One Simple Idea (23 page)

She and Charles studied everything they could find on mental healing, also expanding their studies to Buddhism, Hinduism, Theosophy, hypnotism, and various forms of Christian mysticism. They later took classes in Kansas City from Hopkins herself. Like Myrtle, Charles began to feel physically improved. “My chronic pains ceased,” he wrote. “My hip healed and grew stronger.” He reported being able to walk without his brace, and said his right leg grew fuller and more muscular. Charles also claimed that hearing began returning to his right ear and sight to his right eye.

Eager to share their discoveries, the couple formed Kansas City prayer and discussion groups. Drawing upon Charles’s printing background, they launched the magazine
Modern Thought
in April 1889. It was dedicated to metaphysical healing, New Thought, and Christian Science, and also to occult philosophies and methods, such as Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, clairvoyance, astrology, and palmistry—topics that Charles
later sharply rejected.
Modern Thought
marked the beginnings of the Unity School of Practical Christianity. In years ahead, Charles insisted that the school was explicitly Christian—based in “
Pure Mind Healing
only,” and not the occult subjects that had once moved him.

Magazines, pamphlets, correspondence courses, and mail-order prayer services quickly followed. In a crucial move in 1890, the Fillmores formed the Society of Silent Unity, a distance-prayer service whose workers prayed for anyone who wrote in. Silent Unity quickly became the signature Fillmore operation. In 1907, Charles added telephone technology to Silent Unity, staffing the phone lines with trained, round-the-clock prayer attendants. Unity was probably the first ministry to use the phones in this way.

People called in for help, first in the thousands and then hundreds of thousands. They rang from farms, cities, small towns, and overseas—making prayer requests for healing, marital strife, loneliness, or financial needs. Countless callers felt some solace from the sympathetic voice on the other end of the phone who answered: “This is Silent Unity. How may we pray with you?” Silent Unity remains a popular service, handling thousands of calls a day. It is not a money-raising outfit or a faith-healing operation, but a confidential prayer service run with dignity and sensitivity. Silent Unity was the type of prayer program that physician Richard C. Cabot would have found an appropriate complement to medical treatment.

In 1919 Charles began using his real-estate savvy to acquire land near Kansas City, which took shape as the fourteen-hundred-acre Unity Village. This campus housed the Fillmores’ publishing operations, distance-prayer ministry, radio broadcasts, churches, meeting spaces, hotel rooms, and residential quarters.
^*3
Continually expanding
their media operation, the Fillmores exposed hundreds of thousands of American households to mind-power metaphysics through their magazine
Unity
and their children’s periodical,
Wee Wisdom
, which also launched the literary career of novelist Sidney Sheldon. It published the ten-year-old’s first poem in 1927 and sent him five dollars.

All of this occurred in an era before the nation’s vast media ministries had taken root. The pioneering televangelist Oral Roberts did not publish his first pamphlet-sized work until 1947, the year before the deaths of Charles Fillmore and Frank B. Robinson. At a time when America’s evangelical revivals were still held in large tents, the Fillmores had already completed a model of the ministry as a clearinghouse for magazines, pamphlets, advice books, radio shows, and prayer requests. In 1948, journalist Marcus Bach, the friend to Frank B. Robinson, visited Unity Village and was astonished at how the Missouri operation dwarfed even Robinson’s own:

This was the first full-scale realization of the modern media ministry, built on positive-thinking ideals.

Perhaps the most intriguing and substantive teacher of New Thought in the years immediately following World War II was an Anglo–West Indian dancer and stage actor who cultivated a mysterious biography and went by the singular name Neville.

Born in 1905 in Barbados to an English family, Neville Goddard arrived in New York in the early 1920s to study theater. His ambition for the stage faded as he came in contact with various mystical and occult philosophies. By the early 1930s he embarked on a new and unforeseen career as a lecturer and writer of mind-power metaphysics. In lectures, Neville often referred to an enigmatic, turbaned black man named Abdullah who he said tutored him in Scripture, number mysticism, Kabbalah, and Hebrew.

Whatever the source of Neville’s education, his outlook not only reflected the most occultic edge of New Thought but also the philosophy’s most intellectually stimulating expression. Neville saw each individual as a potential God, who could select from among a universe of infinite realities, all brought into existence by a mixture of our mind’s-eye imagery and emotive states.
That which we think, feel, and see to be true
, Neville taught,
literally is true
. In Neville’s viewpoint, our active imagination—that is, our thoughts and corresponding feelings—creates reality. (I consider the implications of Neville’s ideas further in the final chapter.)

In public talks, Neville made extravagant claims—such as his use of mental visualizations to win himself an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army after being drafted at the height of World War II. In actuality, such a sudden discharge did occur. Neville entered the army on November 12, 1942, obligated to serve for the duration of the war. But military records show that four months later, in March 1943, the mystic and Greenwich Village aesthete was “discharged from service to
accept employment in an essential wartime industry.” Neville resumed his “essential wartime” job as a metaphysical lecturer. A profile in
The New Yorker
of September 11, 1943, described the handsome speaker back at the lectern before swooning (and often female) New York audiences. It is unclear why Neville, a lithe man in perfect health, would have been released from the military at the peak of the war. “Unfortunately,” an army public affairs officer said, “Mr. Goddard’s records were destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center.”

Neville also made bold claims about the prosperous rise of his family’s food-service and retail businesses in Barbados—claims that likewise conform to public records. Even Neville’s tales about the mysterious Abdullah, as will be seen, are far from dismissible.

