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Review of "The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality" by Mitch Horowitz

6/8/2018

20 Comments

 
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The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality
Mitch Horowitz | 192 pages | Inner Traditions | Oct. 2018 | ISBN: 978-1-62055-766-2 | $16.99

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​Not long ago, I reviewed Gary Lachman’s book Dark Star Rising in which the former Blondie bassist explored Donald Trump’s belief in New Thought, a distinctly American philosophy of wishful thinking in which “right” thought influences the physical world in a magical way. Now TarcherPerigree’s editor-in-chief and occult writer Mitch Horowitz—who published Lachman’s book—has a parallel volume, The Miracle Club, casting the same set of beliefs in a much more positive light, treating New Thought as a complete spiritual path to attaining your heart’s desire. “I argue in this book that, for all its shortcomings, and for all its being disparaged by critics as a dogma of wishful delusion, New Thought, in its essentials, is true—and can be tested in your experience,” he writes. “This is a book of practical use.” It is also a book of practical self-delusion that risks substituting hope for hard work and expectation for experience.
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​Here I must confess that to review this book accurately is to burn bridges. Horowitz works in publishing, and I have had conversations with him via social media on occasion. It is challenging to review a book written by anyone of my acquaintance, however slight, to begin with, but to say that its fundamental premise is not just flawed but a little bit dangerous risks upsetting the powerful people who decide which books get published and which don’t, at a time when I have a manuscript on offer. Nevertheless, it would be unethical of me to withhold my judgment in the hope of currying favor. Reader, I just didn’t buy it.
 
Horowitz, who grew up reading cryptozoology, UFO, and paranormal books, is a believer in the metaphysical and the occult (“Yes, I do believe this stuff,” he writes), and he sees the world as pregnant with magic. He believes that critics of the magical worldview are close-minded and refuse to engage in practical magic to see how wishful thinking and directed fantasy can transform physical reality. “The perspective of the critics requires leavening by experience. But experience will not touch the staunchest among them simply because they avoid participation in ideas,” he writes. He alleges that psychologists and journalists see participant observation as “corrupt and misleading,” which is a strange thing to say since we have a whole field of science—anthropology—where participant observation and cultural relativism are key practices and a bedrock of the discipline. Horowitz, consequently and perhaps unconsciously, limits his criticism to those he considers insufficiently open to New Age and Countercultural influences, mostly from well before I was born. There is a recurring theme on the fringes of society that the events of the 1880s-1900s and 1961-1979 are somehow the most important in the history of the occult. The Baby Boomers and their admirers have spent longer reliving the 1960s than they did experiencing them. Horowitz is in his mid-50s and came of age in the 1970s, during the darker echo of the New Age, when ancient astronauts and the Bermuda Triangle, and In Search Of… were all the rage.
 
But if we are to accept his point, I think I would still manage to qualify to review this book. When I was young and occasionally a hopeful investigator of the supernatural, I tried all of those New Age practices—not because I believed them, but because other people did. I became quite adept at imitating the mystical practices of a college classmate who claimed to be able to move objects with his mind due to his spiritual power and faith. It took practice, but I mastered the prestidigitation that makes the trick work. I learned to use meditation to raise and lower my body temperature and to make my skin tingle and hairs stand on end. I’ve even had nights when I experienced altered states of consciousness—natural, not chemical—in which I’ve seen glowing blue vines and psychedelic animals. And it meant nothing to me. I never had an emotional or spiritual experience. If you don’t come to it with a belief that these acts and images have transcendental meaning, they are merely interesting. The meaning is in the observer, not the stimulus. But either way, that makes me a participant, of sorts, and familiar enough to render judgment.
 
Anyway… I am getting off-topic. Horowitz structures his book around two principles, both false. The first is that a person must be a participant in “ethical and spiritual ideas”—by which he means New Thought’s magical claims—in order to critique them. To see why this is false, imagine different nouns in that claim: One must participate in racism to criticize racists. One must participate in ghost hunts to critique whether ghosts exist. One must starve to death on a breatharian diet to critique people who claim to live only on air and sunshine. Horowitz means it somewhat differently. Imagine, for example, trying to understand an orgasm without having had one. But he is confusing two points—the subjective and the objective, or the emic and the etic. There is value in understanding what people experience when undergoing an occult event, but the experience is not in and of itself a measure of objective reality. One might experience tremendous power in a hallucination, but it does not translate into a physical reality in the real world outside the experiencer’s head. Horowitz answers that there is no distinction since “Our psychology is a mosaic of images, scenes, emotions, and words.” This seems less an answer than an obfuscation.
 
