Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Summer 2014 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Boyd, Tim. "President's Diary-" Quest  102. 3 (Summer  2014): pg. 114-115.

Anyone who has been reading this diary during the three years that I have served as president will start to recognize a pattern. Each year in December I have gone to Adyar for the convention, then at the end of January I have traveled to Krotona for the Partners in Theosophy program. So again this year, the end of January found me in sunny Ojai, California at the Krotona Institute of Theosophy. This year’s program was ably led by Nelda Samarel, a past TSA board member, student of Dora Kunz, and retired professor of nursing (among other things). The program was titled “The Art of Leadership: Vision and Practice” and brought together members from around the country.

Krotona is one of a handful of places around the world that are dedicated spiritual centers for the TS work. Although there is necessarily some administrative work that must go on, it is not an administrative center, but a place focused on the cultivation of the inner life as a service to the TS and the world. It has been in its present location on top of Krotona Hill since 1926. One of the results of such longevity is that anyone with even a slight sensitivity quickly becomes aware of an energy that is both peaceful and forceful. Many people from the surrounding community come there just to walk and soak in the feeling. Probably I have said this before in previous diaries, but every time I am there, the thought runs through my mind that I could live here. It happened again this trip.

In February our board of directors came to Olcott for our semiannual board meetings. They were greeted by the subzero temperatures that had become so normal to us Midwesterners during this past winter. Most of our board members came from warmer places—Florida, Portland, Louisiana; even our New Yorkers had had warmer weather.

During one meeting, to add insult to injury, our fire alarm went off, requiring everyone to leave the building immediately. It was not a planned fire drill that we had dreamed up to make the board suffer. It turns out that because of the extreme cold, some vent in the kitchen had frozen shut and the fumes had set off the alarm. What it meant was that we all gathered outside the building for the twenty minutes it took the fire department to arrive, diagnose the problem, and allow us to return. It was eight degrees below zero. In addition to the work done during the meetings, I am certain that our board members returned home with that cherished memory of the camaraderie experienced while huddling together in the subzero weather.

In March I was back in southern California, this time to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Phung Su Chan Ly (Service to the Truth) Vietnamese Lodge in Orange County. Back in October, when we had the Olcott Experience, among other members coming from around the country, Hiep To, president of the lodge, came. At that time he invited me to visit their lodge. We planned the date around my availability. Hiep To was a little concerned because the day that I would be free was not their normal meeting time. He was hesitant because he might “only be able to get thirty to forty people” at that time. I assured him that even if it was only him and me it would be fine. So on March 12, I flew into Los Angeles airport, rented a car, and drove the forty minutes to Garden Grove, where the lodge is located. When I turned onto the street for the meeting, I was on the phone (hands free). I told the person on the other end that I had to end the call so that I could look for the address. As soon as I said it, I said it was not necessary to hang up because “I think I know which house it is.” Across the front of the house there was a twelve-by-three-foot banner that read, “Welcome Mr. Tim Boyd, President of the Theosophical Society in America.” On one side was the emblem of the TS and on the other was a large photo of me. This must be the place.

Before the fall of South Vietnam’s government in 1975 the TS in Vietnam had been extremely active, with over thirteen hundred members, a headquarters building, and many books written and translated into Vietnamese. With the government’s fall, all of that ended. The headquarters was taken, the books were burned, and the members ended up dispersed around the world. Many came to the U.S. Today the TSA has two strong Vietnamese groups, one in Houston, the other in Garden Grove. As soon as our date had been confirmed, Hiep To set to work planning the event. Although he already had a large room in his home that was used for the group’s library and meeting place, he built an addition onto his house that could seat eighty people. He contacted TS and family members around the country. Because my Vietnamese is limited to the words “Phung Su Chan Ly,” and many of the members only speak a little English, he arranged for a translator to participate. In the end over a hundred people attended. Longtime friend and former TSA board member Robert Bonnell and his wife, Leatrice, were some of the handful of non-Vietnamese people attending. Van Ly and his wife, Lien, came with a sizable contingent from the Houston group. Other members came from Seattle. It was a wonderful affair that included homemade vegetarian food, presentation of medals and plaques, and ample time to socialize with some highly motivated and accomplished members. While there, I told the members that after the wonderful way that they had treated me, it was going to be difficult to speak at the American groups.

Two days later found me in Krotona again, this time for a retreat. Professor C. Shinde, the librarian at the Adyar international headquarters, had come to conduct it, and did a fine job. Members came from around the country. It was a welcome opportunity for me to attend a program that I did not have to present. 

