Power to the People
What New Thought really says about attracting money
Is money-making linked to thought causation — or is that guileless fantasy? I am reproducing gratis chapter two of my 2018 book The Miracle Club for my take on the question.
My philosophical hero is Neville Goddard, an English, Barbados-born New Thought teacher, who wrote under his first name. He heard the following words in the midst of a personal vision: “Down with the blue bloods!” To Neville, who died in 1972, privilege did not belong to the rich but to the truly imaginative.
Because of Neville’s English background and elegant bearing, many people assumed he was born wealthy. He was not — far from it. Likewise, because of my New York background and surname, many people judged the same of me growing up. A school bus driver upon hearing that I lived in a suburban development with gaudily named streets like Royal Way and Regents Lane said, “Oh, a rich kid, huh?” A truculent writer with whom I worked once (just once) called me “college boy,” inferring the same thing.
Here’s the truth, of which I rarely speak: My father was a Legal Aid Society attorney in New York City who defended the poorest of the poor. For reasons beyond his control, he lost his job and profession, leaving us to consider applying for food stamps and warming our always-unaffordable home with kerosene heaters. We wore used clothes and scraped together change and coupons to pay grocery bills. There were no Hanukkah, Christmas, or birthday gifts. My sister and I would buy them with our own money, earned from odd jobs, and pretend to friends that they came from our parents. In the words of The Notorious B.I.G., “Birthdays was the worst days.”
One night, in desperation, my father stole my mother’s engagement ring to pay debts, over which he may have been physically threatened. (He had started carrying mace spray.) They divorced. My older sister and I got by through after-school jobs, student loans, and the precious availability of health benefits through my mother’s labor union, the 1199 hospital workers. Given the economic devastation visited on many American homes, including during the still-unhealed 2008 recession, I do not consider our story exceptional.
But when someone assumed then, or does today, that the son of a Jewish lawyer is necessarily born on easy street, he is wrong. This brings me to something else that I rarely mention: Today I am a millionaire. It’s not because I’m a hotshot media figure or dealmaker. In my day job, at the time of this writing, I publish occult and New Age books — not your typical path to wealth. My wife, the daughter of a single-mother family, is a television news producer. We raise two sons in Manhattan. We have no family cash cow. And yet, to draw again on The Notorious B.I.G.: “Now we sip champagne when we thirsty.” Why is that?
Because Neville, in my estimation, was correct. Wealth, to some extent, comes from within. Let me quote the woman I honor in the dedication of this book, Helen Wilmans. A suffragist and New Thoughter, Wilmans rose from dirt poverty on a Northern California farm in the late 1890s to command a small publishing empire.
“What!” Wilmans wrote in her 1899 book The Conquest of Poverty. “Can a person by holding certain thoughts create wealth? Yes, he can. A man by holding certain thoughts — if he knows the Law that relates effect and cause on the mental plane — can actually create wealth by the character of thoughts he entertains.” But, she added, such thought “must be supplemented by courageous action.” Never omit that.
Wilmans’s career was a New Thought parable of liberation. While working as a newspaper reporter in Chicago in the early 1880s, she became one of the pioneering female reporters of that era. Everything had gone against her in life. She was fired from jobs, divorced from her farmer husband, left to raise two daughters on her own, and lived one step ahead of eviction from her Chicago boarding house. More than anything, Wilmans yearned to start her own labor newspaper. She wanted to bring the ideas of mind power to working people. One day in 1882, she asked her Chicago editor if he would invest in her venture. He dismissed the idea out of hand. In despair Wilmans ran from the newspaper offices (probably not wanting her male bosses to see her in tears) and wandered the darkening streets of Chicago on a November afternoon. She thought to herself: I am completely alone; there is no one on whom I can depend. But as those words sounded in her head, she was filled with a sense of confidence. It occurred to her that she did not have to depend on anyone else — she could depend on the power of her mind. This was the New Thought gospel.
“I walked those icy streets like a school boy just released from restraint,” Wilmans wrote. “My years fell from me as completely as if death turned my spirit loose in Paradise.”
