“and the world once again will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell.” – Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas
this sentence is so beautiful.
Please start writing about your spiritual/mystic experiences to share with the class. Idk why everyone is so weird about sharing those details. When I was an atheist I sought this kind of stuff out looking for any proof of “other”. Our mystic ancestors did this all the time.
In 1925, a woman who had never studied psychology, philosophy, or neuroscience wrote a 100-page book that described exactly how your thoughts construct your reality, decades before science had a name for any of it.
Her name is Florence Scovel Shinn, and almost nobody talks about her. She was not an academic. She was not a therapist. She was a commercial illustrator living in New York who began teaching small private groups after watching the same pattern destroy the same kinds of people over and over.
They were intelligent, they were hardworking, and their lives were not working. The book she eventually wrote from those sessions has never gone out of print in a hundred years.
Here is the framework inside it that I have not been able to stop thinking about.
Shinn argued that every human being is playing a game they do not know the rules to. The game is not business or relationships or money. The game is the relationship between what you think and what you get. And the core rule is one most people spend their entire lives violating without realizing it.
Your subconscious mind does not understand the difference between what you want and what you fear. It responds to the dominant image you hold, not the dominant wish.
Which means the person who constantly imagines failure while claiming to want success is not being unlucky. They are being precise. The subconscious is executing exactly what it was given.
She called this the law of karma, but stripped of any mysticism the mechanism is almost mechanical. Every thought is a cause.
Every condition in your life is an effect. Change the cause and the effect must change, because it cannot do anything else.
The insight that floored me was her argument about words. She believed spoken words carry a charge that most people waste entirely by speaking carelessly.
The person who constantly says "I never have enough" is not describing reality. They are issuing a standing order.
What neuroscience now calls self-fulfilling belief loops and cognitive priming, Shinn described in plain language a century ago with no laboratory and no funding.
She just watched people carefully enough to see what the researchers eventually proved.
The game was always the same. Most people just never learned they were playing it.