Back home at Olcott the month closed with a flurry of visitors. Nicholas and Kirsten Van Gelder came down from Madison, Wisconsin for a couple of days. Nicholas is a fourth-generation Theosophist, Theosophical historian, and a nephew of Dora Kunz, past TSA president and world-renowned clairvoyant. Drawing on extensive family archives, Kirsten has written a biography of Dora. It will be released by Quest Books in 2015. While he was visiting, we got Nicholas to give a talk.

Overlapping the Van Gelders’ visit, Glenn Mullin was with us for a week. Glenn is a friend of almost thirty years, and one of the foremost Tibetologists in the world. He has studied with the Dalai Lama’s principal teachers, has written thirty books, and translated many important Buddhist texts into English. Every year for the past twenty-eight years he has visited with us and presented talks and workshops. It is always a lively time when he comes. While he was with us we got a chance to do some planning for another group trip to Tibet (the first one took place in 2007, followed by another in 2008). The idea is to take a small group (maximum twenty-five people) on a tour of the country. The tour would end in Dharamsala with an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. We are looking to do it in 2015. Stay tuned.

Overlapping Glenn, Nicholas, and Kirsten, Minor Lile and his wife, Leonie Van Gelder, came to visit. They are officially in my category of “favorite people.” I have known Leonie for thirty plus years. Minor and I served on the TSA board together for six years during John Algeo’s administration. One way or another we get together every year. Often it’s when I visit Indralaya, where they have been managing the camp for years. Since becoming president of the TSA I have prevailed upon them to come out to Olcott every year. I always feel a little bad about it, because in their hearts they are workers, and every time they visit I take shameless advantage of this character trait. Fortunately they seem to love it.

This diary ends with another part of the annual cycle, my visit to the Detroit Lodge. This year, like the past twenty, I made my pilgrimage to Detroit (actually the suburb of Royal Oaks) for our traditional Friday public lecture and Saturday workshop. Over the years we have become so comfortable with each other that our spring visit has become a much-anticipated bright spot for all of us. The comfort and sense of open exploration that I feel with the group always leaves me feeling enriched. Unanticipated insights seem to always bubble up. I am looking forward to next year.

Tim Boyd

Printed in the Summer 2014 issue of Quest magazine. 
. "Explaining Money to a Fairy

At the C G ferry wharf, the rocks of the hillside come down and almost overhang the gate that gives entrance to the wharf. At this gate a man is stationed on holidays to sell tickets for the ferry. Surrounding this spot is a countryside comparatively rich in fairy life, for much of the land is park and military reservation, and the whole place is therefore suited to the nonphysical creatures of the wood as well as the water sprites of the harbor. A curious adventure with one of these woodland devas will probably interest many people as showing the relationship between the human and collateral nonhuman kingdoms. It took its origin in the very early morning near the spot where the gateman is often seen collecting money.

We met there a curious elfin or sprite, a little fellow perhaps four feet high, slender and extremely active, rather roguish but friendly, and much less timid than most of his fellow fairies. Probably the frequent association with human beings had produced this result, for he seemed actually to be anxious to communicate with us. At any rate he had sufficient courage to attract our attention as we were passing by, shyly and yet gleefully opening his tiny hand, and exhibiting, as a child might, a coin which he seemed to want to know about. Whether this was connected with a real coin he had found and somehow got secreted as a prize possession or whether he made an image of the coin in superphysical matter is immaterial to the narrative. He at any rate clearly indicated that he treasured this thing, and the association in his mind seemed to be that he had seen human beings reluctantly surrendering these curious disks to the ferry gateman. Our fairy friend did not in the least understand why these little disks were prized. To him their special merit lay in the fact that they shone in the sun, at least the silver ones; and he had, as I say, noted that the human beings frequently surrendered them with some reluctance, and got in exchange a much less interesting bit of paper and then (from his point of view) appeared to go down the wharf into a box—the ferry boat—and so proceeded to the city. To him the whole proceeding seemed a kind of unintelligible game, and a bit dull, because human beings seemed never to vary it. He and his less patient friends might have played such a game for a little while now and then, but to go on constantly repeating it seemed to him ridiculous; and he wondered why these humans did not float over to the city through air, or run along the surface of the water by way of varying the game. He had got so far in the study of the matter as to realize that the coins were the key to the situation in some mysterious fashion; hence his appeal to two or three of us passing by and his childlike delight in exhibiting himself as the possessor of one of the treasured shiny disks.

