Dreaming Peace: Introduction
It's good news if thoughts create reality. It means we only need to think about what we want and we will attain it. Ideas will come to us, we will arrange our priorities, accept opportunities, persevere, and our dreams will come true. There are also disadvantages. Take the case of a man who once lived in India. He attained the power to create whatever he thought about, but his first thought was "Oh my god What if I think of a tiger and it eats me up?" Then a tiger came and ate him.
I believe something similar is happening in the twenty-first century. At times it seems as though the world could split apart over a vicious cycle of terrorism and war. Like any vicious cycle, the harder people try to stop it, the worse it gets. The leaders and followers, liberal Democrats and fundamentalist Christian Republicans, all think they know best how to fix the problems. Nevertheless, their hate for each other, and for the situations they're fighting, cancels out any good they might do. Not only that, but the hatred ripples out to create similar hateful situations all over the world. Maybe the hate itself is making things spin out of control.
There must be a way to stop the cycle of violence and bring people together. We just have to find it. Unfortunately, like the man eaten by a tiger, people are frightened. Many have given up looking for solutions and simply believe the world is coming to an end. Peace seems an unattainable luxury in the fearful world of the twenty-first century.
Nevertheless, with positive thinking you can change reality. Contemporary philosopher John Dear said,
"Few dream of a world of nonviolence. If we do, we are dismissed as naive or idealistic. Yet without the imagination for peace, the vision of peace, we will never get out of the downward cycle of violence that is destroying us."
It will take a lot of people with a positive vision of peace to turn things around. As it stands, we're under the control of powerful people who use positive thinking for negative purposes. In the face of this abuse, the best we can do is hope things aren't as bad as they seem. Put on a happy face and tell yourself everything's okay.
Positive thinking has nothing to do with creating wars or getting revenge. A positive outlook is a symptom of maturity, which takes time and conscious effort to develop. You have to uproot old attitudes and resolve deep-seated misunderstandings about life. As long as you feel angry, you can think wishful thoughts all you want, but nothing will happen. Positive thinking means learning to face the material in your shadows. You need to be whole inside if you want your affirmations to work.
The History of Positive Thinking
The first Westerner to write about the mind's influence over reality was Plato (427-347 BC). The Allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic said that prisoners held inside a cave their whole lives would mistake the shadows on the wall for reality. He said that if the prisoners were to come out into the sunlight, they would realize that the world is much different than they imagined. In the same way as the prisoners, all people exist in a world of their own perceptions.
Hundreds of years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) restated Plato's theory in one of his most famous essays, Experience. He said:
"Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue."
The mind creates the reality it wants to see. This is the a key element of positive thinking, because viewpoint - thoughts - can change everything. Emerson inspired an American Transcendentalist Movement. Transcendentalists believed that the mind is a powerful instrument capable of imagination and intuition, and capable of establishing personal communion with the divine.
Alternative religions flourished around the turn of the nineteenth century in Europe and America. Emerson was a hero of this movement, known as the New Thought Movement, or New Age Movement. A number of new religions grew out of the New Age. Philosopher William James (1842-1910) wrote about them in his famous 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Many new age faiths said that the mind could cause or cure disease, so James grouped them together under the heading, "Religion of Healthy Mindedness." He said, "The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind."
Along with mind-body healing, many of the new religions said that the power of mind could bring prosperity. The Christian inspirational newsletter for businessmen, Success magazine, was part of that trend. The new religions said that prosperity was natural if you lived in harmony with God.
The first person to use the power of mind for secular purposes was Emile Coué. Monsieur Coué (1857 - 1926) was a pharmacist in France who studied hypnotism. He noticed that his customers' health depended more on their state of mind than the prescriptions he filled, so he turned his pharmacy into a hypnosis clinic in the evenings. He made up the saying, "Every day in every way I am getting better and better," and taught his patients to repeat it twenty times before falling asleep.
His work was so well received that he quit the pharmaceutical business in 1910 and relocated next to a famous French school of hypnotism, where he reached as many as fifteen thousand patients a year. He traveled in Europe and America in the 1920s and established the Coué Institute for the Practice of Conscious Auto-Suggestion in London and the National Coué Institute in New York. His books My Method and Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion, sold widely.
Some American newspapers called him a doctor or professor; others called him a prophet. Religious leaders accused him of trying to work miracles. In his memoir, American Impressions, Coué reminded people that he was just a pharmacist. He wrote, "I do not want people to have a sort of fanatical belief in me." He said his purpose was "solely to show you how to cure yourselves." He said he was not dealing in the realm of religion, but merely tapping into a natural power that was dormant within the individual. He said, "I confess I fail to see any relationship between religion and autosuggestion. Is medicine a challenge to the Church?"
Coué is known as the forefather of all inspirational authors and positive thinking writers. Although he only taught autosuggestion for healing, he suggested that it could work in business for sales people and managers, and for raising children.
Illustration 1: The Bridge from New Thought to Positive Thinking.
The Positive Thinking Movement as we know it today started in America during the Great Depression. The stock market crash of 1929 left many people destitute. Businesses closed and unemployment rose to twenty-five percent, yet paradoxically, this was the backdrop for Napoleon Hill to publish his best selling book, Think and Grow Rich, in 1937. His message was: "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve."
Hill's book was a stark contrast to all literature on the power of mind up to that point. He was the first person to remove autosuggestion from a healing or religious context and say, "Okay, we can use this to get rich!" It came at a time when people were desperate to try anything and it did help people get back on their feet.
