What's Your Take on Science of the Mind?

Dave Schmelzer's picture
Submitted by Dave Schmelzer
on Thu, 02/24/2011 - 15:52

Thanks for your comments yesterday--Vince comes through in the clutch again, it seems, and helps us understand a bit more about how that last conversation went the way it did.  I was helped!  ...By the end.

Another note: I'm on the road right now and will be for good chunks of the next, count 'em, three weeks.  (I'm writing this, viz. Louis C.K., IN THE SKY!  It's my first use of inflight wifi.)  So I'd, as always, love to see any guest posts that come to mind for you.  You lead the conversation for a bit and see what happens!  My tip as you compose your guest post: don't just pose a question.  (As I'll do below.)  Give us a bit of your take on the question posed, so we'll have actual grist for conversation.

One thing I'm finding in awesome folks I'm meeting in Seek and other similar settings is that more and more people have been impacted by what, in the old days, one might have called "Science of Mind" thought.  So The Secret and The Law of Attraction.  That stuff.  Thoughts are things.  What we think we inevitably bring to ourselves, so we'd better keep our thoughts focused on positive things and on what we want, because that's what we'll draw to ourselves.  We need to rid ourselves of negative self-talk, because that's what we'll bring to ourselves.  Etc.  I meet lots of people--who in most cases are now trying to follow Jesus--for whom this line of thought is mother's milk.

Here's where the "on the one hand" talk starts.  On the one hand, this--if lived out in the context of following Jesus--has upsides and has points of connection with the New Testament.  "Rejoice always" comes to mind.  Commands to be grateful and generous are very easy to understand for my friends with this background.  And, as has just been debated endlessly, this blog tends to take a generally positive tone itself, and that's in the spirit of things here.

On the other hand, I'm trying to work this into a worldview which also involves, as best as we can pull off, unyielding obedience to Jesus as the bottom line, something I'm also pretty motivated towards.  And, while I'm on board with a positive, grateful, generous approach to life, it remains pretty important to me that we're looking to Jesus, not the impersonal universe, to choose to give us these good gifts.  (My friends in these various contexts would not dispute that.  They've all recently chosen to follow Jesus themselves.  But it can all feel like a bit of a package.)

So how about you?  What's your take on science of mind (or a Christianized science of mind)?  Is this no big deal which has some upsides?  Is this to be fled from as one would flee a marauding beast?  Are you having similar conversations, or is no one around you into this?  Help me out here, if you can and would.

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