A Teacher
Brown Landone
Vivid Thinking: intense multi-sense mental rehearsal, then tone, then action
The transmission
Brown Landone (1847-1943) was an American New Thought teacher and author who, by the early twentieth century, had one of the largest personal followings of any teacher in the movement.
He wrote on success, prosperity, and the disciplined use of the mind, and is remembered chiefly for his teaching on “vivid thinking” - the idea that vividness is a trainable quality of mind that distinguishes the effective from the ineffective.
His best-known work is The Success Process (1927), whose chapters lay out “The Only Five Factors Which Guarantee Success,” “The Process of ‘Vivid Thinking’ Which Makes Success Certain,” and “The ‘Doing Process’ Which Always Succeeds.” Landone held that “Vividness is a quality of mind which makes geniuses, and it can be developed” through deliberate use of all the senses, and he ranked the means of expression: of “words, tones, and actions,” words are weakest and action strongest.
He later expanded the method in Basic Vivid Thinking, a multi-lesson course.
What they gave
Vivid Thinking: Argued vividness of mental imagery is a developable skill and the key lever of success.
- Five-factor success model: Reduced success to a small, teachable set of factors rather than vague positive thinking.
- Words < tones < actions: Ranked expression so that mental rehearsal culminates in tone and decisive action, not mere words.
- Multi-sense rehearsal: Taught engaging all the special senses to make the imagined outcome intensely real.
In their words
Your desires always come true. Your wishes seldom do; they die by consuming themselves in forever wishing wishes. A desire with a body or an ideal with a heart always becomes a reality!
Ideals always come true. Change your ideas into ideals and they will become realities.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: the New Thought success current; the era’s faculty-psychology interest in mental imagery and the senses. Influenced: later success-visualization and mental-rehearsal self-help.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- How to Turn Your Desires and Ideals Into Realities1922
- Prophecies of Melchi-Zedek in the Great Pyramid and the Seven Temples1940