The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality

by Mitch Horowitz

Ralph Waldo Emerson called for a “Philosophy for the People”—a simple, dynamic, truthful guide to living ethically and with power.

The guiding principle of positive-mind metaphysics is: thoughts are causative. I consider this outlook “applied Transcendentalism” and explore it on practical terms in this book.

If I posit a connection between the individual and some kind of higher capacity of the mind, that does not mean that only “one thing”—a law of mentation—is going on in your life. Lots of events, whether biological, mechanical, or metaphysical, can be simultaneously occurring.

This is one of the ways that so many people new to LoA and New Though fall into the trap of spiritual bypass. The belief that only thoughts are the causes of the world around us is false.

Above all, New Thought has failed to develop a theology of suffering.

"The reason you lost your job is you weren't thinking positively enough?" Not anything to do with politics cause tariffs to rise and forcing manufacturing to move over seas.

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.

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.

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 non identification.

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.

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.

Too often in the New Thought world we conflate thoughts and emotions. But the two are very different and function on separate tracks.

Neville’s method is to picture a small, satisfying scene that implies achievement of your aim. You are to bask in the emotions of your goal having been reached as you rerun this small scene in your mind.

Positive-mind philosophy places a demand on us, one that we may think we’ve risen to but have never really tried. And that is: To come to an understanding of precisely what we want. When we organize our thoughts in a certain way—with a fearless maturity and honesty—we may be surprised to discover our true desires. A person who considers himself “spiritual” may uncover a deep wish for worldly attainment; someone who has labored to support the work of others may find that he has deeply unsettled yearnings of his own for self-expression; someone who is very public or extroverted may realize that he really wants to be alone.

I'll admit this is where I am still doing the biggest part of my work.

Our bodies and minds decay, and if there is a higher form of life than the physical, then we must bow to it and seek glimpses of it in our lived experience.

When physical development and outer aesthetics become not just a value but an ultimate end, not just a temporal aspect of self-expression but an absolute in themselves, we cross into ethically dangerous ground.

Courage is something you must do all by yourself. If you go your own way, you may have to face an occasional loss.

I want you to select a book that expresses an ethical or spiritual outlook with which you passionately agree. Choose a work that has attained posterity, even if within a small circle, which confirms its pull on the moral imagination.