Taking Superman Seriously: Mitch Horowitz and Muscular New Thought, Part 1

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here ^[2])

Mitch Horowitz
Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of Your Mind
G&D Media, 2022

Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

To trifle with such ideas, rather than fall to your knees and sustain them as lifelong questions, is to toy with destruction. — Mitch Horowitz, Daydream Believer

I’ve frequently described New Thought as America’s home-grown, “two-fisted Traditionalism.” Mitch Horowitz, America’s leading historian — or as he prefers, historian/practitioner — of New Thought, takes that up a notch.[1] ^[3] His upper left arm bears a tattoo of the Hollywood handsome visage of Neville Goddard ^[4], the greatest New Thought lecturer, along with his summary of his method, “Live from the end”; his left forearm bears — sans visage — “A is A,” Ayn Rand’s “chin out” affirmation of the reality of objective truth and of the possibility of knowing it. It’s the American Story: plucky immigrants who made their fortunes in mid-century America.[2] ^[5]

His new book, Daydream Believer, combines history, cutting-edge science, and hard-earned, real-life advice with the goal of rescuing New Thought from the realm of airy-fairy self-deception. As Alan Watts once said about metaphysics, it’s actually “rockily practical”:[3] ^[6]

We must also shed the shibboleth that “positive thinking” produces [one sort] of personality: rosy, ebullient, upbeat. Positivity takes many forms, including deliberateness, persistence (what some call faith), and dedication to evaluating events based not on whether they produce happiness, which may be fleeting, but on their potential for fostering personal development and self-expression.

It opens with a scene that’s sure to please those with a taste for Mark Sedgwick or Gary Lachman-style occult politics: ^{[4] [7]}

Several years prior to this writing, a famous political operative — someone you would immediately recognize and perhaps be surprised by — asked me to meet him at a suite in a posh Park Avenue hotel. I biked up from my then-home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As I settled into a sofa with my helmet in my lap, he asked me: “Who is the best writer in New Thought?” My questioner referred to the philosophy of positive-mind metaphysics that began in the transcendentalist ferment of New England in the mid-to-late 1800s and mushroomed across the nation.

“Neville,” I immediately replied, referring to Neville Goddard, one of the most intriguing mystical voices of the past century.

No,” he said, ribbing me — “I didn’t ask who’s the coolest, I asked who’s the best.” I repeated my assessment. The British-Barbadian Neville, whose career spanned from the late 1930s until his death in California in 1972, was a resplendent speaker who, under his solitary first name, wrote more than ten books on the limitless powers of thought. He has been my greatest influence.

But I have differences with Neville’s ideas, which I do not believe cover the full gamut of human crises and mortality. I wondered then as I have other times: who could I recommend unreservedly?

Although I do not approve of the actions of the political figure who put the question to me, I nevertheless determined to allow it to serve as a personal goad. I decided right there to adopt it as my challenge to lay out a metaphysics of thought causation that shied from neither the sublime heights of possibility nor the severity of the barriers facing us.

Despite the High-Level Operative’s interest, and despite — or perhaps due to — my own efforts on its behalf, the echt-American tradition of New Thought continues to irk the dissident Right, where it serves as a handy punching bag standing in for “Leftist bullshit” or “dime-store Enlightenment.” For example, the Zman says:

We may be seeing one of the terrible side effects of narrative politics. This is the belief that a good story often repeated can change reality.[5] ^[8] Elites have come to believe that saying it makes it real. This is why they invest so heavily in creating narratives and having them repeated by their media organs. Everything is about messaging rather than objective measures. Team Biden is now selling the story that gas prices are falling at historic rates, despite record high gas prices.

In a world where the people in charge are sure that all they have to do is create a really good story and that story will become true, there is no reason for them to ever reconsider the narrative. Once they commit, they are committed. This means anyone questioning the narrative is an enemy. Public policy ceases to be about trade-offs and is instead about the friend-enemy distinction. Friends repeat the narrative and enemies question the narrative.[6] ^[9]

Two days earlier, Larry Romanoff said at The Unz Review:

It sometimes seems that half the content of US bookstores consists of what we call ‘self-help’ books, meant to give us ‘the real secret’ to success and riches. Of course, if one book ever did do that, there would be no need for a second. The secret contained in these books is mostly limited to some variation of “You have to believe”. And when you fail to strike gold, as you inevitably will, then your belief just wasn’t strong enough.