Hill surprised his audience with his strong opinions about sex. He said that a vibrant personality, which he called personal magnetism, came from the same source as sex appeal. In Think and Grow Rich he said, "Sex energy is the creative energy of all creative geniuses." Instead of expressing the energy through purely physical channels, he said you could transmute it into business success. He regretted the conspiracy of silence surrounding sex, which he compared to prohibition. He lamented that sex had been "grossly misunderstood, slandered, and burlesqued by the ignorant and the evil-minded." He encouraged his 1937 audience to see sexual energy as a potential force for good. Apart from that, he held many old fashioned moral views typical of the 1930s.
Hill went on to become a popular author, lecturer, and contributing editor at Success magazine. He was also an attorney. He is widely regarded as the inventor of positive thinking. Every positive thinking book for business has built on the foundation that Hill established in Think and Grow Rich.
The Positive Thinking Movement became an industry in 1956, when Earl Nightingale released The Strangest Secret. The LP sold more than a million copies and won a gold record as the first recording of its kind.
The strangest secret is "We become what we think about." Nightingale said it is strange because it's not really a secret. People throughout history had spoken of it: Marcus Aurelius, Disraeli, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, the Bible, Shakespeare, and George Bernard Shaw. Although the secret is obvious, they don't teach it in school, so everyone must discover it for him or herself. Nightingale compared the mind to a great machine running on auto control. The object was to get your hands on the wheel and guide the machine to a specific purpose.
Nightingale founded the Nightingale-Conant Corporation of Chicago and dedicated his life to teaching people about their duty to think positive. He went on to become one of the most recognized voices in America for his daily five-minute radio program, Our changing World.
Positive thinking got an even wider acceptance during the space age, when Dr. Maxwell Maltz published his book, Psycho-cybernetics, in 1960. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who studied the psychology of human personality. In his surgical practice, he found that unsightly scars inhibited his patients' personalities and behavior. Once he removed the scars, his patients were free to be themselves. He believed there was an inner face that worked much the same way, because a scar on the inner face could hold a person back in life just as much as a disfiguring scar on the body. He said that forgiveness was the scalpel to remove inner scars.
He criticized the branch of psychology called behaviorism, which started with Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936). Pavlov won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1904 for proving that dogs learned behavior through conditioned reflexes. Just as dogs react to rewards and punishment, Behaviorists developed ways to apply Pavlov's theories to humans. Behavior modification is the therapy of choice for most juvenile halls. In a typical behavior modification program, troubled teens earn points for good behavior and lose points for bad behavior. Their release depends on completing a program and earning a certain number of points.
Maltz pointed out that behavior modification was dehumanizing. He said it might teach people some self-control and they might learn to abide by society's rules, but it might also make them resentful. He worried about the trend of scientists comparing the human brain to a computer. Rather than treating humans like animals or machines, Maltz said the mind is like a built-in machine, a computer, that each individual could learn to operate.
Maltz said Psycho-cybernetics was a manual for programming your internal computer. "Psycho" refers to psychology and "cybernetics" comes from the Greek kubernetes, which means steersman, or governor, which people had been using to describe computers since 1940. Dr. Maltz offered a scientific explanation for positive thinking and described it as a compassionate philosophy. He encouraged people to upgrade their self-image and program their minds with enthusiasm for life.
There have been hundreds of books in the positive thinking tradition since the Great Depression, but Coué, Hill, Nightingale, and Maltz were the founders of the true line of positive thinking. They stayed closest to the philosophy that the mind creates reality. Others minimized the mind's power and said that success depends on developing good relationships and self-esteem. Still others got the part about the mind right, but associated it with a particular religion or esoteric supernatural force.
You can't help but appreciate the positive thinking founders' secular approach to the subject matter. Positive thinking has a long tradition in new age religions, but the universal truth that thoughts create reality is not limited to any one religious tradition or to any religion at all. The strangest secret is a natural part of human life.
Illustration 2: Branches of Positive Thinking
Dreaming Peace Table of Contents
(click on chapter title to read the chapter)
How Positive Thinking Works, Part I:
Autosuggestion
The Power of Conscious Thoughts
Power of the Subconscious Mind
Abilities of the Subconscious Mind
Autosuggestion is Simple Psychology
Freud and Jung: Their Views on the Power of Thought
Review
How Positive Thinking Works, Part II:
Positive Mental Attitude
The Role of Mental Attitude
Recognize Fear-Based Attitudes
Renounce Superstition
How to Change Mental Attitudes
Make it through Crisis and Setbacks
Improve Your Tolerance of Everyday Stress
Self-Image and Happiness
Quit Projecting
Get Some Goals
Live in the Present Moment
Review
How Positive Thinking Works, Part III:
Cooperation
Be Who You Are
Healthy Boundaries for Positive Thinking
The Importance of Mentors
Dale Carnegie on Effective Relationships
Relationship Politics
Nice Not Necessarily Positive
Dishonest People Do Not Achieve Real Success
Leadership in a Dysfunctional Organization
Brainstorming
The Negatives of Positive Thinking
Review
How Positive Thinking Works, Part IV:
Solve Collective Problems
Positive Thinking Utopia
The Future is a Work in Progress
Fight for What is Right
Hate Cannot Solve Problems
Learn to Live With Risk
Rumors of the End of the World Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Review
