Читать книгу The Secret Source - Maja D'Aoust - Страница 18

Though the laws of the universe can never be broken, they can be made to work under special conditions which will produce results that could not be produced under the conditions spontaneously provided by nature.

—Thomas Troward

Thomas Troward (1847–1916) is said to be the second father of the New Thought movement, after Quimby. He served as a Divisional Judge in Punjab for twenty-five years. A devout churchman and a student of all religions, he formulated a philosophy that explained a creative mental process. Troward, like most New Thought adherents, believed that all people mentally create the world in which they live. He called his philosophy “Mental Science,” and lectured on it all over the world. Troward spoke several languages, studied biblical scripture written in Hebrew, read the Koran, and researched the writings of Raja Yoga.

Troward was the author of many highly influential books in the New Thought world, including The Edinburgh Lectures (1904) and The Dore Lectures (1909). Troward’s writings influenced many later New Thought authors, such as Emmet Fox, Ernest Holmes, Paul Foster Case, Joseph Murphy and Bob Proctor (who is prominently featured in Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret).

Troward considered himself a Rosicrucian, and focused much of his teachings and inspiration on this source. He ends his final published writing with the following quote:

We are as yet only at the commencement of the path which leads to the realization of this unity in the full development of all its powers, but others have trodden the way before us, from whose experiences we may learn; and not least among these was the illustrious founder of the Most Christian Fraternity of the Rosicrucians. This master-mind, setting out in his youth with the intention of going to Jerusalem, changed the order of his journey and first sojourned for three years in the symbolical city of Damcar, in the mystical country of Arabia, then for about a year in the mystical country of Egypt, and then for two years in the mystical country of Fez. Then, having during these six years learned all that was to be acquired in those countries, he returned to his native land of Germany, where, on the basis of the knowledge he had thus gained, he founded the Fraternity R.C., for whose instruction he wrote the mystical books M. and T. Then, when he realized that his work in its present stage was accomplished, he of his own free will laid aside the physical body, not, it is recorded, by decay, or disease, or ordinary death, but by the express direction of the Spirit of Life, summing up all his knowledge in the words, “Jesus mihi omnia.”³¹

Troward voraciously studied Rosicrucian teachings, According to Claude Brodeur:

Troward has based his philosophy on the principle of a “Universal Subconscious Mind,” and that man’s subconscious is no more nor less than universal and infinite God-consciousness . . . . This kind of thinking puts a Rosicrucian stamp on the new religious thinking called New Thought.³²