Ultimately, it’s the fault of the religion of the Founders:

It is noteworthy that religion plays a significant supporting role in the propagation of this fraud. The simplistic and simple-minded American versions of Christianity, with their two-dimensional and heavily moralistic view of the world, encourage a belief in the eventual triumph of virtue, hard work of course being characteristic of virtue and success being one measure of its practice. In this context and under this indoctrination it is perfectly plausible that the blame for one’s failure to ‘succeed’ should be attributed to one’s own shortcomings, and indeed it is seen as whining to blame the system rather than ourselves for our lack of progress. The entire myth, the foundation of the American Dream, is that US-style capitalism will automatically enrich anyone who works hard, filling individuals with an illusory hope that seldom comes to fruition while encouraging them to blame themselves when they fail.[7] ^[10]

As a historian/participant, Horowitz is a relentless critic of the flabby, self-indulgent muddle that passes for “thinking” among adherents to New Thought (NT), which has accounted for its largely justified reputation as either a wooly-headed dead end or an outright scam. As an historian, he is interested in what NT was and is, but as a practitioner he is only interested in discerning — to paraphrase Evola’s bête noire, Benedetto Croce — what is living and what is dead in NT; what works and what doesn’t work, as one of his heroes, William James, would say, and doing so by conducting experiments in his own life, and inviting the reader join in.

In the process, he brings in — I think unintentionally — enough dissident Right connections — from Nietzsche and Rand to Yukio Mishima ^[13] and Christopher Lasch ^[14] — to finally clear out the stink of patchouli that has clung to NT since the 1960s, while never betraying his loyalty to the Progressive traditions of the American Old Left (and, I would say, the Old Weird America).[8] ^[15]

Horowitz gets right down to business by voicing his uneasiness with the main tenet of New Thought: in a quantum universe, where space and time are within us, and things “out there” exist as possibilities actualized by our perceptions, a clearly delineated image, firmly held in the imagination and imbued with all the emotional intensity of which we are capable, can be brought into existence:[9] ^[16]

For full mental-emotive potential to be reached absolute focus is required . . . [This] also mirrors a natural law: focus produces force.

There is no reason to assume that the efforts of the psyche, whether psychological, metaphysical, or both, form an exception.

All of this suggests not only the validity of the New Thought or mind-causation thesis, but also a different way of working with it.

Although frequently derided as “wishful thinking,” New Thought declares jihad on mere wishes: They assume a present state of lack, thus keeping it going; instead, one must, as Neville says, “Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled,” and replace the unwanted present with the desired — until now merely potential and thus “future” — state.

Despite devoting a lot of attention to outlining and defending Neville’s “simple method for changing the future,”[10] ^[17] and continuing to “honor” the idea, he has some concerns about the ban on wishing. In a state of great physical or emotional pain and suffering, are we really able to devote ourselves to visualizing some more pleasant condition? And conversely, in such states, is it not true that the wish acquires exactly the intense emotional force Neville prescribes?

A wish, even if expressed as a longing, which is, after all, the nature of any wish, may be a natural, powerful means of mental selectivity.

A wish clarifies. . . . If felt authentically, a wish organizes your life with a sense of duty. It informs your actions. A wish prioritizes. It may also select.

An impassioned wish — focused, inwardly stated, possibly spoken aloud, and written down (more on which shortly) — employs extant emotions rather than attempts to restructure prevailing ones. For this reason, wishing may feel more natural than picturizing.

It meets us as we are rather than where we feel we must be. No one fails at a wish.

Horowitz then narrates some occasions when he found this method to be effective, and if that seems too anecdotal for your taste, he caps things off with a Harvard Medical School study from 2010, which “suggested that belief in the facility of the placebo effect was itself sufficient to trigger a therapeutic response” (my italics).

