1898–1981 — Divine Science minister, writer on the subconscious mind
Joseph Murphy wrote the best-selling book this whole lineage has produced. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind appeared in 1963 and has sold in the millions since, largely because Murphy took the New Thought argument and stripped it of metaphysical vocabulary until it read like practical psychology.
Murphy was born in a small village in west Cork and educated by the Jesuits, intending the priesthood. He left that path, emigrated to the United States in the 1920s and worked as a pharmacist in New York before New Thought found him.
He was ordained in Divine Science and from 1949 led the Divine Science church in Los Angeles, where he preached to large congregations, broadcast on radio, and wrote steadily for three decades. He also spent time in India studying Hindu scripture, which colours the later books. He died in California in 1981.
Murphy's whole system rests on a division he borrowed from the New Thought writers before him and from the popular psychology of his day: a conscious mind that reasons and chooses, and a subconscious mind that accepts without argument whatever the conscious mind hands it, then works to produce it.
The practical consequence is that belief, not effort, is the operative thing. What you hand the subconscious repeatedly and with feeling — especially in the drowsy state just before sleep — is what it sets about realising. Readers of Neville Goddard will recognise the drowsy state immediately; the two men were teaching in the same city at the same time from the same inheritance.
Murphy is a late synthesiser rather than an originator. Almost everything in his method appears earlier — in Troward's lectures on the subjective mind, in Haanel's weekly discipline, in Neville's revision and sleep work. What Murphy added was register: he wrote for a mass paperback audience in plain sentences, with case histories instead of metaphysics.
The honest caution is that the case histories are anecdotal and unsourced, and the book promises health outcomes that no reader should substitute for medical care. Read him for the method and the clarity, and read Troward and Haanel for where it came from.
Busy your mind with the concepts of harmony, health, peace, and good will, and wonders will happen in your life.
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, 1963
An Irish-born Divine Science minister, 1898 to 1981, who led the Los Angeles Divine Science church from 1949 and wrote The Power of Your Subconscious Mind in 1963. He was the most widely read popular writer the New Thought movement produced.
It argues that the subconscious accepts whatever the conscious mind repeatedly and emotionally gives it, and then works to produce a matching result. The practical instruction is to impress a chosen conviction — most easily in the drowsy state before sleep — rather than to strain for it.
No. His major works date from the 1950s and 1960s and remain in copyright, so we do not host them. The earlier writers he drew on — Troward, Haanel, Wattles, Behrend — are in the public domain and free in our Source Archive.
He died on 16 December 1981 in Laguna Hills, California, at the age of eighty-three.
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