The reader should realize that our fairy friend was neither human nor animal in consciousness, but was at a curious stage between the two. He had all the characteristics of a terrier—yes, reminding one in actions, though not in shape, of the intensely lively, joyous, impudent, and inquisitive terrier, so desirous of knowing the unknown and enjoying life so hugely. At the same time he possessed a not inconsiderable reasoning faculty and a charming and delicate emotional equipment. The problem before us was to interpret to his consciousness this senseless procedure of buying a ticket and getting on a boat. This in turn involved the explanation of money to him. How was this to be done?

A first attempt was made to convey in terms of feeling the fact that money could buy pleasant things. It was no use endeavoring to explain physical life—eating, drinking, and the like—but it seemed possible to impress the little fellow with the idea that these metal disks in some magic way unlocked enjoyment. Without trying to correct his impression that taking a boat was an obscure sort of a game, we tried to convey to him that money is related to joy. He got at this rather skillfully but curiously, for he possessed himself with the notion that the glitter of the coin was in a way the bottled-up essence of some of the happier things he understood—sunrise, moonlight, and starlight—and also reflections of these and other things in water. He seemed to think that in some way or other the coin was a fragment of these things. Like a terrier with an old boot, he seized upon this idea and got tremendous enjoyment out of it, skipping about and shimmering over it. It proved of no use trying to take this notion away from him.

The next stage was to convey the idea of purchasing the right to travel. For this purpose a boat seemed less likely to enlighten him than something else, and so we trooped up to a milk cart or some such conveyance that happened to be passing by and pointed out that this, like the boat, was a method of getting somewhere. Our fairy friend considered it extremely stupid as a method of conveyance, but he managed to take in the notion that there was somehow fun connected with traveling in this slow vehicle. At any rate there was fun for him in hopping onto it and hopping off again and skipping ahead much more rapidly than the horse, very much as a terrier might skittishly rush about.

When he had achieved this notion, we tried to explain to him that by giving the shiny round object to the man on the cart he would permit human beings to ride. But here we struck an immovable obstruction, for the lot of us were already riding, or making believe to ride, and had paid nothing! Furthermore, our fairy friend exuded the idea that any moment he desired to do anything so stupid as to ride on a cart, he could do it without letting the baker's boy know anything about it! Altogether he thought the whole thing rather idiotic (as perhaps it is), and was inclined to take us all for lunatics. It happened that he popped off the cart just as it turned in the road, and caught sight of the moving wheels, which shone a little in the early sunlight; and he instantly jumped to the not unnatural conclusion that the cart wheels were also some kind of money, for they were round, flat, and shiny, and were connected with the cart and the idea of travel which had been involved in our explanation. He expressed this idea of wonderment and instantly succeeded in reasoning sufficiently to suggest that if the tiny little metal coin was worth so much, the cartwheel in comparison by size ought to be able to purchase for him a whole sunrise! This funny bit of reasoning, though entirely logical, struck us all as being so humorous that we burst out in merriment, whereupon our fair friend, just as any dog might act under a sudden accession of joy, went shooting off into the air down the hillside, coruscating with delight over his adventure, rejoicing in the courage he had exhibited, the unusual nature of his experience, and his supposed triumph in understanding the nature of money.

There was another element in the experience. Just before the adventure of the milkman's cart, we tried to use the idea that sunlight and metallic shine were (to him) related, and we compared the latent force of money to the energy which the fairies sometimes pour out on plants. I remember our friend the sprite going up to a flower and flicking his fingers at it, to show us how he did this. The plant stretched its petals as it unfolded, very much as a cat stretches its legs after a long sleep, enjoying the new liberty. That idea was also part of his conception of the value of shining money.

But altogether, in retrospect, the business seems hopeless, for our fairy lacked completely any understanding of the physical limitations out of which money has grown. I have no doubt that if he remembered the episode for more than a moment, which is of course unlikely, he has conveyed to his fairy friends the most extraordinary conception of human ideas, and made us out to be, as compared with himself and associates, rather stupid and foolish, and interested in the most useless and dull things. And perhaps we are, who knows?

This article first appeared in The Adyar Bulletin, May 15, 1924. The identity of the author is unknown. The most likely candidate is the Theosophical writer and lecturer Fritz Kunz (1888–1972), whose wife, Dora, was known for her highly developed clairvoyant powers and her ability to communicate with nature spirits.

Printed in the Summer 2014 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Gillis, Anne Sermons , "The Money Magicians" Quest  102. 3 (Summer  2014): pg. 106-108.