Why, then, refuse the use of a possibly effective tool, in the name of what New Thought pioneer Ralph Waldo Emerson would call a “foolish consistency”? Here we see the Horowitz method in a nutshell, honoring tradition, but not afraid to put it to the test and accepting whatever works in real experience, both personal and in the strictest laboratory setting.[11] ^[18]

After this apotheosis of the wish, Horowitz then moves on to deconstruct another New Age tick: “just be, man,” or “realize your current perfection.” Hogwash! Horowitz calls on Emerson and Nietzsche to dismiss this nostrum:[12] ^[19]

Without the call of necessity and the striving toward repair — which also results in frictions — we would remain emotional children.

The notion of “just being” or realizing one’s current perfection — rather than the ongoing drive toward perfection — is a promise hinged on self-denial. . . . It often results in passive-aggression, a malady of New Age culture.

Rather than accept defeat as a chance to practice New Age “acceptance,” or Christian punishment for some kind of “sin,” or even a way to derive some “ersatz variety” of “understanding,” Horowitz’s kind of Positive Thinking “seeks, whenever possible, to evaluate circumstances according to their potential for self-expansion and refinement.”

This involves some harsh but useful advice, especially for those who consider themselves “dissidents” in a hostile society: to “to progressively disassociate yourself from everything and everyone that does not fulfill the needs of your development,” and to “step past” anything which is “unnecessary, anything that hinders us with secondary emotional concern and unconstructive expense of energy.”[13] ^[20]

One day, as Mitch Horowitz walked the dark, damp streets of Brooklyn, he “realized with an overwhelming sense of actuality that life assumes the contours of consistently held thought”:

The indelible and somewhat jarringly ecstatic and frightening notion that there is functional truth in the proposition that thought plays a decisive role that is molding, instigative, and formative of your lived experience or conception of reality.

But this means that “thought” is not just some faculty for mulling things over, but a force, and Horowitz is at pains to spell out the implications, which many would rather avoid or deny. Thought is a force, but it is limited within a network of other forces, such as gravity and other physical laws. Nor are we free from force of character, even if it is our own.[14] ^[21]

But within the sphere of events in which we function — i.e., our reality — we are capable of causation, and, in fact, helpless not to engage in causation as we are perpetually thinking, feeling, pondering, and measuring. Hence, be encouraged but also be thoughtful, be watchful, and be careful. Not so careful that you truncate your passions . . . But also not so random that you do not consider fees and measures of outcome.

As another resident of the outer boroughs once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

All this is rather reminiscent of Quantum Mechanics, and many have tried to use QM to explain or justify NT, even Neville himself.[15] ^[22] But again Horowitz is here to raise troubling questions. Under the “many worlds” interpretation of QM:

Your life and experience at this moment may reflect accumulated possibilities and reciprocities that play out in serial realities of which you are a part but are not necessarily aware at a given instance of perception.

Neville promises that the world is as you are. I consider that true. At the same time, the “you” in question may be an infinitude of existences, thus making the task of interpersonal and self-creation appear at once tantalizingly intimate and possible and, by turns, faraway and impossibly frustrating. That is the paradox of our creative-mind reality.

To be able to live this paradox, Horowitz pulls out a surprise: a reconsideration of Neville’s idea of holding an image with emotional intensity:

I contend that those thought patterns most capable of concretizing experience, like signals amid the noise of myriad influences and events, are your most intimately felt and persistently held images of self, often extending back to earliest childhood and presently intact in ways that you may not always suspect. Are you aware of these self-conceptions and images? This is why a clarified aim is so critical. (my italics)

Allow your aim to shape the internal image, at every moment possible, of your lived existence. Use every means to populate your psyche with this self-image.

