The key ideas

The Miracles of Your Mind

Joseph Murphy, 1953

You tell yourself everything is great, and inside someone quietly answers: not true. Joseph Murphy believed the subconscious hears exactly that second voice. In this short book he shows how to talk to yourself without an inner quarrel: through phrases about change, a calm picture of your goal and congratulations heard in advance.

Who it is for

For anyone who repeats the right words to themselves but doesn't believe them. And for everyone curious about how one of the classic figures of the New Thought movement suggested dealing with fear, habit and doubt.

If you look back in your life, you will agree with the writer that most of your fears, worries, and anxieties never came to pass.

The boss doesn't like mushrooms

For years a man keeps telling everyone: “I do not like mushrooms.” One day he is served a dish with mushrooms, and he immediately gets indigestion. A woman is sure that after coffee in the evening she will wake up at three in the morning, and she really does. Joseph Murphy explains both scenes the same way: something inside heard what the boss wanted and obediently carried it out.

Murphy was a minister in Los Angeles, one of the preachers of the New Thought movement. His lecture course was even called “The Miracles of the Mind”. The book's main idea is simple. There is one mind, but it has two sides. The conscious mind reasons and chooses, while the subconscious, as the author was convinced, doesn't argue and accepts what a person feels to be true, not what they say out loud.

An important caveat right away. This is the author's faith, not science, and nobody has verified his stories of healing. But this short book answers a very practical question: what to do when you don't believe your own words.

A quarrel in your own head

One day a woman with psoriasis came to Murphy. An ointment helped, but as soon as she stopped using it, the disease came back. Several times a day the woman repeated: “…my skin is perfect; I am healed.” Nothing changed, and the author understood why: each time an objection sounded inside, “No, your skin is not perfect!”

According to Murphy, when two opposite thoughts collide in the mind, the subconscious accepts the stronger one. A phrase you don't believe only reminds you of what isn't there.

The author found the way out in the wording. Several times a day, for five or ten minutes, the woman began to repeat: “It is changing now for the better.” With a phrase like that, the mind has nothing to argue with. As Murphy tells it, the disease gradually went away and didn't come back. There is no way to check this: it is an example of the author's faith, not a treatment.

To avoid undoing what has been done, Murphy offers the image of a surgeon. If he opened the stitches every half hour to see how things were going, the wound would never heal. “I'm only getting worse”, said ten minutes after a phrase about recovery, works the same way. Catch yourself at the start of such a phrase, cut it off and finish it differently.

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About the author

Joseph Murphy (1898-1981) was born in Ireland and joined the Jesuit order as a young man, then worked as a pharmacist in New York. In Los Angeles he became the minister of one of the largest New Thought congregations and wrote many books on the power of the subconscious.

All books by this author: Joseph Murphy

Terms from the book

  • New Thought
  • Subconscious
  • Rochester
  • Suggestion
  • Goethe
  • Emerson
  • Psoriasis: A chronic, non-contagious skin disease in which red, scaly patches appear on the skin. The disease often subsides and then flares up again.
  • Chaplain: A minister who serves in the army, a hospital or another institution.

All terms

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