And as for fortune, and as for fame . . .
They are illusions.
They are not the solutions
They promised to be.
- Andrew Lloyd Webber,
lyrics from Evita

I live a privileged life, and I recognize that the insights I've had are due to the luxury of living in relative safety. There are no drone strikes in my neighborhood. There's a large selection of food at the grocery store, and I have more than enough money to buy it. We don't have earthquakes, and even though there is flooding in my part of the country, I've never been personally affected, other than having to drive an alternative route.

This article is written for the average Westerner who has the time and ability to ponder the existential dramas of the mind. It is not a one-size-fits-all story. It is a story of something that has gone wrong in our world and the possibility of setting things right.

My childhood was average; dysfunction was the norm, and I was a normal neurotic. Money confusion was not only a family tradition, it was a world condition. Money was worshipped by some while being demonized by others. Money offered pleasure and pain. Motivational speakers promoted career and financial success while spiritual leaders taught that money would steal the soul. Everywhere I looked, the messages were the same. Get more: it will make you happy; money is the answer. Simplify, get rid of, give away; money is the problem.

I explored the alternative spiritual path for years and dragged my precarious money relationship along. I felt alone and different and thought I was the only one living the metaphysical life. I took a Silva Mind Control class in 1978. The training took place in a church. "What kind of place is this?" I asked the instructor. It was a metaphysical church. She gently nudged me to attend. I cried at the first service. I was no longer alone. There were more like me, and they were everywhere.

People in the church didn't chant the axiom money is the root of all evil. They did not see money as the Source; rather, they said there was a principle, a.k.a. God, that provides for our needs. Money was neither glorified nor disparaged. There was a clear message about money: my attitude could either attract or repel it. I could stop being a victim and become a creator. It was my spiritual heritage.

What liberation! I was not powerless. I worked on my relationship with money. My money disease started healing. I learned to manifest material things. I paid off my debts, harmonized relationships, attracted money, and created a wide array of spectacular experiences.

Unfortunately, I linked money and happiness together; my happiness was contingent on circumstances and acquisitions. Even when I did extraordinary things to make a difference to humanity, I always returned to suffering. By that point, I was asking myself that age-old question, "Is that all there is?" Even though I felt safer about money and could attract many things I desired, I was on edge. I found that money had been my target, but suffering was my game. The Law of Attraction could bring more money and possessions, but it did not cure my addiction to suffering.

There is no doubt that manifesting money makes life easier. It's a relief to pay bills, to meet our obligations, and to have funds for discretionary spending. At the same time, manifesting money cannot overcome the emotional experience of lack. One must heal the wounds of abundance abuse. We live in a world of plenty, but we have been taught to believe that there's never enough. We have projected the yearning for ourselves into a belief that money can assuage that yearning. Having enough money starts the healing process, but it's not enough to deliver us to the promised land of abundant living.

Most people don't realize that money is not the problem. They work harder to get more money, spend more than they need, and dream about how much better life will be when they have more. It's a disease. Endless planning, strategizing, and worry about money is the money disease. Unfortunately, this disease is contagious, and it has reached epidemic proportions. The latest form of the disease is money magic. The new money magicians don't defame money; they deify it.

I was happy when Rhonda Byrne's book The Secret came out in 2006. It is nifty for people to learn those old-time laws of attraction. We are creators, not victims. Yet something sticks in my craw over the newfound sorcery that has spread from the supermarket to the stock market. Spiritual people buy the idea that more or better stuff or more and better experiences bring happiness. Yes, I've been there, but I hoped at some point society could stop marketing "more money" as the root of all good. Who needs, deserves, or should have a 10,000-square-foot house or a shiny gas guzzler? Our trees are clear-cut, our rivers run purple, eighty-five percent of all big ocean fish are gone, we have climate refugees, and the money magicians are still teaching how to get more of everything. Our planet and our soul cannot afford this kind of "success." It's time for the moneychangers to get out of the church of the living. It's not morally wrong, it's just spiritually devastating.

It's easy to get sucked into the frenzy of Master Minding, group incantations, and positive thinking. People new to the ideas are on a metaphysical honeymoon, and the energy is enticing. But when you are a longtime student of the wisdom teachings and you are still just using them to find parking spaces after twenty years, there's a maturation problem. Unfortunately, many of the Law of Attraction activities focus on spiritual materialism. Even gratitude can be valued as a commodity rather than a state of being.

The light side of learning how to attract money is that one can pay one's bills and be free from financial worry. The shadow side of that knowledge keeps us focused on getting rather than receiving or giving. Receiving is an effortless art, and true giving feeds the soul, but getting more money, things, or spiritual experiences leads back to suffering. Getting and getting more, better, or different acquisitions is the ego's plan to scare the fear away, but it is only a temporary fix.

