The Power of Your Subconscious Mind: Complete and Original Signature Edition

By Dr. Joseph Murphy and Mitch Horowitz

Within You Is a Force Greater Than You’ve Ever Imagined

Joseph Murphy’s 1963 classic The Power of Your Subconscious Mind gave millions of readers a radical new estimate of their possibilities. In his easily digestible volume, Murphy communicated the “hidden” truth of life: you are as your mind is. This is the master key that impacts wealth, health, career, relationships, and all forms of expression.

The lasting success of Murphy’s work rests on how it affirms and harnesses our deepest instincts about the extraordinary possibilities of thought. As Murphy explores:

• Every religious, psychological, and ethical philosophy agrees: What you think dramatically affects your quality of life.
• Your subconscious mind harbors insightful and creative power—if properly harnessed, this suggestive power can solve problems and shape circumstances in ways you never imagined possible.
• The power of your inner mind is indifferent: Your subconscious picks up on and carries out what you dwell upon, for good or ill.
• You can tap the reservoirs of your subconscious by setting aside time just before going to sleep at night to reflect on a cherished aim or solution to a problem.
• Never force a mental image. Forced effort brings failure.
• Once you have acted to impress your subconscious, do not dwell on the ways and means of accomplishment—these will reach your conscious mind in the form of hunches, happy accidents, and breakthrough ideas.

In this unabridged edition of Murphy’s landmark, scholar of esotericism Mitch Horowitz provides a new historical introduction and assessment of the master’s work, along with a reliable and rigorous timeline that corrects many misperceptions about the author’s life. Mitch’s supplemental readings bring Murphy’s insights—particularly in matters of health—into the 21st century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maple Spring Publishing
• Release date: Sep 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350500189

Dr. Joseph Murphy

Dr. Murphy wrote, taught, counseled, and lectured to thousands of people all over the world, as Minister-Director of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles. His lectures and sermons were attended by thousands of people every Sunday. Millions of people tuned in his daily radio program and have read the over 30 books that he has written. Dr. Joseph Murphy has been acclaimed as a major figure in the human potential movement, the spiritual heir to writers like James Allen, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and Norman Vincent Peale and a precursor and inspirer of contemporary motivational writers and speakers like Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar and Earl Nightingale. He was one of the best selling authors in the mid-twentieth century. His book THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND has sold millions of copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. This book has never been out of print and is still one of the best sellers in the self-help genre. Over the years Dr. Murphy has given lectures and radio talks to audiences all over the world. In his lectures he points out how real people have radically improved their lives by applying specific aspects of his concepts, and gives the listener guidelines on how they too can enrich their lives.

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Introduction

The Revelation of Joseph Murphy

By Mitch Horowitz

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 our moods and outlook result from our personal circumstances. Emotions are symptoms. Murphy’s work, particularly his widely impactful 1963 bestseller, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, upends that view of life.

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.

Beginning with his first book This Is It in 1945, the Irish minister combined principles of psychology, self-suggestion, and a cosmological theology, which he had been developing and testing for many years. It is notable that Murphy did not step out as a writer until age forty-seven. (I experienced a similar trajectory in my own writing career.) The seeker-mystic first sought to validate his ideas in the laboratory of personal experience. Once Murphy found his footing as a writer and speaker, his output was prodigious, as you can see from the timeline at the end of this volume. His original books (not counting myriad anthologies and reissues) surpass forty. Equally remarkable—and a lesson in itself—is that Murphy did not produce the work that made him famous, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, until age sixty five. His career is a reminder not to view traditional milestones of age as nonnegotiable.

Since Murphy’s death in 1981, the size of his readership—measured by reprints, multiple editions, digital and audio volumes, translations, and anthologies—has dramatically grown. Part of the reason for Murphy’s posterity is that he adventurously and, for many seekers, convincingly married twentieth century psychology with the New Metaphysics, specifically New Thought, Science of Mind, Unity, Christian Science, and Divine Science. In so doing, the author gave generations of readers a dramatic new sense of self-potential. Interestingly, Murphy himself requested that no funeral be held and that no obituary be written, according to scholar of religion J. Gordon Melton in Religious Leaders of America, 2nd edition (1999).

