Conversations with a New Thought God

When I was in my early 20s, a friend recommended Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch to me. The book is a conversation between the author and his conception of God. It’s been years and years since I read it, but the general idea is that God created the universe for us to experience as a collective. We’re all interconnected, and we should do what we can to make life better, blah blah blah, all good stuff.

The book dabbles in a lot of positive thinking, the law of attraction, and the importance of synchronicities. In fact, I read it right before The Secret became popular. At that time in my life, I had just gotten over (that’s a lie) failing at making my dream of moving to Italy happen, and I suppose I was ready for something new.

My New Thought Delusion

The combined popularity of the law of attraction and positive thinking in spiritual circles has roots in New Thought. This approach was a major influence on Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking. Mitch Horowitz does a fantastic job summarizing the history of the movement in The Miracle Club.

It operates under the spiritual principle that thoughts generate reality and that intention and desire are key operating forces in the universe. In one way, this is a spot-on analysis of how the universe can actually work: people set out goals and intentions, and they end up materializing precisely because they set those goals and intentions in the first place.

When New Thought works, it fucking works. That’s why you’ll find many fortunate people — both good and absolutely horrible — reaping and touting its benefits. New Thought is a massive success for many. For a while, I counted myself as one of the success stories.

New Thought — though I didn’t have that specific title for it back then — gave me the confidence to follow my dreams because I knew that they would happen if only I believed in them enough. After I embraced the New-Thought-ish teachings in Conversations with God, I started experiencing signs and synchronicities. Things really turned around for me. After a couple of languishing years, I got into a really interesting grad school program that allowed me to travel the world for a year. It truly was one of the best years of my life.

I wanted to keep the momentum going, so I took a fairly bonkers risk and moved to DC with very little to my name except a degree and a dream. I was convinced that my sheer determination would see me through. It had worked until then, and I figured it was only a matter of time until I landed a job in a field that I had been dreaming about for years.

Unfortunately, the universe had…. other plans. DC chewed me up and spit my ass out without a second thought. I was there for six months, and it was a monumental challenge. Towards the end, it got more and more difficult just to make ends meet and to keep my head up.

I started to get signs and syncs that moving back to Buffalo should be the next step. I booked a flight home for Thanksgiving and moved back in with my parents with my tail between my legs.

When New Thought Breaks

Like many people, I naively thought that I had cracked the secrets to the universe and that I was going to be one of the lucky ones. When my dreams turned to ash, I was dumbfounded.

Following signs and synchronicities — which so many magicians and witches point to as important — brought me to my knees. I suddenly found myself to be in my late twenties with a masters degree living at home with my parents, single, in ridiculous amounts of debt, and working a menial job. The months passed, and there were days that I just wanted to melt into the ground and disappear.

It all went so badly that it completely destroyed my faith in how I thought the universe actually functioned. Everything that I attempted to do failed miserably. I tried getting into the Peace Corps; that blew up in my face because I came out in the interview process. Right around the same time, I hit rock bottom: I was forced to perform the Chicken Dance in a Denny’s onboarding training (read the blog I wrote. I promise it’s hilarious).

At that point — and for obviously justifiable reasons if you read my blog post — I turned my back on spirituality, magic, and the occult. No well-meaning god would inflict the fucking Chicken Dance on someone who wants to make the world a better place. They were a dark couple of years.

What my experience taught me is that New Thought doesn’t always work. It can for some, but there are plenty of people who follow their dreams, and the “manifestation” just… never comes. It can be a risky approach to reality and spirituality. Sure, magic can help nudge probability in your favor, but you’ll never truly know how things will work out.

Neoliberal Thought

Of course, New Thought has some major limitations. I mentioned above that, in one way, it is a spot-on analysis of how the universe can work. At the same time, however, it also very much isn’t how the universe works. Just wanting something hard enough doesn’t always translate to that desire manifesting. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be people starving or dying horrible deaths all across the planet. There would also be plenty more movie stars and a hell of a lot less HR professionals (no offense to anyone in HR!).

At its worst, New Thought can result in victim blaming. It’s actually a perfect spiritual model for neoliberalism. Not enough money? Unstable housing situation? Health problems? You’re just not wanting hard enough. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, plebe, and do it harder.

It can and does place the onus for change on the individual. While this isn’t entirely incorrect, the model clearly needs some significant tweaking as it is primarily used by a bunch of fortunate assholes to hoard power and wealth while the rest of us scramble for scraps. Much of the Anglosphere and the West in general is terrible at acknowledging that individual desires work best when kept in check with communal interdependence and reciprocity. Sure, you can want and manifest a giant fucking yacht, but should you when that desire involves slave labor and environmental destruction?

As a quick caveat, I want to point out that I am certainly not absolved of all the complexity I just brought up. The systems we’ve built are stupidly complicated and expecting purity and innocence while functioning inside of them is next to impossible at the moment. I’m typing this on a laptop that was surely built with slave labor and much of its components contain rare earth minerals. We live in a challenging time to say the least.

My Next Delusion

I’ve been thinking about my experience with New Thought a lot recently. I am on the verge of doing something either amazingly stupid or stupidly amazing. Over the last few weeks, I’ve experienced some very strong signs and synchronicities, the likes of which I haven’t experienced since DC. It feels like I’m starting to go down a path set out before me by a living and animate universe again. It’s exciting and also a little terrifying. I’ll have to do a companion piece explaining all the lovely weirdness I’ve experienced over the last month. Just when I think my magical flow state is over, something else unfolds.

The struggle is that the last time I followed synchronicities and signs like this, the universe handed my ass to me on a silver platter and brought me to my knees for a few very dark years. I am gun-shy of following synchronicities to say the least, and I would prefer to avoid as much as possible sinking lower than the fucking Chicken Dance at a Denny’s. Is that even possible? I don’t want to find out.

I’m under no delusions that things will just magically work out for me the way I expected in my 20s. Back then, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted, and that life is no longer how I live. I honestly have no idea where I want to go or how I want to get there, and maybe that’s just how I’m meant to exist for my next chapter.