The second error is related to the first. Horowitz believes that by being a participant in magical occult thinking, one can experiment on oneself and demonstrate the power of positive thinking to effect change. But this is exquisitely untrue. Horowitz does not recommend a strict protocol whereby one might develop clear criteria to measure the impact of positive thinking and evaluate its results. Instead, he advocates unintentionally for confirmation bias. Basically, if we follow his steps as they are given, his method amounts to thinking positively and then trying to retrofit whatever happens next into a framework making it the result of the positive thought. Therefore, negative events are ignored or minimized and coincidental positive events are seen as consequences of the happy thoughts. As we shall see, he backtracks on this a bit later in the book.
 
Horowitz is admirably blunt about the shortcomings of magical thinking, particularly as practiced by modern gurus and hucksters, and he certainly understands that what passes for New Thought is basically a holdover from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, with very little change. He attributes this not to the unscientific nature of wishful thinking but to a lack of dedicated scholars probing the mysteries of wishful thinking. He can do so because he conflates a number of similar but not directly related issues under the banner of “positive thinking.” It is true that thinking positively can make a person feel better and even stimulate the body’s immune response. It can also create a positive feedback loop that makes a person more confident and more likely to take positive actions and engage in reasonable risks. But these are not magical or occult phenomena. They are merely psychological. He mixes these with outright magical ideas about “right” thinking transforming other people’s behavior and the world around us in mystical ways, and therefore sees thought as remaking the world at a physical or metaphysical level, and not just to the extent that it impacts individuals’ attitudes. He says that he believes this because he has seen the results himself, though he has not investigated the causes of the medical miracles he says he has seen. This is something like polling an audience after a David Copperfield performance and concluding from the poll results that Copperfield manipulates quantum reality to make volunteers disappear because people in the audience thought they saw real magic.
 
A recurring theme among those who write about fringe topics is that their biographies predispose them to unusual beliefs. Horowitz credits his faith in positive thinking to his own rise from an impoverished childhood to his current status as a millionaire book editor living the high life among bohemian New York elites. Horowitz built his career on a lucky break—a celebrity interview he parlayed into regular writing features—and an editor who fell in love with a book proposal he shopped around three years later. But he sees this not as a combination of hard work, writing talent, and help from people in powerful positions, but rather as the magical result of wishing really hard for good things. This, he says, occurred in spite of the fact that an “alarming” amount of his day is spent fantasizing about revenge and score-settling, when he knows he should not do so. Is “positive” thought measured net or gross?
 
He reaches for the irresponsible by telling his readers that they, too, can become wealthy by wishing for it with all their hearts. “You must recognize money as a healthful part of existence,” he writes, because “strong people admit that they want money, among other goals, and in so doing are neither in the service of falsehood nor shame.” Hermes Trismegistus would roll over in his many graves. Horowitz likes to quote the Bible to support his views. “For the love of money is the root of all evil,” an unquoted part of the Bible tells us. Horowitz replies that contempt for money is not a virtue but a hypocrisy, for in his view only a fool would give up champagne and Rolexes or trade earthly ambition for loftier aims. “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.” Horowitz issues a caveat later in the book that self-actualization may not lead to financial reward, but he hopes that it will.
 
I am deeply uncomfortable with the crass mixing of the spiritual and the avaricious, especially when Horowitz concludes his remarks on his own wealth by quoting the Notorious B.I.G. to the effect that he drinks only champagne when thirsty, since he has so much money. Similarly, when he advises readers that true spirituality is pursuing one’s ambitions for success, I got the feeling that this wasn’t really a book about the occult or the spiritual, or even self-help, in any traditional sense. It is, instead, the latest American effort to give spiritual cover to capitalist acquisitiveness. My litmus test for this is simple: If a spiritual “truth” wouldn’t make any sense in Ancient Egypt or among the ancestral Puebloans or your choice of world cultures past or present, it probably isn’t really a universal spiritual truth.
 
But don’t take my word for it. Horowitz basically says himself that true spirituality is following American individualism down a capitalist path: “My conviction is that the true nature of life is to be generative. I believe that in order to be happy, human beings must exercise their fullest range of abilities—including the exertions of outer achievement.” Now, one might read “achievement” in a broader sense, beyond the economic. But the book doesn’t really allow for such a reading, focused as it is on turning good thoughts into monetary rewards. Again, don’t take my word for it. Here is Horowitz’s actual advice for self-improvement: “You must write down a certain amount of money that you want to make by a certain date in connection with your aim—and be deadly serious about it.” He also advocates offering God a bargain to get what you want. God is the ultimate pawnbroker, in his view. Again, later in the book, Horowitz backs off on this and declares that ambition must be in service of a passion, not mere acquisitiveness. He tends to revert to the spiritual mean from time to time.
 