Murphy accepted the traditional premise that we possess two minds: the rational, analytic mind called the conscious; and the inner, emotional mind called the subconscious, or what may be termed the psyche. The subconscious is generally agreed to be the driving engine of life—it is the hidden influence that shapes and reinforces your attitudes, affinities, perceptions, self-image, relationships, and experiences. But Murphy went further. He reasoned that the subconscious is programed by the conscious to function as a tool of causation: what we view and accept as valid or perceptively justified—whether sound or desirable—is acted upon and out-pictured by your subconscious in a complexity of ways.

Hence, Murphy reasoned that the mission of your conscious mind must be to protect your subconscious from receiving impressions that misdirect its life-shaping energies. You must consciously filter out or temper suggestions that you do not want your psyche to uncritically accept and act on. The stakes of this transaction are daunting. The subconscious, Murphy reasoned, mediates between individual experience and the existence of an Infinite Mind, which courses through each of us like inlets of a vast ocean. Seen another way, the subconscious or psyche is the medium through which Infinite Mind, or what Scripture calls God and the Hermeticists called Nous, creates and actualizes.

This view is largely at home in New Thought. It differs somewhat from Christian Science insofar as Christian Science theology sees the human mind not as a mediator between the individual and the Higher but as an illusion—sometimes called mortal or material mind, which must be allowed to dissolve like a mirage so that the one Higher Mind can shine through.

In effect, however, Murphy’s philosophy agrees with Christian Science and the related metaphysical schools: materialism is ultimately a delusion and the one true reality is the fullness and unsurpassed peace of the Higher Mind. In this sense, Murphy endeavored to harmonize the New Metaphysics, biblical revelation, religious symbolism, and modern psychology.

Whether by intent or happenstance, in no book did Murphy succeed more fully than The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, which combined self-suggestion, historical and anecdotal portraits, psychological insights, and the cosmic theology Murphy had been developing and testing since he began his career as a metaphysical philosopher almost twenty years earlier. Murphy produced many potent essays, sermons, and books, but this one was his culminating and most powerful statement. It is one of the two or three modern landmarks of creative-mind philosophy, perched in timing and influence between Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking and Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 The Secret. Unlike those books, however, which might be found in homes with few other works of popular metaphysics, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, as with Murphy’s other writings, brought him a following among readers who, like the minister himself, were not casual toe-dippers but lifelong seekers.

Murphy was born on May 20, 1898, to a devout Catholic family on the Southern Coast of Ireland in Ballydehob, County Cork. He was the fourth of five children, three girls and two boys. Murphy’s father worked as headmaster of a local boys high school. His parents urged him to join the priesthood. But the young seminarian found religious doctrine and catechism too limiting. Eager to gaze more deeply into the internal mechanics of life, he left his Jesuit seminary to dedicate his energies to chemistry, which he studied in Dublin both before and following his religious training.

In the early 1920s, married yet still searching for his place in the world of career and commerce, Murphy relocated to America to seek employment as a chemist and druggist. After running a pharmacy counter at New York’s Algonquin Hotel, Murphy renewed his study of mystical and metaphysical ideas. He read works of Taoism, Confucianism, Transcendentalism, Buddhism, Scripture—and, most fatefully, New Thought. The seeker grew enamored of the New Metaphysics sweeping the Western world. The causative power of thought, Murphy came to believe, revealed the authentic meaning of the world’s religions, the deeper mechanics of psychology, and the eternal laws of life.

In arriving at his matured spiritual outlook, Murphy told an interviewer that he studied in the 1930s with the same teacher who tutored his contemporary New Yorker and friend, mystic Neville Goddard (1905–1972). Murphy said they shared the same teacher: a turbaned man of black-Jewish descent named Abdullah.

