Catherine Ponder and the Rich Jesus

I am still working on my The Secret chapter -  it is the final chapter and seems as though it will never end.
One of the authors that Rhonda Byrne urges people to read is Catherine Ponder, who, she says, teaches the truth of the Bible stories - that Jesus, the prophets and patriarchs were in fact wealthy people who despised poverty.

When I worked in a New Age bookshop in Sydney in the 90s and 2000s Ponder's books were very popular, despite their high price. Published by DeVorss publications, Catherine Ponder is a Unity minister (ordained in 1956) who wrote quite a number of books, all based around her particular reading of the Bible as a prosperity text. After her endorsement in The Secret, it seems as though her books have reached a whole new generation of readership, and I notice that the Rev. Dr. Barbara King, one of my favourite women in the world, is teaching at the moment a course based on Ponder's books at her New Thought-based Hillside Chapel in Atlanta, Georgia.
I have gone back to look at Catherine Ponder's book The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity - a substantial text at 430pp. Ponder's style is folksy and engaging, and highly reminiscent of the earlier books of Florence Scovel Shinn. The book is filled with miraculous stories of people who have applied the techniques of New Thought in  their lives and achieved marvellous and unexpected results, usually in the shape of improved finances, work opportunities and greater prosperity. Ponder urges her readers to re-awaken to older dreams of greatness, happiness and wealth, and to employ the usual New Thought technologies of visualisation and affirmation to progress towards greatness. 
I'm not sure that Ponder needed to write quite as many books on the same theme as she did - the central message is repeated ad infinitum - but I have no doubt that she was sincere in her beliefs and her passion and enthusiasm is patent in her writing style. Hers was a thoroughly New Thought vision of the possibility of all people to be great, to be rich and happy and ultimately useful. There is, as well, something of the old-fashioned self-help notion of thrift and financial indepenedence, not to mention self-responsibility. The Ponderian subject is financially independent, working hard to enjoy good and beautiful things and to help others who may be less fortunate.
Ponder sees the individual as the primary source of their own poverty. The natural state is one of wealth, and if we would only stand aside we would allow the Universe to assert its own inevitable prosperity in our lives once again. She writes:

"In order to become financially independent, to the extent of having a constant financial income, it is necessary to discard a number of negative attitudes."

For Ponder, the first step towards wealth is the reorganisation of the mind, filling it with images of the  things we want and of the limitless possibilities before us. No wonder she is endorsed so heartily in The Secret.

• For more information about Florence Scovel Shinn, one of Ponder's principle influences, look here
• To read more about Catherine Ponder on her publisher's website, look here
• An interview with Rhonda Byrne, creator of The Secret

Chicken Soup for the Soul in Vietnamese

My intense interest in the reading of American self-help in Asia sees me haunting bookstores in Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh and Bangkok, seeing just what is translated, how it is presented, and who is buying it.

The Chicken Soup for the Soul books are ubiquitous in Vietnam. In my book Destination Saigon I mention how young students in Hanoi sit around the gardens of the Temple of Literature reading them. Bookstores carry shelves full of them, and they are always presented in bilingual editions. I suspect the simplicity of their stories has great appeal for the English-language learner.

Interestingly, they seem to have received endorsement from all of the main religions, because I have seen them for sale in Catholic and Buddhist bookstores alike.

Vietnamese friends who read them, even quite uneducated and unsophisticated people, are enthralled by the stories in the books and absolutely love them. I once watched a young fisherman lie down and read a pile of them in one afternoon, completely absorbed. When I ased him what he thought of them, he said: "They're brilliant. The most fascinating stories of foreigners and the amazing things they do. Foreigners are so interesting..." For him it was total escapism, an adventure in the exotic. The themes and messages of the stories seemed to have no relevance to his actual life. He was reading them as fantasy.

Aldous Huxley - The Perennial Philosophy

I am using Aldous Huxley's extraordinary book The Perennial Philosophy for my chapter on the uses of Buddhism in Western self-help.
I have never read it before, and will admit that it's a little heavy-going. It's one of the most peculiarly constructed books - quite a post-modern artefact. There are long passages of reflection and explication, chunks of quotation from the spiritual classics to illustrate his proposition, and then snatches of quotation from other spiritual traditions that further flesh out his theme.
I am surprised, however, by the relative sophistication of his understanding of Buddhism. At first I was put off by the generalisations he was making about the tradition (asserting its godlessness etc.), commonplace observations that have become cliches by now. But he soon delves into it much more deeply, trying to find a place in Buddhism for soul and God so that he can fit it into his scheme of a universal spiritual philosophy that unites humanity. In fact, some of his equivalinces and comparisons are quite clever, but perhaps that's because I agree with them.
The Perennial Philosophy was written in 1945, by which time Huxley was well and truly in his mystic phase having dabbled in the Vedanta school of Ramakrishna (to which he introduced Christopher Isherwood). It harks back to an old idea that there are core similarities that unify all of the religious traditions, and so point to a unified creative source that might be called God. It had been an idea much vaunted by the earlier Theosophists.
It was a reasonably popular book, and became immensely influential on the New Age scene. It was one of those books that was rediscovered and taken up with great enthusiasm by the counter-culture of the 1960s. Huxley sought to prove to Christians that spiritual truth existed in all the great religious traditions, and that the West had as much to learn from the East as vice-versa. In many ways it was a re-statement of the American Transcendentalist  philosophy of the late nineteenth century (for more on that, read Richard G. Geldard's excellent The Essential Transcendentalists).