Like Wilmans, I had never dreamed of wealth or wanted to be surrounded by fancy things. I believe in labor unions, moderately redistributive tax policies, and personal thrift — not gross consumption. But there is something vitally important to earning a good living, and that fact cannot be hidden or ignored. Nor can this: Your mind is a creative agency, and the thoughts with which you impress it contribute to the actualized events of your existence — including money. This statement is absolutely true and should never be neglected. I have tested and verified it within the laboratory of my existence, and I am writing these words at age fifty. I will consider later why it is true, but for now, if you want money, I ask you to wholly embrace it as true. This necessary act of conviction will not, in any case, lead you to rash behavior. It does not suggest neglecting daily obligations or loosening your hands on the plow of effort.
To have wealth you must first want wealth. Do you? Or do you consider money gauche or unimportant? Whether you are an artist or activist, soldier or craftsman, you must see wealth as a necessary and vital facet of your life. You can do far more good with money than without. You must recognize money as a healthful part of existence. Nothing is more duplicitous than someone who runs down acquisitiveness while enjoying money that comes from well-off parents, a situation typical of many in the New York media world in which I work. Or, a public persona who scoffs outwardly at money while employing sticky-fingered lawyers, agents, or other parties to comb the earth for money for them. As a publisher I’ve seen it many times. By contrast, strong people admit that they want money, among other goals, and in so doing are neither in the service of falsehood nor shame.
The same holds true of your ambitions in the world. Spiritually minded people, and all others, should honor their ambitions and pursue them openly and transparently, with due respect to colleagues and competitors. Yet this is frowned upon in many reaches of the contemporary alternative spiritual and New Age cultures. Within these worlds, we recycle ideas from the Vedic and Buddhist traditions and use them to prop up unexamined ideas about the need for nonattachment, transcendence of the material, and the value of unseen things. Writers who can’t decipher a word of Sanskrit, Tibetan, or ancient Japanese — the languages that have conveyed these ideas from within the sacred traditions — rely upon a chain of secondary sources, often many times removed from their inception, to echo concepts like nonattachment and nonidentification. We are told that the ego-self grasps at illusions and fleeting pleasures, formulating a false sense of identity around desires, ambitions, attachments, and the need for security. I question whether this interpretation is accurate. In recently working with the Shanghai-based translator of a Chinese publication of my One Simple Idea, I found, to my chagrin and bemusement, that Buddhist concepts I thought that I, as a Westerner, had understood were, in my retelling, completely alien to her experience as someone raised within non-Western religious structures.
Our popularized notions of the Eastern theology of nonattachment are cherry-picked from religious structures that were, in their originating cultures, highly stratified and hierarchical. Hinduism and Buddhism, moreover, addressed the lives of ancient people for whom distinctions of caste, class, and status were largely predetermined, and who would have regarded cultural mobility almost as unlikely as space travel. There were social as well as spiritual reasons why worldly transcendence beckoned. Shorn of their cultural origins, concepts of nonattachment today sound tidy and persuasive to Westerners who understandably want something more than the race to the top. (Or, just as often, who fear they may not reach the top and thus desire an alternate set of values.) But this transplanted outlook is often ill fitting and brings no more lasting satisfaction to the modern Westerner than so-called ego gratifications. This kind of ersatz “Easternism” has been with us for several decades, most recently popularized by writers such as Eckhart Tolle and Michael A. Singer, yet it has not provided Westerners with a satisfying response to materialism because it often seeks to divert the individual from the very direction in which he may find meaning, which is toward the compass point of achievement.
Some of my spiritual friends and colleagues have told me that I am too outwardly focused. Isn’t the true path, they ask, marked by a sense of detachment from the outer? Doesn’t awareness come from within? Isn’t there, finally, a Higher Self or essence from which we can more authentically live, rather than succumb to the illusory goals of the lower self or ego, which directs us toward career, trinkets, and pleasure?
I have been on the spiritual path for many years. I have sought understanding within both mainstream and esoteric movements. My conviction is that the true nature of life is to be generative. I believe that in order to be happy, human beings must exercise their fullest range of abilities — including the exertions of outer achievement.