Shortly before his death in 1981, Murphy sat for a little-known series of interviews with French-Canadian writer Bernard Cantin who in 1987 published the French language work Joseph Murphy se raconte à Bernard Cantin [Joseph Murphy Speaks to Bernard Cantin]. It has never appeared in English. Murphy described his encounter with the mysterious Abdullah, as recounted by Cantin:

It was in New York that Joseph Murphy also met the professor Abdullah, a Jewish man of black ancestry, a native of Israel, who knew, in every detail, all the symbolism of each of the verses of the Old and the New Testaments. This meeting was one of the most significant in Dr. Murphy’s spiritual evolution. In fact, Abdullah, who had never seen nor known the Murphy family, said flatly that Murphy came from a family of six children, and not five, as Murphy himself had believed. Later on, Murphy, intrigued, questioned his mother and learned that, indeed, he had had another brother who had died a few hours after his birth, and was never spoken of again.

Following this period, Murphy in the late-1930s began his climb as a minister and writer, soon lecturing over radio and speaking on both coasts. He wrote prolifically on the auto-suggestive and causative faculties of thought—and finally, at sixty-five, reached a worldwide audience in 1963 with The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, which went on to sell millions of copies and has remained one of the most enduring books on mind-power metaphysics.

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind boasts an unusual range of admirers, including actors David Hasselhoff and Victoria Principal. (Murphy’s 1953 book The Miracles of Your Mind sat in Marilyn Monroe’s library.) Parents have told me that they raise their children on the methods and ideas explored in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. I’ve heard from committed spiritual seekers who report that this popular how-to has proven one of the deepest influences in their search.

The success and longevity of Murphy’s landmark rests, in part, on how it affirms and organizes some of our deepest instincts about the radical possibilities of thought and marries a range of psychological and spiritual suppositions. Among Murphy’s key ideas:

Every religious, psychological, and ethical philosophy agrees: What you think dramatically affects your quality of life.

Your subconscious mind harbors insightful and creative power—if properly harnessed, this suggestive power can solve problems and shape circumstances in ways that you never considered possible.

The power of your mind is indifferent: Your subconscious picks up on and carries out what you dwell upon, for good or ill.

You can tap the power of your subconscious by setting aside time just before going to sleep at night to reflect on a cherished aim or the solution to a problem. Drift off with assurance that your subconscious is working on it.

Form vivid, believable, emotionally charged mental pictures—and stick with them. Consistency is the key to training your subconscious.

Never force a mental image. Forced effort brings failure. Be relaxed, calm, and confident when impressing your subconscious. If you find this difficult, step away and return to it when you’re in a calm and confident state.

Once you have acted to impress your subconscious, do not dwell on the ways and means of accomplishment—these will reach your conscious mind in the form of hunches, happy accidents, and breakthrough ideas.

Neither disdain nor worship money. Understand money as a natural, healthful part of life. Your subconscious will act gainfully on that belief.

Specialize in a field of work that you love and strive to know more about it than anyone else. Passion and focus act powerfully upon your subconscious.

Your subconscious is not to be trifled with. Scrutinize your desires regularly to ensure that they are ethically sound and for the presumed benefit of all concerned.

In sum, Murphy taught that if you want to make one definite and gainful investment in your future, learn how to cultivate an affirming, meditative, and flexible pattern of thought, informed by the principle: you are as your mind is.

I admire Murphy’s scruples, life journey, and efforts. But I do not mean to leave the impression of total comfort with his ideas. I believe that Murphy, like most of his New Thought contemporaries, failed to come to terms with global or individual suffering, much less develop a persuasive or mature spiritual response to calamity, other than to reassert the therapeutic primacy of the psyche, or what might be deemed the try again response. Indeed, when confronted with questions of evil and chronic suffering, New Thought writers, Murphy included, tended to slip into circular reasoning or contradiction, unable to fully account for tragedy and limitation in their model of a self-created world.

Murphy fitfully sought to contend with this problem in his 1954 book The Meaning of Reincarnation where he blamed the thought patterns of parents for an offspring’s illness or disability. He later moved away from that indefensible proposition to suggest that the pool of thoughts of all humanity, extending to antiquity, could be the responsible factor in incomprehensible suffering. The minister further attempted to confront the question of tragedy in his 1971 book Psychic Perception where he described the individual as subject to the thoughts of a world mind or race mind, which contained the substance of every thought—good or ill, nourishing or punishing—that every individual had ever conceived.

