Each Mind a Kingdom

One of the things that is most apparent when studying the history of self-help literature is the dominance of women. Since the earliest days of New Thought women have been the movement's principal leaders and followers. Certainly in the early literature of Australian self-help, immersed as it is in the philosophy of New Thought, women are the real pioneers.
American historian Beryl Satter has written an excellent book called Each Mind a Kingdom, which details the phenomenon of women in the New Thought movement.
In my research on Sister Veni Cooper-Mathieson, a wonderfully eccentric Australian author, publisher and spiritual leader, I noticed that she led something called the White Cross Crusade. I was surprised to discover that this was a society to promote celibacy aming young women. They met weekly in the Domain, and there was a companion group for young men. By the brevity of the mentions, I can only assume that both movements were not particularly well subscribed. Sister Veni wrote extensively on the subject of female emancipation, a key component of which she saw as being chastity among the young.
It wasn't until I read Satter's fascinating book that I realised that these crusades for morality and celibacy were an intrinsic part of the New Thought movement in America. Indeed, the position was seen as a progressive one, helping to combat the problems of unwanted pregnancy, venereal disease and the abandonment of unmarried mothers.
The New Thought movement saw itself as ushering in a new, purer age, in which women were empowered, and would no longer be enslaved to what was characteristically cast as the baser sexual demands of men.
Physical desire - and sexuality in general - was posited in this early movement as a problem, something to be overcome. It is fascinating how these early feminist visions were tied in with ideas of chastity and sexual purity.

Stephanie Dowrick - An Introduction

Australia's leading writer on matters of spirituality and personal transformation is without a doubt Stephanie Dowrick. Her lyrical and frequently literary books are also bestsellers, though they sometimes defy categorisation in any of the usual sub-genres of self-help. Drawing from a deep understanding of religion, mythology, psychology and literature, Dowrick's oeuvre is pretty much all her own, and is these days increasingly imitated.
Dowrick emerged from a background in publishing, which probably goes some way to explaining the great commercial success of her books. There is no doubt she has a flair for marketing, publicity and promotion which has seen her emerge as one of Australia's leading media commentators. In London in the 70s Stephanie was the founder and first Managing Director of The Women's Press, proving her pedigree as a feminist. It is that aspect of her writing that particularly interests me academically. I think she was among the first in the self-help genre to really speak to a female readership, though the books are in no way intended for women only. I am interested in reading the books closely to find out in what ways (if any) feminist ideas are engaged and explored.
She later worked as a publisher at Allen & Unwin in Australia. This, too, would be an interesting avenue to explore, though I doubt I'll have the space in my thesis. Maggie Hamilton is another publishing industry executive who went on to write self-help books. And, perhaps obliquely, Rhonda Byrne was a successful television producer before she branched out into the field of personal transformation. It's certainly an interesting phenomenon, and I wonder if I could find parallels in America or the UK.
These days Stephanie Dowrick is one of the pioneers of the burgeoning Interfaith movement, and noting the different religious references in her books would also be a fascinating endeavour. She has a background in Jungian psychology, and has been deeply influenced by Quaker thought. She also seems to have a clear understanding of both Buddhism and Sufism, which speaks to the extraodinary depth of her learning and her spiritual understanding.
I plan on bringing you a few little potted analyses of some of Stephanie Dowrick's books as I slowly piece together my PhD thesis. I hope you'll find them as interesting as I do.

The Eternal Mind in The Science of Mind

Ernest Holmes' own specialised terminology flows thick and fast throughout his mammoth text The Science of Mind. I suspect that at times terms are interchangeable, but I may be wrong - he may be completely thorough and consistent in his subtle use of terminology. I would have to read the book many times over to be able to ascertain that, and to be honest I don't think that's going to happen.

There are many terms for God, and they are quickly identified by the capitalisation of the first letter. One of the most common is Mind, occasionally more clearly signified as Eternal Mind. This Eternal Mind is the creative, unifying force at work in the universe, the thing to which we are all attached, and from which we all emerged. It is separate from the small-m mind that we all possess, but only because we have limited our material minds, and enforced our own separation. In fact, the goal of Science of Mind (i.e. Holmes' philosophy) is to re-unify us with the Eternal Mind, so that we can experience one-ness with the absolute.

Holmes tells us that "the Eternal Mind knows all things" and this assures the reader that what we are talking about here is the old-fashioned God, re-cast as something more scientific, less loaded. It is subtle theology, and I imagine quite effective - few could quarrel with the notion of the mind, something we all possess.

These two minds - the material and the Eternal - are the essence of Science of Mind philosophy. What the spiritual practitioner is doing is training the small mind (Holmes says "renewing") to work in accord with the Eternal Mind, so that we might recognise our own divinity. This is an individual project, and the work can only ever be done by the individual - we cannot hope to change the mind of another.

By turning our thoughts toward good, the mind is retrained, and material circumstances are changed. In Holmes' philosophy (as in the Fillmores' and Mary Baker Eddy's) good must always trump evil - a good thought held in the mind will drive out all evil, for only good is real. Good is of the Eternal Mind - it is its essential nature.