Metaphysics is based in mind. Spirituality is based in the heart. Trying to get more money gives us a metaphysical to-do list that can never be completed. The ego demands more action, more planning, and more control. It analyzes every situation and buys or rejects ideas based on keeping the body or certain mental constructs safe. It is exhausting to couch everything in positive terms, and trying to control life becomes a heavy burden. Positive words offer relief from the habit of being pessimistic or cynical, but when each thought is policed, our intention to be positive becomes a crushing command for perfection. Spontaneity suffers, and our need to be optimistic turns against us.

Positive thinking is only one component in achieving emotional freedom. Our lives require so much more than one rule to guide behavior. Positive thinking has a place, along with many other forms of authentic expression, but unless it partners with wisdom and authenticity, it becomes the boss, not the servant of our creation.

Our lives are easier when the mind no longer serves as our ruler, decider, and conflict generator. When we immerse ourselves in omnipresent goodness, the need to change, manipulate, dissect, control, or get more dissolves. We enter the kingdom and rest in the peace of being.

Manifest; it's a part of conscious living. Take care in your mind. If you are hungry, eat. If you are thirsty, drink. If you need to pay bills, attract money. The problem arises when the ego drives us to continually get more. With ego at command central, there is a dominating restlessness that keeps us striving toward meaningless acquisitions and goals. When manifesting is the central theme of one's life, it is neurotic. The spirit rises in being, not in doing, getting, or having.

If money magic worked, I would know. It does work for getting more money, but it doesn't work in the arena of spiritual satisfaction. Money magic, when used as an emotional fix, dulls the soul. It takes us from the present to a hope that money will provide the means to power, love, and importance, or that we can buy the spiritual experiences we need to actualize for ourselves.

If we must question or take action, our effort might best be spent finding out who we are rather than what we want. How about practicing the presence rather than milking it for personal gain?

Abundance is our natural state. We heal thoughts and feelings of lack when we live in the ever-present state of abundance. Trying to stamp out our fear about money fuels the fear. As these illusions appear on life's screen, we work hard to fill the void. As we fill one void, another appears on the horizon. When we stop and realize that the void is mental and that lack is the fiend of dualistic thought (the ever-present good/bad, bad/good), we bring forth the wholeness of present reality.

The mind, when not aware of its true nature, stalks reality with an agenda. It is in the decision to stop the mind so that it might surrender and rest in a deeper stillness that we become peaceful. This way of life money-proofs us, so that our moods don't rise and fall over a bank balance. One of the cornerstones of Theosophy is meditation, and meditation is a stepping-stone to self-knowledge and contentment. When we can be still and know the Source, we find a dynamic spiritual rest which refreshes, restores, and renews our lives, and the best thing about it is that this path leads away from suffering.

Anne Sermons Gillis is the president of the Houston Lodge, a political activist, life coach, the author of three books, and a minister. She resides in The Woodlands, Texas.

Printed in the Summer 2014 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch. "The Aquarian

The nation's most fateful evangelizer of the positive in the latter half of the twentieth century was neither a mystic nor a minister. Like many of the shapers of positive thinking, he had a modest formal education, possessed a self-devised philosophy of life, and showed a willingness to experiment with a wide range of religious ideas. Friends and adversaries alike experienced a sense of wonder that he became the twentieth century's most influential president, next to Franklin Roosevelt. This was Ronald Reagan.

Every historical writer who has approached the life of Reagan experiences the same sense of perplexity over who the man really was. Pulitzer-winning biographer Edmund Morris was so confounded by his subject that in his epic biography, Dutch, the writer made himself a character, finding it more useful to chart Reagan's influence on those around him than to part the curtain on the man himself. Many biographers were left to plumb Reagan's movies, his penchant for homegrown wisdom, and his bevy of moralistic stories for keys to the man's outer actions—such as his stare-down of the Soviet Union (followed by his role reversal as a peacemaker); his chimerical (though to the Soviets alarming) pursuit of "Star Wars"; and his bread-and-butter conservatism (clung to even though his family was rescued by the New Deal). In every respect, Reagan was a pairing of opposites.

The skeleton key to Reagan's career is not found in his films, his flights of idealism, or the pivoting of his internal moral compass, though each of these things is important. To be finally understood, Reagan must be seen as a product of the positive-thinking movement. Indeed, it was Reagan's song of the positiv—as articulated in thousands of speeches as a conservative activist, California governor, and U.S. president—that, more than any other factor, made the principle of brighter tomorrows and limitless possibilities into the idealized creed of America.