Hence, an infant born ill could be a victim of this world mind. Yet to assume, as Murphy wrote, that every thought has a timeless ripple effect—so that a person can be impacted by something thought centuries or millennia earlier—places us at the mercy of a near-infinitude of influences and outcomes. This amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of randomness or accident, the very things Murphy argued do not exist.

In the present, some New Thought writers and seekers attempt to ascribe natural disasters, wars, pandemics, and famines to mass or personal karma. I do not believe that the law of karma or some ersatz version of it—the concept itself is forebodingly vast and varied within its traditional Vedic moorings—is intended to flatten complexity. Karma does not exist to plug conceptual gaps. Indeed, on the spiritual path, we measure verities through intimate experience. If a person hasn’t been through global calamities that is reason enough not to attempt judgment. Judging the suffering of another person or nation is tantamount to throwing a stone rather than gleaning a truth.

I believe that in our known sphere we experience many laws and forces; the law of mind, I warrant, is ever operative but it is impacted by other experiences in our physical framework, just as gravity is impacted by mass. I explore this in greater detail in the appendices at the end of this volume. I wish it was a subject area where Murphy had gone further. To his credit, I believe that certain of his insights coalesce with traditional Vedic ideas about reincarnation, especially when he describes all of humanity emerging from and returning to original thought substance. In this regard, Murphy’s outlook on reincarnation runs closely to that of occult explorer Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831–1891).

How then to regard Murphy? I think that one of the shortcomings of modern intellectual culture is the all or nothing attitude foisted upon us, whereby we are expected to either wholly accept or reject every aspect of a writer’s outlook. That would leave the search impoverished and monochromatic (which, for many people, it is). The thrill of reading Murphy is that, questions and dissents aside—and those things ought to be a regular part of the mature seeker’s experience—he exudes the practical joy of the possibilities of expansive thought, of the perceptual basis of experience (in which I firmly believe), and of the protean aspects of idealistic philosophy. On these topics, modern culture has produced few better writers—and perhaps no greater or more impactful work than The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.

This Maple Spring edition of Murphy’s classic is reproduced from one of its earliest printings and captures Murphy’s original word choices and punctuation. Murphy’s biography, especially in reissues of this signature work, is often mangled; as a corrective, this edition includes a comprehensive timeline of the author’s life. It also features three appendices that expand on some of the themes and issues raised in this introduction: Appendix A: The Most Delicate Issue in Metaphysics; Appendix B: Suffering and the Limits of Mind Power; and Appendix C: Why Doesn’t the Law of Attraction Always Work? I hope you’ll find them valuable steppingstones in your own search.

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian whose books include Occult America, One Simple Idea, The Miracle Club, Daydream Believer, Uncertain Places, and Modern Occultism.

Introduction

How This Book Can Work Miracles in Your Life

I have seen miracles happen to men and women in all walks of life all over the world. Miracles will happen to you, too—when you begin using the magic power of your subconscious mind. This book is designed to teach you that your habitual thinking and imagery mold, fashion, and create your destiny; for as a man thinketh in his subconscious mind, so is he.

DO YOU KNOW THE ANSWERS?

Why is one man sad and another man happy? Why is one man joyous and prosperous and another man poor and miserable? Why is one man fearful and anxious and another full of faith and confidence? Why does one man have a beautiful, luxurious home while another man lives out a meager existence in a slum? Why is one man a great success and another an abject failure? Why is one speaker outstanding and immensely popular and another mediocre and unpopular? Why is one man a genius in his work or profession while the other man toils and moils all his life without doing or accomplishing anything worthwhile? Why is one man healed of a so-called incurable disease and another isn’t? Why is it so many good, kind religious people suffer the tortures of the damned in their mind and body? Why is it many immoral and irreligious people succeed and prosper and enjoy radiant health? Why is one woman happily married and her sister very unhappy and frustrated? Is there an answer to these questions in the workings of your conscious and subconscious minds? There most certainly is.

