Guy Spiro: Bill, please talk a little about what New Thought is and the history of it.

Bill Arrott: New Thought is not really new thought, it’s been around for thousands of years. It goes back to ancient Egypt. Aldous Huxley referred to it as the perennial wisdom. William James, the father of American psychology, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience called it the religion of healthy mindedness. It has its antecedents in many religious persuasions. Much more recently, the Dalai Lama called New Thought “the religion of the 21st Century.” He also called The Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes “the best Western expression of Tibetan Buddhism” he had read. These statements emerged in a series, “Synthesis Dialogs,” sponsored by Associated Global New Thought (AGNT).

     AGNT, headed by Michael Beckwith, is an offshoot of INTA [International New Thought Alliance]. INTA and AGNT are complementary, but with different missions. INTA is an alliance of New Thought churches, centers and individual ministries. AGNT is a public platform for New Thought leaders. AGNT is socially active, applying New Thought principles to humanitarian issues. INTA focuses on teaching and communicating New Thought principles without advocating any particular social actions, leaving that up to its individual members as Spirit motivates them. You might say it's like the difference between science and engineering. The one focuses on principles; the other focuses on putting the principles to work. Both have their place. Many churches belong to both INTA and AGNT. At the upcoming Parliament of World Religions in Melbourne, Australia, this December, INTA, AGNT and the various New Thought denominations will be speaking as one voice.

GS: I’ve come to view it as a simple explanation of the way things work.

BA: That’s how Ernest Holmes, the principal man in the development of the Religious Science branch of New Thought, came into it. He was curious and wanted to know what made things tick and what was the commonality of all religion.

GS: When people talk about New Thought and its origins, some will point to Emerson and the Transcendentalists while others will start with Phineas Quimby or Mesmer.

BA: They were all active about the same time. Quimby was a healer, a clockmaker by trade, and he became interested in Mesmerism which became hypnotism. Mesmerism was developed by Anton Mesmer. He was a Frenchman who believed in magnetism. He believed magnets could heal people. He would run magnets over peoples’ bodies and chant and they would get well. One day somebody showed up and he couldn’t find his magnets. So he used blocks of wood and the same thing happened, they got well. Then Mesmer became almost a side show artist. He wore a peaked hat, carried a wand and put on these wonderful stage shows using the power of Mesmerism. Quimby attended some Mesmerism events and started picking it up himself. He started working with a medium and doing all sorts of things with healing and then realized he didn’t need the Mesmerism at all. Healing took place in the mind through the power of suggestion.

GS: There was just a long piece in a recent issue of Newsweek about mainstream medicine having to acknowledge what they call the placebo effect. Belief and the power of mind cannot be denied.

BA: Phineas Quimby was doing the same techniques that Jesus used. Jesus’ healings were not physical healings but were spiritual healings. Quimby started practicing the same things. He had tens of thousands of people coming to him and he began to teach. At the same time, Emerson and the Transcendentalists started breaking with the traditional church. Emerson began writing some of his famous essays on self-reliance and the power of the individual. His essay “History” begins with the two sentences, “There is one mind common to all men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.” This is what really turned Ernest Holmes on—the concept of One Mind. In The Science of Mind, Ernest Holmes took it one step further, stating that every man is both “an
inlet and an outlet.” He did much of his writing sitting at a desk at his house that overlooked the bridge at Concord, where the Revolutionary War started. His thinking has influenced the whole character of American thought.

GS: What are these years?

BA: 1840–1860, in those years. Quimby began teaching his methods, lecturing at a small class, attended by Mary Baker Eddy who was carried in to see him on a stretcher. What they think now is that she was suffering a paralyzing form of hysteria. He taught the methods to these people and Mary Baker Eddy took copious notes and eventually began to teach it herself. She was healed, and I’m not sure of all the details here, but she adopted those healings and she healed herself using the same techniques. She went on to found Christian Science.