So, Horowitz now reasonably asks, which reality are you living in now? One way to look at the “infinitude of existences” is through a variation Neville offers of his usual method, in which one looks to the past rather than the future:

Now this is how we do it. At the end of my day, I review the day; I don’t judge it, I simply review it. I look over the entire day, all the episodes, all the events, all the conversations, all the meetings, and then as I see it clearly in my mind’s eye, I rewrite it. I rewrite it and make it conform to the ideal day I wish I had experienced. I take scene after scene and rewrite it, revise it, and having revised my day, then in my imagination I relive that day, the revised day, and I do it over and over in my imagination until this seeming imagined state begins to take on to me the tones of reality. It seems that it’s real, that I actually did experience it and I have found from experience that these revised days, if really lived, will change my tomorrows. When I meet people tomorrow that today disappointed me, they will not tomorrow, for in me I have changed the very nature of that being, and having changed him, he bears witness tomorrow of the change that took place within me. It is my duty to take this garden and really make it a garden by daily using the pruning shears of revision. [16] ^[23]

Once more, this is an insight that Horowitz “honors” but still has a few questions about. If we can not only change the future — that is, bring about a different outcome to how things stand in the present — but also change the past, doesn’t that invoke all the well-known paradoxes of “time travel”? Good Lord, are we going to have to talk about string theory? Horowitz muses thus:

What if the antecedent event and its alternative proceed in real but different dimensions? The thing that gets altered forms a new dimensional strand or string — imagine reality as an endlessly expansive ball of twine — and the “anchor strand” from which you reconceived the event remains circumstantially untouched. What is touched, what is altered, is the emotional antecedent of the incident. (my italics)

So that your anchor reality and the psyches of those you encounter within it — independent beings who crisscross from time to time within your perception of reality or intertwined strings, as you do within theirs — are leavened by the alteration of experience with the perceived event unchanged.

There is . . . an alternative reality — one among an infinite number — where altered circumstance, jarring or salving, is experienced. [But] within the anchor reality of your inceptive experience. [Only] the emotive ripple is felt. Healing can occur. The opposite is also true, so we should be careful when we consider the question of reviewing the past or when we idly revise or rerun its scenes.[17] ^[24]

I think the idea here is that Neville’s method of revision changes the emotional residue in the present, leaving the event unchanged and continuing in other time streams, with other emotional residues; healing or closure occurs though the event remains. In any event, Horowitz moves on to question the exclusive value of “healing or closure”:

Neville equated revision with forgiveness. In Neville’s mystical reading of Scripture, to forgive does not mean to excuse but to revision an adversary or fractious encounter according to your ideal. . . . I am not always emotionally or ethically certain that I truly want to undo or reverse an event so much as resolve it on my own terms. Do you want peace — or victory?

I believe that there are periods in which we actually want to hang onto negative situations, themes, or memories. For example, a perceived adversary may also be someone for whom you harbor deep feelings, even love. What is love but the opposing polarity of hate? In both situations, another person shapes, marks, and even gives direction or purpose to one’s life.

Hence, we may wish, without ever fully expressing it to ourselves, to retain, review, repeat, and even re-live a difficulty . . . we may savor or enjoy conflict, which might provide a feeling of aliveness or a thrill of having escaped.

Once again, the spirit of Nietzsche arises in these “New Age” considerations, but as Horowitz begins to quote Nietzsche, a slight but intriguing digression opens up:

“One has to repay good and ill — but why precisely to the person who has done us good or ill?” This is a disquieting principle. Why should payment be extracted from an uninvolved pedestrian? To this objection the philosopher might reply: why then should good tidings be granted to any such person? — as in the popular concept of “pay it forward.” Perhaps both consequences are unwarranted on an intimate scale but arise from matters other than the one immediately perceived.

Cazart! We’ve reached a suggestion of the amoral metaphysical idea of “passing the buck,” spiritual progress not by working with one’s karma but by dumping it on an innocent passerby; I discuss this in my collection Passing the Buck: Coleman Francis & Other Cinematic Metaphysicians (Colac, Victoria, Australia: Manticore Press, 2021); reviewed here ^[27].[18] ^[28]

Chapter VI, “Why Prayer Works,” might seem like it wouldn’t appeal to many Counter-Currents readers; one might even suspect Horowitz, a non-practicing but by no means secular Jew, is trying to sneak in a commercial for some sort of monotheism. Yet, what he says here is pagan-friendly and could even have been written by our own rune master, Collin Cleary ^[29]:

I believe that prayer and petitions to a deific entity, infinite mind, or greater force represents an authentic and potent possibility.