Seekers too often divide, and implicitly condemn and confuse, their efforts by relying on terms like ego and essence, as though one is good and other bad (while neither actually exists beyond the conceptual.) A teacher of mine once joked: “If we like something in ourselves, then we say it comes from essence; if we dislike it, we say it comes from ego.” I contend that these and related concepts, like attachment/nonattachment and identification/nonidentification, fail to address the needs, psychology, and experience of the contemporary Western seeker. And, in fact, such concepts do not necessarily reflect the outlook of some of the most dynamic recent thinkers from the Vedic tradition, including the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918–2008) and Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986).
Let me be clear: The inner search and the search for self-expression are matters of extraordinary importance — and extraordinary mystery. I believe that the simplest and most resounding truth on the question of the inner life and attainment appears in the dictum of Christ: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.” We are products of both worlds: the seen and the unseen. There is no reason to suppose that our efforts or energies are better dedicated to one or the other. Both exist. Both have veritable claims on us.
I do not view nonattachment as a workable goal for those of us raised in the West, and elsewhere, today. Rather, I believe that the ethical pursuit of achievement holds greater depth, and summons more from within our inner natures, than we may realize. “Satisfaction with our lot,” Emerson wrote in his journals on July 28, 1826, “is not consistent with the intentions of God & with our nature. It is our nature to aim at change, at improvement, at perfection.”
I recently read a book that I recalled my mother borrowing from our local library when I was eight or nine years old: Yes I Can, the autobiography of entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., published in 1965, the year of my birth. In the public mind, Davis is remembered as a flashy, somewhat self-parodying Vegas performer — but decades before his tuxedoed stage shows, Davis was an innovative prodigy, raised on the vaudeville circuit, where he was subjected to the brutality, insults, and physical assaults that often characterized black life under Jim Crow. These threats followed him into the army during World War II, where he used his skills as an entertainer to mitigate some of the racism around him — though indignities and violence always snared him at unexpected moments. When Davis left the military, he made an inner vow that shaped the rest of his life:
I’d learned a lot in the army and I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong, so important, that those people and their hatred could never touch me. My talent was the only thing that made me a little different from everybody else, and it was all that I could hope would shield me because I was different.
I’d weighed it all, over and over again: What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent. Where do I want to go? I want to be treated well. I want people to like me, and to be decent to me. How do I get there? There’s only one way I can do it with what I have to work with. I’ve got to be a star! I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.
I challenge anyone to question the drive, purpose, and canniness of Davis’s words — not to challenge them from a meditation cushion or living room sofa, but from within the onrush of lived experience. Davis was viewing his life from a pinnacle of clarity. Would his worldly attachments and aspirations cause him pain? He was already in pain. At the very least they would relieve certain financial and social burdens — and probably something more. Would his attainment of fame ease his inner anguish? I think he owed it to his existence, as you do to yours, to find out. Whatever your goal may be, you cannot renounce what you haven’t attained. So to conclude that success, in whatever form, is not meaningful is just conjecture without first verifying it.
Do not be afraid of your aims, or slice and dice them with melancholic pondering. Find them — and act on them. By living as a productive being, in the fullest sense, you honor the nature of your existence and perform acts of generativity toward others. If you are able, you may then determine from the vantage point of experience and attainment whether your aim responded to an inner need of profound meaning. I won’t tell you what you’ll find — you may differ from me; I will tell you that this been the case for me.
I wrote earlier that I feel confident in the existence of an extraphysical dimension of life. Following from that, I also assume there is some form of nonphysical or after-death survival. But I do not know that. I do know that we have verifiable experiences in this world. Jesus didn’t say to avert your eyes from the world but to “render under Caesar”; that is, to fulfill both transcendent ethics and worldly requirements. “To be in the world but not of it” — to locate your values on the highest scale, but to dig your well where you stand.
The greatest of worldly requirements, as I’m sure you implicitly feel whether you accept or resist it, is the fulfillment of your self-potential, which includes your command of resources and your ability to influence others through your artistic, commercial, or social activities. Whatever your aim in life, it must be acknowledged that money is necessary. Without it you can do nothing — you will be forced to spend all your time and attention getting it, while anxiously yearning to enact your plans in the world. So, I offer no false demureness on matters of wealth.
