A rare image of Joseph Murphy, undated. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Revelation of Joseph Murphy

A New Thought pioneer’s radical idealism

Mitch Horowitz
15 min readApr 20, 2023

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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.

A first edition of Murphy’s 1963 landmark.

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.

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Mitch Horowitz
Mitch Horowitz

Written by Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China

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