The code in which Reagan spoke is the key to the inner man—a fact sensed by President Gerald Ford, who called Reagan "one of the few political leaders I have ever met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations." (Reagan, it should be noted, had produced his own political speeches starting in the 1950s, and, as president, crafted the basic boilerplate and stories for many of his talks.)

In a 2010 reassessment of Reagan, Newsweek erroneously called him a born-again Christian. For all the admiration that born-again Christians felt for Reagan, and he for them, he cannot be described in that way. Ronald and Nancy Reagan's proclivity for astrology is already well known, but it is just one branch from a larger tree. One of the most overlooked facets of Reagan's career, and an aspect of his life with which few admirers have come to terms, is the strain of avant-garde thought and mysticism that touched him as a young man, and Reagan's enduring taste for the New Age spirituality of his Hollywood years.

Reagan didn't experience Hollywood as an interlude in his life. He spent nearly three decades of his adulthood there; it was, in all its facets, an integral part of him. He complained to biographer Lou Cannon about "this New York Times kind of business of referring to me as a B-picture actor." In a late-night discussion, after speaking with Cannon about his string of substantial film roles, Reagan concluded somewhat sheepishly, "I'm proud of having been an actor." He was similarly proud of being part of that community's spiritual and social customs.

One of his closest friends in California was astrologer Carroll Righter, who in 1969 became the first and only astrologer to appear on the cover of Time magazine. In Reagan's best-known movie, Kings Row from 1942, he costarred and became friendly with actress Eden Gray, who went on to write some of the twentieth century's most popular guides to Tarot cards. (Gray recalled Reagan gamely reading aloud from his horoscope and those of other actors before shoots.) And when Reagan began his political rise in the 1950s, his early speeches, and those he later delivered as president, featured themes and phrases that can be traced to the writings of a Hollywood-based occult philosopher, Manly P. Hall.

None of this was a source of embarrassment to Reagan. Throughout his life he was at ease discussing premonitory dreams, astrology, number symbolism, out-of-body experiences, and his belief in UFOs, including personal sightings in the 1950s and '70s.

During his 1980 presidential campaign, he sat for a three-hour interview with journalist Angela Fox Dunn, the daughter of Malvina Fox Dunn, Reagan's drama coach at Warner Brothers in the 1930s. Reagan never opened up so much as when he was around people with ties to his movie days. With surprising frankness, the Republican nominee expounded on topics ranging from the astrological signs of past presidents, to his mother's religious beliefs, to the prophetic qualities of psychic Jeane Dixon, another old Hollywood friend. While Dixon was "always gung ho for me to be president," Reagan related, in the "foretelling part of her mind" the prophetess didn't see him in the Oval Office. (A prediction that, more or less, squared with Dixon's record.) He also boasted to Dunn of being an Aquarius, the most mystical of all the zodiac signs. "I believe you'll find that 80 percent of the people in New York's Hall of Fame are Aquarians," he said. (It is not clear what Hall of Fame Reagan was referring to—it may have been the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at New York's Bronx Community College. If so, he would have been disappointed to learn that Aquarians are not overrepresented among its inventors, statesmen, and scientists.)

At the back of his personality, Reagan was the man he proudly described to Dunn: an Aquarian. He was influenced by various mystical and mind-power cultures, whose mark he left permanently stamped on America.

"Child of Destiny"

Long before his life in Hollywood, Reagan was at home with various blends of American mysticism. A combination of the conventional and otherworldly characterized his childhood.

"The best part," he recalled, "was that I was allowed to dream. Many the day I spent deep in a huge rocker in the mystic atmosphere of Aunt Emma's living room with its horsehair-stuffed gargoyles of furniture, its shawls and antimacassars, globes of glass over birds and flowers, books and strange odors."

His mother, Nelle, was, by turns, religiously conservative, but she also infused her sons with a freethinking streak, telling Ron and his brother to address their parents by first names. In a progressive viewpoint that wouldn't gain currency until many years later, Nelle told the boys that their father's alcoholism was really a disease. Nelle was committed to seeing her sons well rounded, and she took them to plays, recitals, and lectures. One biographer called her a "determined improver." Another noted that she "encouraged positive thinking." Nelle wrote a poem for her Disciples of Christ church newsletter, "On the Sunnyside":

Think lovely thoughts, ennobling the soul
Keeping them from strife . . . 
The sunnyside's the only side
Full of graces divine
Sometimes too bright for us to scan
I'd seek to make them mine.