     Meanwhile, some of the other students of his were writing and talking about his methods, but they weren’t starting any groups as such. Mary Baker Eddy was the one who began to form churches. She was ambitious and a remarkable woman considering that was the middle of the 19th century. Her greatest public triumph was right here in Chicago. She gave a lecture and the Tribune, or the predecessor to the Tribune, reported men walking away with tears in their eyes. She had a student by the name of Emma Curtis Hopkins who became a protégé, her assistant, and then the first editor of the Christian Science Journal, the predecessor to the Christian Science Monitor.

     They came to a parting of the ways. Emma Curtis Hopkins was a student of many religions, a deeply spiritual person, and Mary Baker Eddy started teaching things that in Emma Curtis’ mind ... Mary was claiming things as her own teachings which Emma knew as age old teachings. Mary Baker Eddy started claiming that revelation was complete in herself and there would be no changes in Christian Science until she authorized them. But she made her transition before she made any changes. Some of the stuff that Mary Baker Eddy was quoting, Emma Curtis would say, came from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Even in the Bible, the phrase, “I Am that I Am,” which Moses quoted in Genesis comes from the Book of the Dead.

GS: The internet movie Zeitgeist, I can’t really recommend it for several reasons, but they did some good research and make a real point of going on about how Christianity plagiarized from earlier religions. I’m sitting on a panel discussing it afterward, and I said, “I thought this crowd would be in favor of recycling. They are saying ‘plagiarism’ and putting it down, but where do you think these ideas would have come from?”

BA: A lot of the medieval paintings of Mary and the infant Jesus are versions of Isis and Horus found in hieroglyphics and the tombs in ancient Egypt.

     So, Emma Curtis Hopkins came to Chicago in 1887. She founded the Christian Science Theological Seminary in Room 72 of the Auditorium Building. The people that went on to found the various New Thought churches today, such as Unity, and Divine Science, and a number of independent churches, were students of hers. The Filmores, Nona Brooks, Melinda Kramer—and in later years, Earnest Holmes was a student of hers. She had moved to New York at that time and he studied with her there as a class of one.

GS: Bringing the story along.

BA: The predecessor to this Congress in Chicago, being held by the International New Thought Alliance, was called the International New Thought Federation, which organized in Chicago in 1903, largely through Mary Baker Eddy’s teaching.

GS: Chicago has always been a hotbed of alternative spirituality.

BA: I don’t know if you’d call New Thought alternative.

GS: Alternative to what is thought of as mainstream.

BA: New Thought is becoming mainstream.

GS: People have no idea how much effect New Thought has had an on mainstream religion.

BA: As a matter of fact, Norman Vincent Peale was a Dutch Reformed minister, the same denomination as Robert Schuler of the Crystal Cathedral in California. In the early ’50s, Peale wrote the book The Power of Positive Thinking which was a New York Times best seller. That was called the beginning of the positive thinking program in this country. Earnest Holmes, the founder of Religious Science, visited the Marble Collegiate Church and Norman Vincent Peale introduced Earnest Holmes as the man from whom he got all his ideas. It all came from The Science of Mind which is one of the foundational books of New Thought.

     The New Thought Federation, and some of these early groups, came together to share ideas and explore their commonality, and mostly talk to each other, people in the movement. In 1914, it became known as the International New Thought Alliance. They had their first Congress in San Francisco in 1915, and in 1916 in their second Congress, here in Chicago, they developed their constitution. The statement of purpose reads as such: To teach the Infinitude of the Supreme One; the Divinity of Man and his Infinite Possibilities through the creative power of constructive thinking and obedience to the voice of the indwelling Presence which is our source of Inspiration, Power, Health and Prosperity. Then it continued primarily as a meeting of leaders and teachers, every year since then except for one year during the Depression and one year during WWII.

     In 1952, Dr. Robert Bitzer, who was a Religious Science minister, founded the first Religious Science Church, the Hollywood Church of Religious Science. He became president of the International New Thought Alliance (INTA), and he was president for the next eleven years. At the 1952 Congress in Chicago, he changed the whole tenor of the Congress, instead of making it an in-group, he opened it up, making it a teaching forum for all the teachers to come and teach lay people and to attract a larger audience as a public education forum.