Either way, this is deeply at odds with the communitarian spirit of many Eastern and traditional societies, where being “generative” is secondary to serving the greater good of family, community, and society, and where personal achievement is much further down the list than doing one’s duty. Consequently, Horowitz’s spiritual philosophy is really an American one, born of a particular culture and a particular mindset, and largely limited to it. “New Thought at its best and most infectious celebrates the primacy of the individual,” he writes in claiming that the individual and the community are actually one and the same, and individual success becomes community success. Not necessarily. That’s why I felt quite uncomfortable that Horowitz’s “practical” advice on spirituality was focused entirely on the individual and the ego, seeking to fulfill personal goals and aims without considering the larger community and culture. It just felt crass, a happy face pasted over Aleister Crowley’s maxim about doing what one will and that shall be the whole of the law. For better or worse we live in a society and a culture, and elevating the individual’s goals and achievements over the common good and the commonweal strikes me as ungenerous at best and dangerous at worst.
 
Horowitz fills his book with stories of people who thought positively and were transformed. This, however, is nothing but confirmation bias. What of all the people who thought positively and failed? (Horowitz briefly addresses this, but merely advises individuals to assess their own failures, without controls or comparisons.) Joel Osteen preaches a similar doctrine, which he calls the Gospel of Prosperity—that thinking godly thoughts will bring wealth. Yet Osteen’s church isn’t filled with the wealthy, and though they all believe Osteen’s claim that God will shower happy shiny people with money, it doesn’t happen. New Thought might celebrate its wins, but without counting fairly all those who tried and failed, it is just a bunch of just-so stories designed to make those with nothing feel hope and those with everything feel justified in having it. New Thought places the credit for events squarely on the individual, and it absolves him of any guilt for being in the right place at the right time, or being born into the right family, or taking advantage of random opportunities. No, some miraculous power made it all happen for a reason.
 
As the book goes on, and the advice for living well under New Thought piles up, it becomes quite clear that the only underlying method to the selection of traits for a good life is the traditional middle-class virtues of midcentury America. Horowitz feints toward the universal with quotes from other cultures, but his prescription for living well is to basically live like a sitcom hero from the 1950s—to be honest and true, to never gossip or slander, to work hard and well for good pay, to dream big but not too big, and to remember that father knows best, to make room for daddy, and to leave it to Beaver. Apparently New Thought is like having Robert Young constantly lecturing in your head.
 
One question I had is this: What happens when two people wish with all their hearts for irreconcilable ends? Who adjudicates which positive thought is more powerful, or more deserving? Any answer I can come up with borders on the ridiculous, or the depressing. Horowitz tells a story about wanting to be the narrator for a particular audiobook only to be told by the publisher that he wasn’t wanted. After engaging in creative visualization, a new publisher bought the rights and asked him to narrate the book. He alleges that his wishful thinking made this happen. But what if the ex-narrator at the first publisher also wished hard for the job? Why did his wishful thinking fail? Who judged him unworthy? Just imagine the bureaucracy needed to manage the sheer volume of wishes. And worse: How do you like knowing that your actions are altered by other people wishing you to dance like a marionette on a string? Horowitz recognizes that these events could be explained without recourse to the supernatural but he claims, in italics, that they just “felt” paranormal. Waterboarding feels like drowning, but it isn’t.
 
Near the end of the book Horowitz accidentally confesses the truth: He writes that from the sixth grade down to the present he has desired power, particularly the power to get out from under the thumb of others. “All of my pathologies stemmed from one thing: frustration of this wish,” he writes. From an emic perspective, Horowitz feels that he is embracing his power with positive thinking. From my etic perspective, he seems to be using New Thought to act out teenage fantasies and imagine that he has great power to perform wonders and magic on the world around him. That adolescent anxiety is perhaps why his final statement of the real meaning of life is one that a teenager would make: The purpose of life, he says, is “The enactment of personal means” (emphasis in original). In other words, he wants to be what every teenager wants to be, free from authority and rules and strictures and limits, “free and wild and beyond good and evil,” as Lovecraft once said. It is the fantasy of the American adolescent, and one belied by the fact that we live in a world filled with other people, whose own power fantasies can and will come into conflict with our own. That is why we have a social contract, and with it the very limits that Horowitz hopes to transcend. That way lies anarchy.
 
