Think and Grow Rich showed readers how to unlock the door to very tangible forms of wealth by exercising their innate control over their own minds. A quarter of a century later, Dr. Joseph Murphy, a minister and a major figure in the human potential movement then taking shape, looked at the subject of success from a perspective that was more focused in one sense and more broad in another. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind homes in on how the subconscious mind in particular can transform not just our finances, but every aspect of our lives.
The mechanism is simple: our conscious thoughts, whether automatic or disciplined, positive or negative, desired or feared, provide marching orders to our subconscious mind, which proceeds to carry them out by any means it can. Our subconscious minds are constantly working to turn our hopes and desires into reality. And we can largely control that process by controlling our thoughts—for better or worse. Murphy helps train us to use this power for good in our lives and the lives of others, rather than unwittingly stay enslaved to our own automatic, often negative, thoughts.
Like the premise of Think and Grow Rich, this concept is not new. Recognizing The Power of Your Subconscious Mind has long been a crucial step in most methods of self-help. But over the years, even as experts have freshened up the concept for contemporary audiences, something of its practicality and coherence has been lost along the way. Critics of the contemporary “positive thinking” movement have rightly denounced the notion that thinking happy thoughts is the only thing we need to do to transform our lives.*
Murphy’s approach puts such criticism to rest. For him, positive thinking, or “auto-suggestion,” is only one part of a coherent framework—and a major principle of that framework is that “you can’t get something for nothing.” What’s more, his paradigm is anything but passive: our thoughts never take the place of action but enable the right action at the right time.
“A magnetized piece of steel will lift about twelve times its own weight,” Murphy writes, “and if you demagnetize this same piece of steel, it will not even lift a feather.” The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is freely available to anyone, but most of us have no idea how to use it to best effect. Here, just as Napoleon Hill did in the realm of business, Murphy explains how our thoughts work much like any other unseen force, such as magnetism or electricity or the Internet. Then he sets about showing us, in specific and practical detail, how to “magnetize” ourselves to attract what we desire into our lives.
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is not about religion. But it is about practical faith, which anyone can understand and master. If you’ve ever wondered how faith really works for some and why certain prayers are answered, you may be surprised to know how much it has to do with our underlying mindset, rather than our specific words or even the deity to whom we pray.
What Murphy promises in these pages is nothing less than “the master secret of the ages,” and he unveils it using the same principles of mind power that we learned about in Hill’s work: everything from desire, self-confidence, perseverance, and generosity to setting specific goals and imagining your ideal end result in specific terms.
Applied to making a living, these principles look like thriving, cutting-edge entrepreneurism that does good and does well. Applied to health, they bring vibrant energy and longevity. Applied to relationships, they yield compassion, humility, and the understanding that true love is rooted in sacrifice and service. In any context, they can free you if you’re stuck and put you on the path to succeed and thrive. And if the premise is simple, the promise is great: describing the subconscious mind in action, Murphy writes, “I have seen miracles happen to men and women in all walks of life all over the world.”
* “The Secret (book),” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_(book).