As always, he is “rockily practical,” and has always advocated what he calls the “D-Day Approach”: Use everything you’ve got. Use visualization to empower, not replace, surgery; why not prayer along with pharmaceuticals, church-going along with chemo?[19] ^[30]

But this seems to be not only dismissing the petty atheism and materialism that have become the default position of those who consider themselves respectable thinkers, but also what we might call the “practical atheism” of New Thinkers such as Neville, who reject the Biblical god for a god within: “Your own wonderful human imagination,” as he frequently said.[20] ^[31]

Using the metaphor of the tree and the branch, Horowitz in turn rejects the inference that if, as Jesus and Neville say, “I and the Father are one,”[21] ^[32] this eliminates any distinctions and, above all, symbiotic relations between us and whatever we conceive a higher entity may be.

Rejecting both new-fangled atheism and New Age passivity, Horowitz takes a broader view and asks, in effect, were our ancestors — you know, the ones who invented agriculture, mathematics, basically everything — completely wrong about their place in the universe?[22] ^[33]

What if our ancient, pantheistic ancestors — whose lives and civilizations spanned the globe for millennia and laid the foundation for our present — were religiously insightful?

[All] ancient people — with remarkable consistency and archetypal symmetry — brought a sense of personification to the energies and cycles that they detected in nature. . . . The ancients often imbued these energies with traits, personas, and deific qualities; they sought relationships with them, including of a petitionary nature.

Horowitz recalls the Hermetic and Neoplatonic principle — revived today by Gurdjieff and Jung — that the soul, the psyche, is “a medium of exchange between the individual and the liminal [and] forms a tissue of connection between the psychological and the transcendent or numinous.”

Another Hermetic principle is that “As above, so below.” Thus, “the same qualities necessary for a transcendent relationship are those required for any mature relationship: affinity, empathy, insight, seriousness, sincerity, clarity, and respect.” And then consider:

Consider whether the ancient gods have been neglected. What if they hunger for your attention? What if they long for veneration in a world that has largely forgotten them? Can gods be lonely?

Well, if one conceives of greater intelligences, it stands to reason that empathy, too, must be present within an intelligence. Without empathy one being cannot fully understand another. . . . All-seeing beings, or at least beings with greater perspective, must have an expansively greater capacity for empathy.

If deific or energetic intelligences experience intensely felt emotions, that may explain why the pantheon of gods, from ancient Africa to Iceland, often appear in parables and stories as possessing fallible, sometimes frustratingly human traits, including jealousy, rage, fickleness and lust. Hence, I would venture that, yes, the old gods may be lonely. [23] ^[34]

The problem with this line of thinking, valuable as it may be, is that it tends to get almost as airy-fairy as the “all is one” mentality; consider your stereotypical Ren Faire. Ever practical, Horowitz asks, in the spirit of Neville — go home and try it! — that we “make a plea to the ancients.”

I propose that you settle into a quiet or meditative mood tonight — or right now — with these principles in mind. Make a direct appeal to whatever deity you feel sympathetic toward. See what happens. Try it as a personal experiment.

* * *

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Notes

[1] ^[39] See his Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (New York: Bantam, 2009), One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (New York: Crown, 2014), and most recently Modern Occultism: History, Theory, and Practice (New York: G&D Media, 2023).

[2] ^[40] In The Miracle Club, Horowitz said that “New Thought at its best and most infectious celebrates the primacy of the individual. Seen in a certain light, the mystical teacher Neville Goddard, the New Thought figure whom I most admire, was a kind of spiritualized objectivist. Or perhaps I could say that Ayn Rand, the founder of philosophical Objectivism, and an ardent atheist, was a secularized Neville.” See my review: “Evola’s Other Club: Mitch Horowitz & the Self-Made Mystic ^[41].” Bert Cooper advises Don Draper to take $1.99 out of his bonus and buy Atlas Shrugged (Mad Men, S1E8, “The Hobo Code”).

