The transmission
Joseph Murphy was born in 1898 in County Cork, Ireland, and raised in a devout Catholic household, initially training for the Jesuit priesthood before abandoning orthodox Catholicism after a crisis of faith.
Emigrating to the United States, he worked as a pharmacist in New York and there encountered New Thought, studying with figures in the Religious Science movement and reportedly absorbing the mental-science framework of Thomas Troward, whom he regarded as a decisive influence.
He was ordained in Divine Science and went on to lead the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles for several decades, building a large lecture and radio audience. Murphy’s intellectual project was the popularization and simplification of New Thought into a repeatable psychological technique centered on the subconscious mind.
Drawing on Troward’s dual-mind model and the autosuggestion methods associated with Émile Coué, he packaged manifestation as a matter of programming the subconscious through repeated, confident belief, especially in the relaxed state before sleep.
His 1963 best-seller The Power of Your Subconscious Mind became one of the most widely circulated metaphysical self-help titles of the twentieth century, translating the esoteric vocabulary of his predecessors into accessible, mass-market prose.
What they gave
Mass-market subconscious doctrine: Reduces New Thought to a single operational claim—that beliefs impressed on the subconscious are objectively realized—stated in plain, repeatable language.
- The pre-sleep technique: Systematizes the practice of impressing affirmations on the subconscious in the drowsy, relaxed state before sleep, when the conscious “censor” is quiet.
- Prayer as autosuggestion: Recasts prayer not as petition to an external deity but as a structured method of self-suggestion that conditions the subconscious.
- Healing through belief: Extends the subconscious mechanism explicitly to physical health, framing recovery as the body obeying a confidently held subconscious conviction.
In their words
Your subconscious mind does not argue with you. It accepts what your conscious mind decrees.
Remember, it is the world within, namely, your thoughts, feelings, and imagery, that makes your world without.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Thomas Troward (dual-mind mental science); the Divine Science and Religious Science movements (Ernest Holmes milieu); Émile Coué’s autosuggestion; his contemporary Neville Goddard.
- Taught / Influenced: a broad stream of twentieth- and twenty-first-century prosperity, self-help, and “subconscious reprogramming” authors who inherited his accessible formulation.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Their Practices 9
- The Argumentative MethodAffirmation
- Drowsy-State Subconscious ImpregnationAffirmation
- The Thank-You MethodAffirmation
- Decreeing Perfect HealthEmbodiment
- Imagine the Happy EndingImagination
- The Mental Movie MethodImagination
- Scientific PrayerStillness
- The Passing-Over TechniqueSurrender
- Hand It to the SubconsciousSurrender
Essential Works
- The Power of Your Subconscious Mind1963