Murphy, Joseph (1963/2008). The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. New York: Tarcherperigee book. 300 pages

I am not going to do a normal book review here. Instead, you and I will study this book. I will read a chapter or group of chapters and summarize it/them and express my thoughts on it/them and ask you to think about what the chapter(s) said.

This book will, I hope, help us change our self-defeating and unproductive patterns of thinking; therefore, let us study it.

Normally, I would read a 300 pages book in two days but I am going to read this book slowly, drag it out to a week, so, for a week I will be writing on it.

Joseph Murphy (1898-1981) was born in Ireland. He entered a Catholic seminary during his teenage years. Being a Catholic priest used to be typical Irish vocation (I am Catholic; my first Parish priest was an Irish Priest that we called Reverend Father Kelly).

Joseph did not find what they were teaching him at the seminary to his liking and dropped out of school. He then came to New York; he went through the famous Ellis Island immigration processing center. He did not know anyone at New York and had no money on him. So, how does a guy eat and find a place to live? Good question. Where there is a will there is always a way.

He managed to live with another guy in a single room! That guy was an aspiring pharmacist at a local store. The guy got him a job assisting him at his store. Thus, he worked for the guy and they became friends. He decided to formally study Pharmacy and did. He worked as a pharmacist until 1939 when the Second World War broke out.

He joined the US military and worked as a pharmacist. At the end of the world he did some travelling in India, for during the war he had read up on Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and other oriental religions. Upon returning to the USA he went west, to Los Angeles, California and got his self-involved with what is generally called New Thought movement.

This is a new religion that began with such folks as Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science), Myrtle Fillmore (Unity Church), Ernest Holmes (Science of mind), James Allen, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale (their later followers include Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar and Earl Nightingale etc.).

These new religionists tried to synthesize, conjoin Oriental religions with Christianity and came up with interesting ideas on the nature of God, spirit and mind. They were the early twentieth century’s writers on what is today called pop psychology. They used insights from their understanding of Oriental philosophy and Christianity to help Americans make sense of their complex world.

At Los Angeles, Joseph Murphy made friends with folks teaching these new thought ideas and in time established his own church called Church of Divine Science. His church grew and in time he had to rent a theatre, auditorium at Wilshire Boulevard, to accommodate those who flocked to his Sunday services. He initiated a weekly radio talk program that millions of people across the USA listened to. He had arrived as a new thought teacher.

Whereas he wrote over thirty books, this particular book, the power of your subconscious mind, is considered his Magnus Opus. Let us, therefore, begin by looking at what the introduction to the book said.

Joseph Murphy, PhD, DD, in the introduction to his book, said that the beliefs we place into our subconscious minds influence our conscious thinking and behavior and eventually determine the outcome we get from life.

The beliefs do not have to be positive or negative, all that matters is that we accept them unexamined, uncritically. What you believe to be true you act on and get attendant results.

This book might as well be called the power of the beliefs in your subconscious mind (I once accepted the belief in ghosts and had dreams where unseen entities, ghosts attacked me).

Your subconscious mind, what Dr. Murphy calls a darkroom, contains your beliefs. All kinds of ideas and beliefs are reposed in that darkroom and from there they influence our thinking and behaviors. These ideas may have been put into our subconscious minds by our parents and other significant others when we were children, such as our peers and teachers and pastors; it does not matter who their source is; what matters is that we accepted them as true.

What we believe is true we act on. What we act on we get. What you get out of life is predicated on the beliefs in your subconscious mind that you acted on.

FEAR

If for whatever reasons you placed excessive fear into your subconscious mind your conscious thinking is filled with fear and you behave fearfully and get fear generated results.

What you fear generally happens to you. If you believe that your boss at work is going to fire you he will probably fire you. His firing you represents the fulfilment of your belief; you validate your belief in doing what makes him fire you.

LOVE AND FORGIVENESS

If you believe in love and forgiveness for all people and place it into your subconscious mind, it affects how you relate to other people. You love and forgive people. Those you love and forgive tend to love and forgive you hence you have many friends, folks who do things that make life easier for you.

HATE AND PARANOIA

Alternatively, if you hate people, believe that the people are hostile to you (paranoia), that the universe is hostile to you, you will think and act as you believe and people become hostile towards you (this is called the paranoid self-fulfilling prophesy; the paranoid person believes that people do not like him, stimulate them to quarrel or hate him; he then says: I told you, people are out to get me).

DESIRE FOR SEPARATED SELF LED TO THIS UNIVERSE

The universe validates what you wish to be true. A course in miracles states that life on earth is an experiment whereby the sons of God have beliefs (in specialness and separation from God) and their beliefs show them the world they experience.

WEALTH AND POWER

If you fervently desire to be wealthy and place it into your subconscious mind, you will work for wealth and attract wealth to you…the universe gives you what your heart wishes for, in this case wealth, every prayer of the heart, wishes is granted by the universe; if you place desire for power, high social status and fame into your subconscious mind you will get those (whether they are good for you or not does not matter; the salient point is that what you desire, believe you get).

ANGER AND FRUSTRATION

Some persons are quick to anger; apparently, they put into their subconscious minds the utility of using anger to solve their frustrations.

Idealism is a quest for power. I had need for power to recreate me, other people and the world. Since I do not have such grandiose power I felt frustrated at me and people for being real, not ideal and felt angry at them.

The quest for ideal self (what Alfred Adler and Karen Horney called Neurotic, unrealistic quest) led me to easily feeling disappointed with my and peoples actual imperfect behaviors. In graduate school I already knew just about all of what the professors were teaching me and felt that they were wasting my time. More importantly, what they were teaching me, what they called empiricism, logical positivism, social realism, science, did not make sense to me because my mind desired an idealistic world.

Let me summarize the introduction to Dr. Murphy’s book. It is overly simplistic. However, we must bear in mind the time and era when Dr. Murphy wrote (1963). Knowledge has moved far, far away from what people understood to be true in the 1960s.

That been said, Dr. Murphy has useful ideas in saying that what we place into our subconscious minds affect our thinking, behavior and outcomes from life.