Ultimately, Horowitz has become one of those comfortable Western elites who imagines that the freedom afforded by privilege is open to everyone, for “life is about more than settling or being practical—it is about being expressive of something, of standing for something.” Try telling that to the single mother working two jobs to keep a roof over her kid’s head, or the Third World factory worker chained to an assembly line in the vague hope of someday having a family. Self-actualization is a nice goal, I guess, but it is one that only people already positioned for the upper middle class American version of success can afford to pursue. You have to already have your basic needs met before pretending that activism and artistry will be your true passion and goal. “New Thought” is an indulgence for a particular class of Americans, not an amazing occult discovery.
 
But I am willing to be proved wrong. I have a book about the racist history of the Mound Builder myth in need of a publisher, and Horowitz says that book editors are susceptible to having their actions altered by authors’ magical thinking. So, I will think really hard about it, and we will see if Horowitz will suddenly feel inspired to make my book interesting to whoever is in charge of American history books over at Penguin Random House, the parent of his imprint. Let’s make it happen. After all, the credibility of New Thought is at stake.

20 Comments
E.P. Grondine
6/8/2018 09:40:22 am

Is your new book finished, Jason?

Reply
Clete
6/8/2018 10:42:05 am

His book sounds a lot like a Family Guy episode where Brian wrote a book titled "See it, Want it, Do it." The thesis being that if you see something and want it, then you can accomplish it by doing it. Very simple and usually impossible.

Reply
Machala
6/8/2018 12:14:38 pm

" America was not built by wishful thinking. It was built by realists, and it will not be saved by guess work and self-deception. It will only be saved by hard work and facing the facts."

___ Adlai Stevenson, regarding The Power of Positive Thinking (c)1960

Reply
Huh? What?
6/8/2018 06:34:10 pm

Said the guy who lost.

peter kichmeir
6/8/2018 11:17:37 am

Your review makes me think of L.Tolstoy, who had his wn vision of Christianity and believed all troubles could be solved by an Utopian belief in the practical wisom of the pesant and self-sufficiency. He played the peasaant and made his own shoe whilst his servants prepared supper for him.

Reply
Americanegro
6/8/2018 11:19:13 am

People generally don't give the whole Crowley quote:
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will."

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Courtier%27s_Reply

Reply
Machala
6/8/2018 11:23:03 am

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale must be rolling in his grave !
It seems that all of these New Thought proponents are simply riffing on Peale's 1952 bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking and adding a "magical" component to it. ( Of course Peale was a Christian minister, so there was that "mystical" influence in his writings. ).
Much of the philosophy of "TPofPT" is carried forward - along with much of Peale's self deceptive advise.
People familiar with Norman Vincent Peale's writings and his personal life will immediately see the parallels between was Peale was peddling, and what's now being advocated by Osteen's Gospel of Prosperity, Horowitz's Miracle Club or any of the other gurus of New Thought.



Reply
Tom mellett
6/8/2018 06:53:35 pm

Au contraire! I see NVP crowing “See, I told you so!” from his spacious (though spaceless) heavenly abode.

Do you not realize that Donald J. Trump becomeing President of the USA is the culmination of Norman’s preaching the Gospel of Prosperity?

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/donald-trump-2016-norman-vincent-peale-213220

And

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/13/donald-trump-positive-thinking-215704

Reply
Machala
6/8/2018 11:10:52 pm

Thanks, I wasn't thinking about it from that slant, and you're right of course !
Trump is of a generation ( my own ) that grew up with the pious Peale's platitudes and assurances.
I was thinking that Peals would be horrified ( or maybe not ) by the non-traditional "believers"..... But, given his underlying and oft disguised hatred of Catholics, African Americans, and liberals, and his affinity for the John Birch Society, I guess he'd be pleased by the alt-right's adaptations of his philosophy.

Americanegro
6/9/2018 06:06:32 pm

I shudder to think what would have happened to our country if Washington, the Roosevelts, Kennedy, Reagan, Al Gore, the Bushes, etc. hadn't been rich. Oh my God, John Kerry! Someone needs to take his wives' money!!!