[3] ^[42] In My Own Way: An Autobiography (Pantheon, 1972), p. 1. See here ^[43] for more on Watts at Counter-Currents.

[4] ^[44] See Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Lachman’s Dark Star Rising: Magick & Power in the Age of Trump (New York: TarcherPerigree, 2018) — or better for the latter, Rainer Chlodwig von K.’s review ^[45]. For Steve Bannon and the occult (with guest appearances by Jason Jorjani and Counter-Currents’ own John Morgan), see Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War For Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), reviewed here ^[46].

[5] ^[47] Neville’s frequent mantra was “An assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact.” This has been attributed to several people, usually British and often prime ministers (Churchill, Clement Atlee). Perhaps it ultimately comes from William Blake, Neville’s favorite author outside the Bible, who really did say: “If the fool will persist in his folly he will become wise.”

[6] ^[48] “Narrative Investment ^[49].”

[7] ^[50] “The American Dream ^[51].” In The Miracle Club, Horowitz critiques Barbara Ehrenreich’s similar “blaming the victim” attack from the Left.

[8] ^[52] Indeed, Horowitz may be — presumably unintentionally, and therefore all the more significantly — part of an informal movement I see forming on the internets, which, dissatisfied with the “Alt Right” alternatives offered to the modern Left, argues for recognizing the merits of selected elements of the traditional Right and Left, and holding them in a pragmatic, non-ideological synthesis. See several recent mega-essays by “Jung/Freud,” such as “Leftist Defense of Family Culture, Why Both Leftism and Rightism Are Essential to Neo-Fascist National Humanism, and the Need for Temporal Socialist Consciousness ^[53],” or “John Carter” on “The Internet is a Brain with Schizophrenia: Right and Left as Neural Net ^[54].”

[9] ^[55] Crowley of course defined his Magick as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will,” and his private secretary, Israel Regardie, called Neville’s lectures “the most magickal” of all the New Thought teachings. See Regardie, The Romance of Metaphysics (1946); the relevant chapter on Neville ^[56] appears as the Introduction to The Power of Imagination: The Neville Goddard Treasury; Mitch Horowitz, ed. (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2015). Horowitz cites “Japanese essayist and novelist Yukio Mishima ^[57] . . . in his personal manifesto Sun and Steel: ‘Anything that comes into our minds for even the briefest of moments, exists.’”

[10] ^[58] See my review, “Evola’s Other Club,” cited above.

[11] ^[59] “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance.” As Paul Feyerabend, Luftwaffe pilot and philosopher of science, said, the only rule of the scientific method is: “Anything goes.” See his Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1975).

[12] ^[60] The simple fact — unpalatable as it may be to both the Left and the Right, the New Age saps and Fascist fanboys — is that Nietzsche’s favorite philosopher was: Emerson. Not favorite living philosopher, or favorite English-language philosopher, but philosopher, tout court. Everyone has a favored candidate for Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” but perhaps we should spend more time considering his “First Man”: “Nietzsche loved Emerson from first to last. Nietzsche’s interest in and admiration of Emerson began when he was still a schoolboy and continued throughout his productive life. He studiously annotated and copied whole passages from German translations of Emerson’s essays. In 1884, Nietzsche described Emerson as ^[61] ‘a glorious, great nature, rich in soul and spirit’ and pronounced Emerson to be ‘the author who has been the richest in ideas in this century.’ And commenting on a collection of Emerson’s essays, Nietzsche wrote: ‘Never have I felt so at home in a book, and in my home, as — I may not praise it, it is too close to me.’” Chris Augusta, “Nietzsche’s First Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson ^[62].” The image of Nietzsche copying “whole passages” from Emerson recalls Hunter Thompson’s Nevillesque method of becoming a great writer by typing and retyping The Great Gatsby; see my “Hunter S. Thompson: Father of Fake News ^[63], Part 5.”

[13] ^[64] This “step past” may remind us of Jonathan Bowden’s advice to “step over” various cultural shibboleths. For more on Bowden as a New Thought practitioner, see my review “Your Faith Is Your Future: For Neville, Bowden, & Prince Harry ^[65]!”

