up on and carries out what you dwell upon, for good or ill.

4.You can tap the power of your subconscious by setting aside time just before going to sleep at night to reflect on a cherished aim or the solution to a problem. Drift off with assurance that your subconscious is working on it.

5.Form vivid, believable, emotionally charged mental pictures — and stick with them. Consistency is key in training your subconscious.

6.Never force a mental image. Forced effort brings failure. Be relaxed, calm, and confident when impressing your subconscious. If you find this difficult, step away and return to it when you’re in a calm and confident state.

7.Once you have acted to impress your subconscious, do not dwell on the ways and means of accomplishment — these will reach your conscious mind in the form of hunches, happy accidents, and breakthrough ideas.

8.Neither disdain nor worship money. Understand money as a natural, healthful part of life. Your subconscious will act gainfully on that belief.

9.Specialize in work you love and strive to know as much as possible about it. Passion and focus act powerfully upon your subconscious.

10.Your subconscious is not to be trifled with. Scrutinize your desires regularly to ensure that they are ethically sound and for the presumed benefit of all concerned.

In sum, Murphy taught that if you want to make one definite and gainful investment in your future, learn how to cultivate an affirming, meditative, and flexible pattern of thought, informed by the principle: You are as your mind is.

Iadmire Murphy’s scruples, life journey, and efforts. But I do not mean to leave the impression of total comfort with his ideas.

I believe that Murphy, like most of his New Thought contemporaries, failed to come to terms with global or individual suffering, much less develop a persuasive or mature spiritual response to calamity, other than to reassert the therapeutic primacy of the psyche, or what might be deemed the “try again” response.

Indeed, when confronted with questions of evil and chronic suffering, New Thought writers, Murphy included, tended to slip into circular reasoning or contradiction, unable to fully account for tragedy and limitation in their model of a self-created world.

Murphy fitfully sought to contend with this problem in his 1954 book The Meaning of Reincarnation. In it, he blamed the thought patterns of parents for an offspring’s illness or disability. Murphy later moved away from that indefensible proposition to suggest that the pooled thoughts of all humanity, extending to antiquity, could be the responsible factor in incomprehensible suffering.

The minister further attempted to confront the question of tragedy in his 1971 book Psychic Perception where he described the individual as subject to thoughts of a “world mind” or “race mind,” which contained the substance of every thought — good or ill, nourishing or withering — that every individual had ever conceived. Hence, as he saw it, an infant born ill could be a victim of this “world mind.”

Yet to assume, as Murphy wrote, that every thought has a timeless ripple effect — so that a person could be impacted by something randomly conceived centuries or millennia earlier — places us at the mercy of a near-infinitude of influences and outcomes. This amounts to tacit acknowledgment of randomness or accident — the very things Murphy argued do not exist.

Today, some New Thought writers and seekers attempt to ascribe natural disasters, wars, pandemics, and famines to mass or personal karma. I do not believe that the law of karma or some ersatz version of it — the concept itself is forebodingly vast and varied within traditional Vedic moorings — is intended to flatten complexity. Karma is not putty to plug ontological gaps. Indeed, on the spiritual path, we measure verities through intimate experience. If a person hasn’t been through global calamities that is reason enough not to attempt judgment. Judging the suffering of another is tantamount to throwing a stone rather than gleaning a truth.

I believe that in our known sphere we experience many laws and forces; the law of mind, I warrant, is ever operative but is impacted by other experiences in our physical framework, just as gravity is impacted by mass. I wish it was a subject area where Murphy had gone further.

To his credit, I believe that certain of his insights coalesce with traditional Vedic ideas about reincarnation, especially when he describes all of humanity emerging from and returning to original thought substance. In this regard, Murphy’s outlook on reincarnation runs closely to that of occult explorer Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831–1891).

How then to regard Murphy? One of the maladies of modern intellectual culture is, I believe, prevalence of an “all or nothing” attitude, in which we are expected to either wholly accept or reject every aspect of a writer’s outlook. That would leave the search impoverished and monochromatic (which, for many people, it is).

The thrill of reading Murphy is that, questions and dissents aside — and such things ought to populate every mature seeker’s experience — he exudes the practical joy of possibilities of expansive thought, of perceptual basis of experience (in which I firmly believe), and of protean aspects of idealistic philosophy.

On these topics, the alternative spiritual culture has produced few better writers — and perhaps no greater or more impactful work than The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.

Joseph Murphy Timeline

Many author bios of Joseph Murphy are replete with errors, including in some of his best-known books. To remedy matters, this timeline presents the fullest information I could locate through immigration records, Murphy’s few interviews, and cross-referenced statements and historical sources.

1898 — Joseph Denis Murphy is born on May 20, the fourth of five children (three girls and two boys) to a devout Catholic family on the Southern Coast of Ireland in Ballydehob, County Cork. Murphy’s father was headmaster of a local boys high school.

Circa 1914–1915 — After being educated locally, Murphy studies chemistry in Dublin. Bowing to his parents’ wishes he enrolls briefly in a Jesuit seminary. Dissatisfied with his studies and unbelieving of the doctrine of no salvation outside the church, Murphy leaves seminary.