Nelle doted on Ron as her favorite. "Within the Reagan household," observed biographer Lou Cannon, "and perhaps in Ronald Reagan's heart, there was an early sense that he was a child of destiny." By the time Reagan arrived at Eureka College in central Illinois in 1928, he was comfortable with this perspective. He fondly recalled a French professor with a reputation as a psychic who forecast his greatness. "This is a class of destiny," she announced at the start of the term, and he felt she was speaking directly to him.

Reagan's break into radio came in 1932, when he was hired by the Palmer family, who were proprietors of an Iowa radio station. The Palmers were also a clan of spiritualists, mystics, high eccentrics, and visionaries. The family patriarch, D.D. Palmer, was the founder of chiropractic healing in the late nineteenth century. A mesmerist and spiritualist, D.D. Palmer said that the chiropractic method was transmitted to him from "an intelligence in the spiritual world" during an Iowa spiritualist convention.

D.D.'s son and successor, "Colonel" B.J. Palmer—the man who hired young Reagan as a broadcaster—developed his own variant of mind-power philosophy. Colorful and fearless, B.J. expanded the college of chiropractic and mental healing which his father had founded in Davenport, Iowa. This was where Reagan walked the halls and grounds as an employee at the radio station called WOC, for "World of Chiropractic." Its programming promoted the school but also featured standard broadcasts of sports, news, and music.

Part showman, B.J. Palmer created a strange otherworld on the campus, which had an adjacent mansion and gardens nicknamed "A Little Bit o' Heaven." B.J. festooned the Iowa property with curios from his world travels: statues of the Hindu gods Kali and Ganesha, massive Buddha heads and shrines, Chinese Foo Dogs, bronze and marble renderings of Venus, Japanese temple gates, and a truly eerie, enormous stone mosaic of a coiled, fanged serpent. ("The serpent was cast out of heaven," B.J. explained in a visitors' guide.)

Reagan spent his working hours at the college's rooftop station and joined the chiropractic students for meals in the basement cafeteria. Making his way from the roof to the basement, Reagan recalled seeing the hallways of the Palmer School of Chiropractic emblazoned with bits of B.J.'s philosophy, such as: "THINK! SPEAK! ACT, POSITIVE! I AM! I WILL! I CAN! I MUST!" Like many mental mystics, B.J. believed that man possessed an inner divine sense, a branch of the "Universal Intelligence," which he termed Innate. "INNATE," Palmer wrote, "is the ONE eternal, internal, stable, and permanent factor that is a fixed and reliable entity . . . the same capable INNER VOICE that is capable of getting any sick organ well."

To Reagan, B.J. Palmer's world was neither shocking nor surprising. It primed him for the spiritual culture he soon discovered in Hollywood. During his film career, Reagan encountered a mystical influence that left its mark on his political vision.

The President and the Occultist

Reagan often spoke of America's divine purpose and of a mysterious plan behind the nation's founding. "You can call it mysticism if you want to," he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, "but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage." These were remarks to which Reagan often returned. He repeated them almost verbatim as president before a television audience of millions for the Statue of Liberty centenary on July 4, 1986.

When touching on such themes, Reagan echoed the work, and sometimes the phrasing, of occult scholar Manly P. Hall.

From the dawn of Hall's career in the early 1920s until his death in 1990, the Los Angeles teacher wrote about America's "secret destiny." The United States, in Hall's view, was a society that had been planned and founded by secret esoteric orders to spread enlightenment and liberty to the world.

In 1928, Hall attained underground fame when, at the remarkably young age of twenty-seven, he published The Secret Teachings of All Ages, a massive guide to the mystical and esoteric philosophies of antiquity. Exploring subjects from Native American mythology to Pythagorean mathematics to the geometry of ancient Egypt, this encyclopedia of arcana remains the unparalleled guidebook to ancient symbols and esoteric thought. The Secret Teachings won the admiration of figures ranging from General John Pershing to Elvis Presley. Novelist Dan Brown cites it as a key source.

After publishing his "Great Book," Hall spent the rest of his life lecturing and writing within the walls of his Egypt art deco campus, the Philosophical Research Society, in L.A.'s Griffith Park neighborhood. Hall called the place a "mystery school" in the mold of Pythagoras's ancient academy.

It was there in 1944 that the occult thinker produced a short work, one little known beyond his immediate circle. This book, The Secret Destiny of America, evidently caught the eye of Reagan, then a middling movie actor gravitating toward politics.