[14] ^[66] Throughout this chapter, Horowitz seems very much on Team Schopenhauer, despite or perhaps because of his reverence for Nietzsche. For example, his rejection of the notion of thought as “a tool of decision” rather than a force, which is “to ascribe too much facility, I think, to the rational, prioritizing facets of intellect, which, experience also teaches, wield so little actual control over the order of life, including our emotions, intimacies, and physically felt urges — much less so control over those of others.” The idea of the world as an “outpicturing” of our emotions recalls Schopenhauer’s basic idea of the world as a representation of the Will, which “shows itself as terror, fear, hope, joy, desire, envy, grief, zeal, anger, or courage.” — The World as Will and Representation (trans. Payne), Vol. II, p. 212. And of course, “Nor is your life wholly the domain of accident since we can divine early in the existence of any individual personality traits that doggedly even deterministically linger” evokes Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the immutability of character.

[15] ^[67] “Do you realize that no two people live in the same world? . . . Scientists will one day explain why there is a serial universe. But in practice, how you use this serial universe to change the future is more important.” Five Lessons: A Master Class (1948); reissued with a bonus chapter by Mitch Horowitz (New York: Tarcher/Perigree, 2018), Lesson Five. See my review here ^[68].

[16] ^[69] From the 1954 lecture, “The Pruning Shears of Revision ^[70].” Another version can be found in his book Seedtime and Harvest (1954), Chapter Four. For a step-by-step guide, see this ^[71]. Horowitz says Neville believed “this method was the insight for which he would be most widely remembered.” I can’t help but be reminded of Ed Wood musing at around the same time and place: “This is the one. This is the one I’ll be remembered for ^[72].” I’ve previously compared Neville’s persona to another man with one name, Criswell from Plan Nine ^[73] from Outer Space — but in a good way, of course.

[17] ^[74] This is perhaps related to the karmic “boomerang” effect that Evola discusses in The Hermetic Tradition, in the chapter “The Invisible Masters,” as part of his consideration of why supposed “mages” such as Crowley or Austin Spare — and, perhaps, Evola himself — seem to lead such troubled lives and come to such lousy ends. See “Immobile Warriors: Evola’s Post-War Career from the Perspective of Neville’s New Thought ^[75].”

[18] ^[76] “Nietzsche’s ideal may reflect the impersonal scales of life found within concepts of karma in Vedic theology. I might refrain the philosopher’s question from ‘one has to repay’ to ‘nature has to repay.’” As usual, Horowitz’s reference point is Nietzsche, but as before, Schopenhauer is there between the lines, this time with his idea of “eternal justice”: Since we are all metaphysically expressions of the same Will, the wrongdoer, by his very act, inflicts the same act on himself; punishment is immediate and “fits the crime.” See WWR, op. cit, Vol. I, sec. 63-66.

[19] ^[77] See The Miracle Club, p. 110.

[20] ^[78] Israel Regardie already noticed this in 1946: “In reality Neville is an atheist. It is conceivable that both he and his audiences would be shocked to learn of my conclusion. Yet he himself clearly and definitely states that outside of man, there is no God.” In his first book, At Your Command (1939), Neville bluntly says ^[79]: “So can’t you see why the millions of prayers are unanswered? Men pray to a God that does not exist.” See my review of Horowitz’s 2016 edition, “Lord Kek Commands! A Look at the Origins of Meme Magic ^[80],” also reprinted in my collection Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, & Other Populist Gurus (Colac, Victoria, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020).

[21] ^[81] Neville interprets this as “You and your conception of yourself are one. You are and always will be greater than any conception you will ever have of yourself.”

[22] ^[82] In saying this I recall Eliot’s description of Kipling’s “vision of the people of the soil”: “It is not a Christian vision, but it is at least a pagan vision — a contradiction of the materialistic view: it is the insight into a harmony with nature which must be re-established if the truly Christian imagination is to be recovered by Christians.” A Choice of Kipling’s Verse Made by T. S. Eliot (Faber, 1963), p. 33.

[23] ^[83] Horowitz adds that “William James made a similar observation in his essay ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ in 1895: ‘I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity.’”