If you can agree that money is important, there are two vital, inner steps to opening yourself to money. I purposely offer these steps early in this book because I am unashamed of them, and because I promised you a philosophy of results. Keeping one’s word is the cornerstone of the search for meaning.
1. You must possess and pursue a clear and definite aim in life.
By this I do not mean a flimsy, general, or vague desire, and certainly not a set of aims that may be in contradiction (for example, wanting to raise a young family while also wanting to frequently travel). You must know exactly what you want to accomplish, and you must feel it passionately, even obsessively. You must be willing to turn aside everything and everyone who doesn’t contribute to your realization of that aim. (I do not necessarily mean family members or people in need.) If that strikes you as ruthless or extreme, it is because you do not yet possess, or are not yet honest about, your definite aim. When you find it, it will be like finding breath itself.
You’ve heard the expression “no one on his deathbed ever wished he had spent more time at the office.” Well, I doubt that principle is true. Pursuing a deeply felt aim is, in fact, rarely a source of regret. The important thing is to be unembarrassed and uncompromisingly honest with yourself about what your central aim is. And remember: it’s yours — you don’t have to advertise it to skeptical friends or family members. It’s better not to. Most people are creatures of jealousy. They often run down other people’s legitimate aims. Don’t invite purposeless scrutiny. Share your ideas only as necessary. Devising a chief aim is so crucial — and so foundational to everything in this book — that I return to it in almost every chapter.
2. You must write down a certain amount of money that you want to make by a certain date in connection with your aim — and be deadly serious about it.
What do you want to earn from the pursuit and realization of your aim? Write it down. Be precise. Set a dollar amount and a date. This is a step that I long resisted. I wanted general prosperity, but eschewed listing some fixed sum. It struck me as narrow. It seemed to violate my sense of ethics and spiritual ideals. I was wrong. I currently have a yellow sticky note pasted inside the back cover of my personal copy of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (whose jacket and spine I have covered in clear packing tape to keep the book from falling apart after multiple readings). My yellow note is dated 11/23/14 and lists a specific dollar amount, to which I committed to earning by the following year on 11/23/15 (which also happens to be my birthday). I later wrote an addendum on this piece of paper: “This happened!! 5/27/16.” The latter date is when I had noticed, entirely by surprise, that the sum I had written down arrived within the given time frame. In the period since I wrote that sum, I have listed another sum yet further off in the future.
As I am writing these words, certain unforeseeable forms of income have flowed to me in considerable amounts, and I’ve turned away other offers for reasons of preference and time management.
Why does the listing of a sum and date make any difference? Well, it’s far more than just jotting down a number and date. You must have that sum and deadline firmly in mind and fully embrace them as goals. It makes you honest and focused about what you desire. The sum should be believably attainable to you. It must be inwardly persuasive. There are always opportunities to go further — but be reasonable at first so that you do not pit the faculties of logic in opposition to your goal. Your mental and emotional aptitudes — innovation, empathy, logic, instinct, and, I believe, some form of extraphysical understanding and communication — will collude in the most sensible and direct way to set you toward your financial goal. You cannot foresee exactly how your aim will come to pass: if you are committed and ethically clear, ever conscious of the financial direction in which you wish to move, possessed of and active toward your plans, and mindful of and obedient to basic religious ethics of plain dealing and honest delivery of your service or product — i.e., something that benefits the user and creates a widening circle of generativity — the means will unfold. Indeed, what we see and experience as a logical progression of events may be accompanied or driven by a higher creative agency, which works in concert with our focused, clarified ideals in the same way that the spiritual appeal and hopeful energies are measurable in certain ways in the body, but are not themselves what is measured. In any case, if you recede into laziness, procrastination, dishonesty, exaggeration, or entitlement, the circle of productivity will correspondingly recede and so will the flow of finances to you. (And note that the things I’ve just mentioned are usually forms of fear.)