Yet other stories surrounding Neville are shakier. In 1955, Hollywood gossip columnist Jimmie Fidler described the young Neville as “enormously wealthy,” his family possessing “a whole island in the West Indies.” In actuality, Neville’s material existence as a young man was precarious, a fact he never disguised. While he landed roles on Broadway and toured as part of a ballroom dancing duo, Neville lived hand-to-mouth, working for a time as an elevator operator and a shipping clerk. In pursuit of spiritual awareness, the young man experimented with ascetic living, including swearing off meat, dairy, tobacco, and alcohol. At one point, his weight dropped from 176 to 135 pounds.

By 1930 Neville felt physically unwell and was no closer to peering into life’s mysteries. But he experienced a dramatic turnaround upon meeting his mysterious spiritual mentor named Abdullah. In Neville’s recollection, his first meeting with Abdullah had an air of kismet:

Writing about Neville in the 1940s, the occult philosopher Israel Regardie called Abdullah an “eccentric Ethiopian rabbi.” The description stuck, and Neville’s apprenticeship under an “African rabbi” became part of his mythos.

Following this fateful encounter, Neville said he and Abdullah together studied Hebrew, Scripture, number symbolism, and mystical religions for five years—planting the seeds of Neville’s philosophy of mental creativity. Neville recalled first grasping the potential of creative thought while he was living in a rented room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the winter of 1933. The young man was depressed: his theatrical career had stalled and he was broke. “After twelve years in America, I was a failure in my own eyes,” he said. “I was in the theater and made money one year and spent it the next month.” The twenty-eight-year-old ached to spend Christmas with his family in Barbados, but he couldn’t afford to travel.

“Live as though you are there,” Abdullah told him, “and that you shall be.” Wandering the streets of New York City, Neville adopted the
feeling state
that he was really and truly at home on his native island. “Abdullah taught me the importance of remaining faithful to an idea and not compromising,” he remembered. On a December morning before the last ship that year was to depart for Barbados, Neville received a letter from a long-out-of-touch brother: Tucked inside were fifty dollars and a passenger ticket.

By the mid-1950s, Neville’s life story exerted a powerful pull on a budding writer whose own memoirs of mystic discovery later made him a near-household name: Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda told his own tales of tutelage under a mysterious instructor, in his case a Native American sorcerer named Don Juan. Castaneda first discovered Neville through an early love interest in Los Angeles, Margaret Runyan, who was
among Neville’s most dedicated students. A cousin of American storyteller Damon Runyon, Margaret wooed the stocky Latin art student at a friend’s house, slipping Carlos a slender Neville volume called
The Search
, in which she had inscribed her name and phone number. The two became lovers and later husband and wife.

Runyan spoke frequently to Castaneda about her mystical teacher Neville, but he responded with little more than mild interest—with one exception. In her memoirs, Runyan recalled Castaneda growing fascinated when the conversation turned to Neville’s discipleship under an exotic teacher:

“There was,” she concluded, “a certain power in that position, an appealing kind of freedom in the lack of past and Carlos knew it.”

Both Neville and Castaneda were dealing with the same basic idea, and one that had a certain pedigree in America’s alternative spiritual culture: tutelage under hidden spiritual masters. It was a concept that the Russian mystic Madame H. P. Blavatsky ignited in the minds of Western seekers with her late-nineteenth-century accounts of her mentorship to unseen
Mahatmas
, or Great Souls. Blavatsky aroused a hope that invisible help was out there; that guidance could be sought from a difficult-to-place master of wisdom, someone who might arrive from an exotic land, or another plane of existence, and who could dispense illuminated
knowledge. Indeed, the Abdullah story as told by Neville might be dismissible as a tale borrowed and retouched from Blavatsky—except for another, better-known figure in the positive-thinking tradition who, toward the end of his life, made his own claims of mentorship under the turbaned Abdullah.

The Irish emigrant writer Joseph Murphy arrived in New York City in the early 1920s with a degree in chemistry and a passion to study metaphysics. Murphy is widely remembered for his 1963 megaseller
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
. The book remains one of the most engaging and popular works of mind-power philosophy. Shortly before his death in 1981, Murphy, in a little-known series of interviews published by a French press in Quebec, described his own encounter with the mysterious Abdullah. Interviewer Bernard Cantin recounted the tale in his 1987 book of dialogues with Murphy:

Was there a real esoteric teacher named Abdullah who taught Neville and Murphy? A plausible candidate exists. He is found in the figure of a 1920s- and ’30s-era black-nationalist mystic named Arnold Josiah Ford. Like Neville, Ford was born in Barbados, in 1877, the son of an itinerant preacher. Ford arrived in Harlem around 1910 and established
himself as a leading voice in the Ethiopianism movement, a precursor to Jamaican Rastafarianism. Both movements held that the East African nation of Ethiopia was home to a lost Israelite tribe that had preserved the teachings of a mystical African belief system. Ford considered himself an original Israelite, and a man of authentic Judaic descent. Like Abdullah, Ford was considered an “Ethiopian rabbi.” Surviving photographs show Ford as a dignified, somewhat severe-looking man with a set jaw and penetrating gaze, wearing a turban, just like Neville’s Abdullah. Ford himself cultivated an air of mystery, attracting “much apocryphal and often contradictory speculation,” noted Randall K. Burkett, a historian of black-nationalist movements.