Shane Sullivan
6/8/2018 12:00:54 pm

"Nevertheless, there are many Taoists in the world who
cannot with a true heart regard essence and life as most
important. They talk about the virtues of the Tao, but in their
hearts they are criminals and gangsters. They want their
imaginings of the Tao, and they want their greedy ambitions
too. They are easily angered and unreceptive."
-Liu I Ming (Trans. Thomas Cleary)

Reply
Cesar
6/8/2018 04:36:12 pm

“One might experience tremendous power in a hallucination, but it does not translate into a physical reality in the real world outside the experiencer’s head.”

“My white brother,” said one Apache shaman, “you probably will not believe it, but I am all powerful. I will never die. If you shoot me it will not hurt me. If I wish to kill anyone, all I need to do is to thrust out my hand and touch him, and he dies. My power is like that of a god”.

Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1964, pp. 299.

But

“It was 4 August 1968, and it was the feast day of Saint Dominic, patron of Santo Domingo Pueblo, southwest of Santa Fe. At one end of the hot, dusty plaza, a Dominican priest watched nervously as several hundred dancers arranged in two long rows pounded the earth with their moccasined feet as a mighty, collective prayer for rain, accompanied by the powerful baritone singing of a chorus and the beat of drums. As my family and I viewed this, the largest and in some ways the most impressive Native American public ceremony, a tiny cloud over the Jémez Mountains to the northwest got larger and larger, eventually filling up the sky; at last the storm broke, and the sky was crisscrossed by lightning and the pueblo resounded with peals of rolling thunder”.

Coe, Michael D. Breaking the Maya Code, 1994, pp. 202.

Reply
John Pierce
6/8/2018 06:42:12 pm

One can't write worthwhile restaurant reviews if one has never eaten in a restaurant. Maybe Horowitz was trying to say something analogous.

Reply
Enid McConnell
6/9/2018 08:14:38 am

This sounds like the well-known yogic technique of "creative visualization," but did Horowitz happen to mention the downside? Unless directed to a higher power for the greatest good of all concerned, this universal force will use the most convenient channel to fulfill your desire. So, for instance, if you selfishly desire wealth, a loved one may happen to die and leave you an insurance policy. Like King Midas with the golden touch who turned his daughter into gold, you will gain the money but lose the loved one.

Reply
Joe Zias
6/10/2018 08:39:41 am

Power of positive thinking, why it sometimes works. As a graduate student in the inner city of Detroit, (1968-71) I did a study on store front preachers who as one theologian said, 'were pimping off the bible'.

One source of income aside from fencing stolen goods, running numbers healing, came from candles which had been blessed by the preachers. Many of the buyers were women who came to the store front because their old man' had disappeared all of a sudden and they wanted him back and thought one of those magical candles just might do the trick. It usually worked, as the blessed candles burned forever and sure enough the old man eventually would return before the candle burned down. What they failed to understand was that when the welfare check came around the old man miraculously would turn up for a few days.
All the preachers had a spot on the radio in the early morning telling listeners what verse to read, and they ran as many verses as time allowed. The reason, when the preacher said read John 3:16 he meant put a 'dime' (ten dollars) on the number 316, box it i.e. any combination of 316 and if the number came up that day and you won the lottery, gotta lay something on the preacher as he got the 'tip' from Gawd. They ran as many verses as they could in the 5 minutes they were on air, thus statistically increasing ones chance of the number coming up that day. The winning number was always from 1-1000 and then it became a morning number and an afternoon number. State lotteries, a tax for those people who flunked high school math, eventually put a damper on the numbers business.

Reply
David
6/10/2018 12:13:43 pm

Thank you very much for the great review.

Reply
Emily
6/10/2018 11:55:36 pm

So anyone who isn't materially prosperous in life is guilty of wrongthink.

I wonder what these people make of disabled people. Well, there was that one Republican candidate who said we should all be killed.

These people are, quite simply, gross. Donald Trump was born rich and still managed to go bankrupt multiple times. A rich person going bankrupt stays rich, while a middle class or poor person going bankrupt has their life ruined, because that's the society we live in. This kind of nonsense says that that's the way things should be.

I don't think it's particularly American though. It's simply a new gloss on the supposed divine rights of the aristocracy.

Reply
Americanegro
6/11/2018 12:41:35 pm

"Well, there was that one Republican candidate who said we should all be killed."

I challenge you to name the person and provide the quote.

Reply
Ali Buckler
10/16/2018 07:31:41 am

Farron Cousins Republican candidate for Governor of Oklahoma said disabled and terminally ill people should be euthanized.

Dorrine
2/21/2020 01:32:46 am

People like Farron Cousins could change them minds if the farmacy industry gives him a better job.

Reply

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