The New Testament in The Science of Mind

The Fifth part of Ernest Holmes' The Science of Mind is taken up with a more in-depth exploration of the New Testament, dwelling particularly on the healing stories of Jesus. Citing chapter and verse, Holmes attempts a metaphysical explanation of these familar stories, stressing the ways in which they might show us that the healing powers of God are available to us all. Because Christ consistently healed the pathetic, the outcast and the seemingly unworthy, Holmes sees this as evidence that the Love if God is complete and all-encompassing - no-one is unworthy in the eyes of the Divine.
He says adamantly that "God knows no evil" (p. 438), and this kind of rhetoric is directly traceable to his teacher Emma Curtis Hopkins, who herself learned it from Mary Baker Eddy. Holmes says that Jesus was teaching this reality as he healed - by pointing out that people themselves laboured under the delusions of sin, sickness and unforgiveness. Jesus freed them from these self-imposed states of misery by making them realise that in God's eyes they were entirely perfect.
He reads Matthew 9:16 as an injunction to abandon old spiritual ideas. For Holmes the new is invariably the right, because the human is forever on an evolutionary path. Those new realisations we gain are to be embraced, and not mixed up with the old cloth of old, limiting beliefs.
This section is using the New Testament to reinforce Holmes' New Thought ideas about spiritual healing and the perfected self. he uses Christ healing sytories to reinforce the idea that our miseries are only ever illusory, and can be dropped in a moment with the right inspiration.

The Quest for Meaning

I am quite a devotee of Unity FM, the on-line radio station run by the Unity School of Christianity, an American church that propagates the teachings of New Thought. The church has been around for over 100 years, and as churches go it is on the extreme-liberal end of things, with openly gay clergy and a reasonably open-ended theology that encourages people to seek their own spiritual truths. The church exists more to encourage positive thinking and the cultivation of spiritual technologies such as prayer and reflection. Unity is the largest and most widespread of the New Thought denominations.
Their radio station is reasonably new - I think it's been running for about two years now - and for me it offers a fascinating insight into American self-help culture. I especially enjoy it when they discuss books, and one of the shows, Hooked on Classics, is devoted solely to the study of New Thought books, normally reading one particular title over a number of weeks in a kind of on-line bookclub.
The output of Unity FM is quite impressive, and I am invariably weeks behind in my listening. So it is that I've just finished Jim Rosemergy's book The Quest for Meaning, which was the book being discussed a couple of months ago!
Until then I'd never heard of Jim Rosemergy, a Unity Church minister who turns out to have been an extremely prolific author. This book is about the notion of vocation and mission, and how we might view our lives and our work as some kind of spiritual mission. Interestingly, at exactly the same time I have also been reading Micki McGee's academic study of self-help writing, Self-Help Inc., and in it she discusses this very trope.
As one would expect from the pen of a mnister, this book is overtly religious, and targeted I would imagine primarily at church members. He discusses the classic New Thought notion that we are all children of God, and that all of us are blessed with a special mission that we should do our best to fulfill. This idea is much older than Unity, of course - I can trace it back at least as far as Swedenborg, and almost certainly way before. At the end of each chapter he provides a series of questions for reflection and topics for prayer, a set of work he refers to as an "Adventure." This kind of structure is quite typical of self-help writing, though in this case a number of the questions were quite esoteric - sometimes almost koan-like.
Rosemergy quotes the special notion of mission that Unity Church's founders, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, lived with. He includes their extraordinary "covenant" - a document they wrote together which set forth their life's plan and all that they were prepared to do to achieve it. This was written in 1892, and serves as an early example of the "mission statement" that all corporate entities are encoraged to committ to paper these days.
The Quest for Meaning is an interesting little book, and would fascinate a conventional theologian with its very specific - and very specifically New Thought - Christology.

The Secret

I've just read all the way through The Secret. This book will take up the entirety of the final chapter of my thesis, and it is a fascinating object of study.
Of course, part of its interest to the literary scholar is the fact of it being so excessively - and unashamedly - intertextual. There is really very little in the book that is original prose - most of it is quotes from motivational speakers, or excerpts from much older New Thought books. This makes it a treasure-trove for me, allowing me to mine it for its influences and its references, all of which it wears very much on its sleeve.
The Secret still manages to infuriate people, and whenever I mention I am working on self-help books for my PhD, 8 people out of 10 will bring up The Secret. Such a powerful cultural artefact is a rare thing indeed, and I am always fascinated to hear why people dislike it so. They have invariably never read it, and have no idea about the social, cultural and religious movements that inform its philosophy. But its enormous popularity seems to give people some sense of ownership over it, and everyone seems to have an opinion one way or another.
My take on The Secret? Well obviously I can't give a whole chapter's worth of critical analysis here (mostly because I am yet to write that chapter!), but I see it as a manifestation of quasi-religious faith, and hope for a pleasant future in a world that offers people very little of either. Most people that read and enjoy The Secret and view the movie do not, in my experience, belong to any particular church or espouse any particular religious faith. And so the message of The Secret is something quite new to them, and something to which they can respond positively.
When I was in Melbourne recently a dear friend told me that The Secret was listed on a website called Things Bogans Like, and I was fascinated by this. Because I think that this encapsulates a large part of why self-help - and The Secret in particular - is so derided in some sectors. It is consumed by working-class people, and speaks largely to their hopes and dreams. As such it falls well outside of what is designated as high culture - particularly any kind of literary culture - and so is still open to the kind of paternalistic condemnation that other genres were once subject to.

The Science of Mind on Thought

"Thoughts of lack, poverty and limitation contain within themselves the conditions necessary to produce lack, poverty and limitation."

The Science of Mind p. 402