Louise Hay in Vietnam

While in Vietnam recently I was pleased to see that the self-help sections in bookstores had grown significantly.
Amongst the offerings were these parallel texts of Louise L. Hay in Vietnamese and English. I couldn't resist.



I wonder if they are licensed?
I have actually bought quite a few copies of these to distribute to friends in Vietnam, and the reaction has mostly been very positive - in fact, the ideas are quite radical to them. Some, however, scoffed after reading and said "It's all very well for foreigners to think like this..."

Thea Stanley Hughes

A name that is largely forgotten now in the annals of Australian literature is Thea Stanley Hughes.
Hughes was an innovator, a feminist, a dancer, a prolific author and proponent of self-help philosophies.
She came to Australia as a teacher of dance, establishing the Women's League of Health, an organisation that taught a style of dance-exercise that was, in many ways, the equivalent of aerobics in 1930s Australia. She was an advocate of the hygienics movement, a popular fad that endorsed clean living, healthful diet (mostly based around vegetarianism) and plenty of exercise and outdoors experience.
She remained an exercise and dance teacher for many years, but slowly she became an author as well. Developing some of the ideas of hygienics, Hughes began to write about the great and the self-reliant who she saw embodied in the explorers of early Australia. She used their biographies as guides to self-help and moral development.




This style of writing had a great pedigree, of course, having been perhaps most successfully done by the original self-help writer Samuel Smiles.
Thea Stanley Hughes moved on to more didactic material that was modelled closely on the conventional self-help books coming out in Australia in the 1970s.
Significantly, Hughes was an Anthroposophist, and most of her writings reflect the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, to a greater or lesser extent. Towards the end of her life she became a quasi-mystical figure and developed something of a cult following. She was involved with the Christian Community, an Anthroposophical offshoot that sought to explore Christianity more deeply.
I am discussing Hughes' work in the current chapter of my thesis, which explores the New Age and the significance of minority religiuous traditions in Australian writing, most notably Theosophy, Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism and, as embodied in Huges, Anthroposophy.

Daily Word for the Spirit

I have blogged before about the Daily Word, the bi-monthly magazine of affirmations produced by the Unity Church. It is one of the longest-lived New Thought periodicals, and is a charming remnant of really pure New Thought ideas.
The enormous amount of inspirational content produced by the magazine is being used, these days, in a series of spin-off books. Each book is developed around a theme (in this case the rather nebulous "For the Spirit" - I also own the much more solidly focused Daily Word for Weight Loss) and provides a "best-of" selection of stories and affirmations from the mag.





I have just finished Daily Word for the Spirit, which was also a Unity FM book club choice on the Hooked on Classics show, so I had the opportunity to read it closely and hear it explained by the editor and some of the people whose stories are featured, week by week. I really enjoy this process, and am a solid fan of Hooked on Classics - though I'm always running months behind.
This particular book was interesting because it contaned a chapter from Iyanla Vanzant, herself a bestselling self-help writer and once Oprah Winfrey's favoured spiritual teacher. Vanzant's chapter falls toward the end of the book, and in it she details some of the struggles she has faced in her life. She talks about the power of generosity and of supporting others, and here she says something really interesting:

"I talked to them about...the strength derived from loving yourself and other people - giving and serving not because of the rewards, but because you love it and it feels good."

New Books - The Last Batch?

This might be it. My dissertation is due on February 9, and I have reached the point where I really just have to write up all teh research I have already done - there is no time to embark on some new tangent.
So here is the last hurrah (hopefully) - the last few books I have purchased for my own research.
From the top:

How I Would Help the World by Helen Keller - I think this is just her book My Religion re-titled and re-packaged for a more secular 21st century audience. In it she expounds her understanding of Swedenborg's theology and how it impacted her life and made her the person she was.

Tiffany's Swedenborgian Angels by Mary Lou Bertucci and Joanna Hill - A beautiful book which discusses the symbolism of the exquisite stained-glass angel images Tiffany created for a Swedenborgian church in the USA.

Flow-dreaming by Summer McStravick

Hegel's Political Philosophy ed by Walter Kaufmann

Goethe's Poems