     He also took on and spearheaded the movement to raise the standards for ministers in New Thought. There were a lot of fringe people calling themselves ministers, without any training or background, seeking to pass themselves off as New Thought, and they were making up weird things. One of the aims of New Thought through the years has been raising the standards of education for the ministers in training. You really have some outstanding people in the New Thought ministry today.

     You’re familiar with The Secret? I think at least half of the people that were on The Secret panel and were on Larry King Live were Religious Scientists. They didn’t identify themselves as such, but they were. The Secret emphasized the “getting” side of the law of attraction. In the New Thought movement, we’re more interested in the “being” side, the spiritual side, not on acquiring things, but on the becoming more fully realized people.

GS: Then the getting becomes way more effective anyway.

BA: And less necessary. Once you’ve tapped into Source and you realize that you’re already one with everything and you have the infinite power and wisdom of the Universe available to you from within, you find you need less and less from what’s out there. You don’t take your identity from your achievements, or your possessions or the world. You give your identity to it.

GS: You get to a place where once you recognize a need, it’s already filled.

BA: Yes. I think most of us in our lives have used the power of attraction far too often, and end up cluttered with a lot of stuff.

GS: That, and people in error-thinking use it the wrong way, for what they don’t want. It’s getting more commonly known that worrying is praying for what you don’t want.

BA: That’s it exactly. Power goes to that which you give your attention. Power goes to and enhances what you give your attention to, what you appreciate, appreciates.

GS: Even if it’s something that you’re not really appreciating, but you’re focused on.

BA: In the Book of Job, Job says “That which I feared has come upon me.” There’s nothing new in what we have, but yet it is new everyday.

GS: What’s new is a more generalized willingness to accept it. And it comes from so many different directions. Everywhere you look, everyone’s saying the same thing.

     Talk a little more about the The International New Thought Alliance.

BA: The New Thought Alliance is an organization to which many, many New Thought Churches and Centers belong. Unity, Divine Science, the Centers for Spiritual Living, the Universal Foundation for Better Living, that’s Christ Universal Temple; and a lot of black churches, the New Thought Network, centers like the Power Circle on the south side of Chicago or The Chapel of Truth in Atlanta, and many others are all members of the INTA. The INTA is holding their 94th Annual Congress and it’s going to be at the Hilton Chicago Indian Lakes Resort in Bloomingdale.

GS: What going to happen there, and why would people that are new to New Thought want to attend?

BA: What we’re bringing together are outstanding speakers from all the branches of New Thought. We’ll be giving talks, workshops, meditation sessions, and we’ll also have wonderful music by New Thought musicians, music which includes all New Thought themes. It starts on a Monday night and goes through Friday morning.

GS: But people can come for a day.

BA: A day or even a half day. The evening sessions on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are all open to the public on a love offering basis. Dr. Arthur Chang of Founder's Center for Positive Spirituality is the keynote speaker. He may well be one of the most advanced thinkers in the New Though movement. I hope you can come to hear him. If you were to attend only one talk at the Congress, this should be it. All the other sessions, you can come for the whole sessions or the individual half days.

     There will be opportunities for healing, for meditation. There is going to be a wonderful banquet at which John Randolph Price and Jan Price are going to be honored with the Torchbearer Award for their work in the World’s Peace Meditation, which takes place on New Year’s Eve morning every year and at noon Greenwich time, 6am here in Chicago. Churches and centers all over the world get together for an hour of meditation. They are being honored for that work at the banquet.

     Compared to other conferences of this type, this is probably the most reasonable, expense-wise. The hotel has dropped their rates to $105 per night for one or two people, or $115 a night for three or four, and these are oversized rooms. The conference fees are very reasonable. You won’t find any conference, New Thought or related conference, at that price. The rates are kept low on purpose and none of the participants are paid nor are their expenses paid. They come at their own expense to share. The public and your readers are especially invited.

     I’d like to mention that my wife, Elizabeth Arrott, is the chairman of the Congress and the co-author of a book with Michael Rann, Shortcut to a Miracle: How to Change Your Consciousness and Change Your Life. She wrote it, he came up with the title and, to do him justice, there are a number of healings in that book and at least half of them are his. Both Elizabeth and Michael have done a lot of good healing work, and the book is filled with case histories on the healings that have taken place.

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