Being generative means providing a concrete service, not just expecting payouts from the world in the forms of remuneration, applause, contracts, and open doors. Are you offering a service — or just placing demands on others? Cornering people to read your novel is not offering a service. Do you possess, or are you willing to attain, the necessary skills to earn money through whatever career, service, or product you have dedicated yourself to? This consideration is vital because you cannot serve the productivity and betterment of others — and, hence, make financial claims on them — without being able to plant and harvest. Don’t dream of being a farmer but be a farmer by harvesting a crop and thus having something viable to offer. By your fruits your benefactors will know you.
Some New Thought authors have taken a “fairy dust” approach to riches, promising their readers that visualization and affirmation open up the storehouses of heaven. I recently discovered a cache of letters that readers had sent to the publisher of New Thought pioneer Joseph Murphy more than a decade after the writer and minister’s death in 1981. It was heartbreaking to read the yearning, disappointed questions of these earnest correspondents — many of whom were trying to manifest money — written to a man now deceased.
I selected one letter below, handwritten by a woman in Tampa, Florida, that typified the needs of many who wrote Murphy. Following her letter, I include what I would say to this woman if I could reach back in time and respond:
August 12, 1993
Dear Dr. Murphy,
I keep reading your book Your Infinite Power to Be Rich so much that
it is falling apart and I still haven’t reached my goal of receiving abundance.
I feel that I must be doing something wrong so that I can’t break this poverty syndrome. I keep saying these wonderful affirmations but I think I neutralize them because I don’t believe I deserve wealth of any kind.
I would like to be financially secure so that I never have to worry about money again. I would like good, supportive relationships and a soul mate.
Somehow I got the impression from my youth that I didn’t deserve anything because I’m no good.
Please help me to get out of my poverty.
Sincerely, ____________
And my reply:
Dear ____________,
First of all I want to assure you of something — and I want you to
remember this for the rest of your life: You are not only good — you are exceptional. You are a leader among people and are part of the nobles of the human race. This is for the simple fact that you have taken steps that so few people ever consider: striving to heighten your place in life, engaging in inner development, and caring enough about such things to take the time to write a letter to an author whose work touched you. Most people never write one letter in their lives. Most never read a single book, or attend a single lecture, with the aim of raising their sense of self-potential. So, please, let us lay that childhood myth immediately to rest. You are exceptional — and this is a fact.
I love Joseph Murphy’s work; but I believe that sometimes saying an affirmation — even with depth of feeling — is not enough. The most remarkable people in history, from Joan of Arc to Mahatma Gandhi, led lives of devotion and action. They were ardently committed to affecting things in the world. Whatever your employment, throw yourself into it with passion. Be aware of everything that you can do for your bosses, coworkers, and customers. Be the problem-solver to whom others look for help and advisement. Know more about your job than everyone else, not in a know-it-all way but with the aim of providing service and doing your personal best. Expect — and respectfully require — good wages for your good work. Join a union if you are able and support activists and leaders who defend the rights of workers. But, above all, be the person upon whom all others rely.
Author James Allen was a working-class Englishman who rose from a childhood of poverty to a writing career, largely through his dignity of character and his dogged and intelligent persistence. [We explore his life in a later chapter.] I urge you to read his As a Man Thinketh. And when you do, remember that his words and ideas weren’t the work of someone famous or wealthy. They came from a workingman who had tested them in the laboratory of his own life. Also please read Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, which is useful because it combines a program of mental metaphysics with a plan of action.
As for good relationships and finding a soul mate, those, too, are noble and right yearnings. My counsel is to associate only with people who are supportive and respectful of your search for self-betterment and spiritual awareness. Seek out those who are engaged, in whatever way, in bettering themselves. Spend no time — or as little time as practicality allows — among cynics, bullies, or unproductive people. Avoid those who gossip, and refuse to listen to rumors or hearsay. (Nothing is more deleterious of our relationships or sense of self-respect than engaging in gossip.) Do this, and you will naturally come into the company of true friends and, hopefully, a soul mate.
I enter into a few moments of prayer every day at 3 p.m. EST — and I would be privileged if you would join me. I wish you every good thing.
Your friend, Mitch
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