The New Thought movement has now been gaining momentum for over 150 years and has become the dominant paradigm in personal development for people all over the world. Many times people overlook this fact for the sake of its religious and spiritual overtones.
To really understand what’s going on here, it’s best to step back and try to see the full picture from above, for a bird’s-eye view of the realms of personal development and religion. To do this effectively, we’d like to be able to draw a line between the two so we can say, “This is a religion and this person’s personal development.”
It sounds easy to do in theory, but when you actually start drawing the boundaries between the two, the whole thing gets a bit blurry. Let me give you an example, “The Ten Commandments” is an explicitly religious work while “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” is an explicitly personal development work. Although both bodies of work contain similar principles, only one of them has any reference to divinity.
The New Thought movement is so large and pervasive that it includes both ends of the spectrum by including works that are predominantly religious as well as works that have no spiritual overtones at all.
Enter spirituality
The third element within the movement is what completes the spectrum. Let’s define the three and I think it will be easy to understand how the New Thought movement can be all three of these things without having to be either one or the other:
- religion: Religion refers to specific practices and common beliefs regarding the nature of divinity within a particular group.
- Spirituality: Animism refers to the general practice of communicating with the divinity, but unlike religion, animism does not need specific practices or agreed-upon beliefs of a particular group. in this way; Doing yoga or playing golf can be spiritual experiences.
- Self development: Personal development is the practice of becoming one’s ideal self and experiencing one’s ideal situation, with or without the need to include divinity.
In many ways, all three of these have the same ultimate goal, “experiencing your ideal self in your ideal situation.” Religion, spirituality, and personal development are simply three different techniques that have been devised to achieve the same thing.
Bring it all together with a new thought
Each of the above categories is inherently different Exclusive, for example: Religions are exclusive because each religion is defined by its unique beliefs and practices. On the other hand, the New Thought movement is special because it is comprehensive rather than exclusive.
In general, New Thoughtists accept that everyone everywhere pursues the same simple goal in life: “Experience the ideal self in their ideal situation.” Some people consider this to be in tune with divinity, while others simply consider it the best possible person. Some people have meticulous instructions and practices for achieving this goal, while others want to forge their own path.
With more than 10 million practitioners worldwide, the New Thought movement is large enough to simultaneously embrace these three distinct viewpoints. There are New Thought churches, New Thought spiritual centers, and New Thought personal development groups all separate and distinct from each other unrelated to the widespread belief that we truly can experience life as our ideal self, in our ideal situations.
Three tracks to the same destination, which is part of what makes it so interesting; It’s religion, spirituality, personal development, or any combination of the three, it’s true for any individual! New Thought practitioners have created a path that accepts each person’s unique way as their own.