REASON FOR WRITING THIS BOOK

It is for the express purpose of answering and clarifying the above questions and many others of a similar nature that motivated me to write this book. I have endeavored to explain the great fundamental truths of your mind in the simplest language possible. I believe that it is perfectly possible to explain the basic, foundational, and fundamental laws of life and of your mind in ordinary everyday language. You will find that the language of this book is that used in your daily papers, current periodicals, in your business offices, in your home, and in the daily workshop. I urge you to study this book and apply the techniques outlined therein; and as you do, I feel absolutely convinced that you will lay hold of a miracle-working power that will lift you up from confusion, misery, melancholy, and failure, and guide you to your true place, solve your difficulties, sever you from emotional and physical bondage, and place you on the royal road to freedom, happiness, and peace of mind. This miracle-working power of your subconscious mind can heal you of your sickness, make you vital and strong again. In learning how to use your inner powers, you will open the prison door of fear and enter into a life described by Paul as the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

RELEASING THE MIRACLE-WORKING POWER

A personal healing will ever be the most convincing evidence of our subconscious powers. Over forty-two years ago I resolved a malignancy—in medical terminology it was called a sarcoma—by using the healing power of my subconscious mind which created me and still maintains and governs all my vital functions. The technique I applied is elaborated on in this book, and I feel sure that it will help others to trust the same Infinite Healing Presence lodged in the subconscious depths of all men. Through the kindly offices of my doctor friend, I suddenly realized that it was natural to assume that the Creative Intelligence which made all my organs, fashioned my body, and started my heart, could heal its own handiwork. The ancient proverb says, The doctor dresses the wound and God heals it.

WONDERS HAPPEN WHEN YOU PRAY EFFECTIVELY

Scientific prayer is the harmonious interaction of the conscious and subconscious levels of mind scientifically directed for a specific purpose. This book will teach you the scientific way to tap the realm of infinite power within you enabling you to get what you really want in life. You desire a happier, fuller, and richer life. Begin to use this miracle-working power and smooth your way in daily affairs, solve business problems, and bring harmony in family relationships. Be sure that you read this book several times. The many chapters will show you how this wonderful power works, and how you can draw out the hidden inspiration and wisdom that is within you. Learn the simple techniques of impressing the subconscious mind. Follow the new scientific way in tapping the infinite storehouse. Read this book carefully, earnestly, and lovingly. Prove to yourself the amazing way it can help you. It could be and I believe it will be the turning point of your life.

Be sure that you read this book several times. The many chapters will show you how this wonderful power works, and how you can draw out the hidden inspiration and wisdom that is within you.

EVERYBODY PRAYS

Do you know how to pray effectively? How long is it since you prayed as part of your everyday activities? In an emergency, in time of danger or trouble, in illness, and when death lurks, prayers pour forth—your own and friends’. Just read your daily newspaper. It is reported that prayers are being offered up all over the nation for a child stricken with a so-called incurable ailment, for peace among nations, for a group of miners trapped in a flooded mine. Later it is reported that when rescued, the miners said that they prayed while waiting for rescue; an airplane pilot says that he prayed as he made a successful emergency landing. Certainly, prayer is an ever-present help in time of trouble; but you do not have to wait for trouble to make prayer an integral and constructive part of your life. The dramatic answers to prayer make headlines and are the subject of testimonies to the effectiveness of prayer. What of the many humble prayers of children, the simple thanksgiving of grace at the table daily, the faithful devotions wherein the individual seeks only communion with God? My work with people has made it necessary for me to study the various approaches to prayer. I have experienced the power of prayer in my own life, and I have talked and worked with many people who also have enjoyed the help of prayer. The problem usually is how to tell others how to pray. People who are in trouble have difficulty in thinking and acting reasonably. They need an easy formula to follow, an obviously workable pattern that is simple and specific. Often they must be led to approach the emergency.

UNIQUE FEATURE OF THIS BOOK

The unique feature of this book is its down-to-earth practicality. Here you are presented with simple, usable techniques and formulas which you can easily apply in your workaday world. I have taught these simple processes to men and women all over the world, and recently over a thousand men and women of all religious affiliations attended a special class in Los Angeles where I presented the highlights of what is offered in the pages of this book. Many came from distances of two hundred miles for each class lesson. The special features of this book will appeal to you because they show you why oftentimes you get the opposite of what you prayed for and reveal to you the reasons why. People have asked me in all parts of the world and thousands of times, "Why is it I have prayed and prayed and got no