Circa 1916–1918 — Murphy works as a pharmacist for England’s Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I.

1918–1921 — Murphy works as a in pharmacist in Dublin. He earns a monthly salary of about $10.

1922 — Dissatisfied with traditional religion and finding limited opportunities to practice as a chemist, Murphy just shy of age 24 arrives in New York City on April 17, 1922. He is accompanied by his wife, Madolyn, who is eight years his senior (wedding date unknown). He arrives with $23. Applies for citizenship in August.

1923–1938 — Murphy works as a pharmacist in New York City including at a pharmacy counter at the Algonquin Hotel. He deepens his study into metaphysics and years later recounts having studied with the figure of Abdullah, a black man of Jewish descent whom Murphy’s contemporary and fellow New Yorker Neville Goddard (1905–1972) said that he studied with. Murphy reports that Abdullah tells him that he actually had three brothers, not two. Upon checking with his mother, Murphy discovers that he had a third brother who died at birth and was never spoken of.

Circa 1931 — Murphy begins attending the Church of the Healing Christ in New York City, presided over by Emmet Fox.

Circa 1938 — Murphy is ordained as a Divine Science minster. He continues to work as a druggist and chemist.

1941 — Murphy begins broadcasting metaphysical sermons over the radio.

1942 — Murphy enlists as a pharmacist in the New York State National Guard, a post he holds until 1948.

1943 — Murphy studies Tarot in New York City and comes to believe in symbolic correspondences between Tarot cards and Scripture.

1945 — Murphy writes his first book, This Is It: The Art Of Metaphysical Demonstration.

1946 — Murphy is ordained as a Religious Science Minister in Los Angeles. He soon takes over the pulpit of the Institute for Religious Science in Rochester, New York. He publishes the short works Wheels of Truth, The Perfect Answer, and Fear Not.

1948 — Murphy publishes St. John Speaks, Love is Freedom, and The Twelve Powers Mystically Explained.

1949 — Murphy is re-ordained into Divine Science and becomes minister of the Los Angeles Divine Science Church, a post he holds for the next 28 years. Services become so popular that they are held at the Wilshire Ebell Theater.

1952 — Publishes Riches Are Your Right.

1953 — Publishes The Miracles of Your Mind, The Fragrance of God, and How to Use the Powers of Prayer.

1954 — Publishes The Magic of Faith and The Meaning of Reincarnation, one of his most controversial books.

1955 — Publishes Believe in Yourself and How to Attract Money, one of his most enduringly popular works.

1956 — Murphy writes Traveling With God in which he recounts his international speaking tours, comparing New Thought with various global traditions. He also publishes Peace Within Yourself (St. John Speaks revised) and Prayer Is the Answer.

1957 — Publishes How to Use Your Healing Power.

1958 — Publishes the short works Quiet Moments with God, Pray Your Way Through It, The Healing Power of Love, Stay Young Forever, Mental Poisons and Their Antidotes, and How to Pray With a Deck of Cards.

1959 — Publishes Living Without Strain.

1960 — Publishes Techniques in Prayer Therapy.

1961 — Publishes You Can Change Your Whole Life and Nuclear Religion.

1962 — Publishes Why Did This Happen to Me?

1963 — Publishes The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, which becomes a worldwide bestseller and landmark of New Thought philosophy. Its publication transforms Murphy into one of the most widely read metaphysical writers in the world.

1964 — Publishes The Miracle of Mind Dynamics.

1965 — Publishes The Amazing Laws of Cosmic Mind Power.

1966 — Publishes Your Infinite Power to Be Rich.

1968 — Publishes The Cosmic Power Within You.

1969 — Publishes Infinite Power for Richer Living.

1970 — Publishes Secrets of the I Ching.

1971 — Publishes Psychic Perception: The Magic of Extrasensory Perception.

1972 — Publishes Miracle Power for Infinite Riches.

1973 — Publishes Telepsychics: The Magic Power of Perfect Living.

1974 — Publishes The Cosmic Energizer: Miracle Power of the Universe.

1976 — Murphy’s first wife Madolyn dies. He remarries his secretary, Jean L. Murphy (nee Wright), also a Divine Science minister. He writes Great Bible Truths for Human Problems.

1977 — Publishes Within You Is the Power.

1979 — Publishes Songs of God.

1980 — Publishes How to Use the Laws of Mind.

1981 — Murphy dies on December 16 in Laguna Hills, CA, where he and his wife Jean are living at the Leisure World retirement community, now known as Laguna Woods Village. “He requested that no funeral be held and that no obituary be written.” (Religious Leaders of America, 2nd edition by J. Gordon Melton, The Gale Group, 1999.)

1982 — These Truths Can Change Your Life is published posthumously.

1987 — Canadian writer Bernard Cantin publishes the French language work Joseph Murphy se raconte à Bernard Cantin [Joseph Murphy Speaks to Bernard Cantin] with Quebec’s Éditions Un Monde Différent. The book is based on extended interviews Cantin conducted with Murphy before his death and provides a rare window into Murphy’s career. It does not appear in English. The Collected Essays of Joseph Murphy is published posthumously.