Hall's concise volume described how America was the product of a "Great Plan" for religious liberty and self-governance, launched by a hidden order of ancient philosophers and secret societies. In one chapter, Hall described a rousing speech delivered by a mysterious "unknown speaker" before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The "strange man," wrote Hall, invisibly entered and exited the locked doors of the statehouse in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, delivering an oration that bolstered the wavering spirits of the delegates. "God has given America to be free!" commanded the mysterious speaker, urging the men to overcome their fears of being hanged or beheaded, and to seal destiny by signing the great document. Newly emboldened, the delegates rushed forward to add their names. They looked to thank the stranger only to discover that he had vanished from the locked room. Was this, Hall wondered, "one of the agents of the secret Order, guarding and directing the destiny of America?"

At a 1957 commencement address at his alma mater Eureka College, Reagan, then a corporate spokesman for General Electric, sought to inspire students with this leaf from occult history. "This is a land of destiny," Reagan said, "and our forefathers found their way here by some Divine system of selective service gathered here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his climb from the swamps." Reagan then retold (without naming a source) the tale of Hall's unknown speaker. "When they turned to thank the speaker for his timely words," Reagan concluded, "he couldn't be found and to this day no one knows who he was or how he entered or left the guarded room." Reagan revived the story in 1981, when Parade magazine asked the president for a personal essay on what July 4 meant to him. Presidential aide Michael Deaver delivered the piece with a note saying, "This Fourth of July message is the president's own words and written initially in the president's hand" on a yellow pad at Camp David. Reagan retold the legend of the unknown speaker—this time using language very close to Hall's own: "When they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he was not to be found, nor could any be found who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors."

Where did Hall uncover the tale that inspired a president? The episode originated as "The Speech of the Unknown" in a collection of folkloric stories about America's founding, published in 1847 under the title Washington and His Generals, or Legends of the Revolution by American social reformer and muckraker George Lippard. Lippard, a friend of Edgar Allan Poe, had a strong taste for the gothic—he cloaked his mystery man in a "dark robe." He also tacitly acknowledged inventing the story: "The name of the Orator . . . is not definitely known. In this speech, it is my wish to compress some portion of the fiery eloquence of the time."

For his part, Hall seemed to know almost nothing about the story's point of origin. He had been given a copy of "The Speech of the Unknown" by a since-deceased secretary of the Theosophical Society, but with no bibliographical information other than its being from a "rare old volume of early American political speeches." The speech appeared in 1938 in the Society's journal, The Theosophist, with the sole note that it was "published in a rare volume of addresses, and known probably to only one in a million, even of American citizens."

There are indications that Reagan and Hall may have personally met to discuss the story. In an element unique to Hall's version, the mystic-writer (dubiously) attributed the tale of the unknown speaker to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. When Reagan addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on January 25, 1974, he again told the story, but this time cited an attribution—of sorts. Reagan said the tale was told to him "some years ago" by "a writer, who happened to be an avid student of history . . . I was told by this man that the story could be found in the writings of Jefferson. I confess, I never researched or made an effort to verify it."

Whether the president and the occultist ever met, it is Hall's language that unmistakably marks the Reagan telling. Biographer Edmund Morris noted Reagan's fondness for apocryphal tales and his "Dalíesque ability to bend reality to his own purposes." Yet he added that the president's stories "should be taken seriously because they represent core philosophy." This influential (and sometimes inscrutable) president of the late twentieth century found an illustration of his core belief in America's purpose within the pages of an occult work little known beyond its genre.

"Anything Is Possible"

During the 1980 president campaign, many Americans were electrified by Reagan's depiction of America as a divinely ordained nation where anything could be willed into existence.

In announcing his candidacy in 1979, Reagan declared: "To me our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible . . . If there is one thing we are sure of it is . . . that nothing is impossible, and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact." It was a vastly different kind of political oratory than the restrained, moralistic tones of his opponent, Jimmy Carter.

Through his reiteration of this theme of America's destiny, and his powers as a communicator, Reagan shaped how Americans wanted to see themselves: as a portentous people possessed of the indomitable spirit to scale any height. This American self-perception could bitterly clash with reality in the face of a declining industrial base and falling middle-class wages. Nonetheless, the image that Reagan gave Americans of themselves—as a people always ushering in new dawns—formed the political template to which every president who followed him had to publicly adhere.*

After Reagan, virtually every major campaign address included paeans to better tomorrows, from Bill Clinton's invocation of "a place called Hope" (and his use of Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow") to Barack Obama's "Yes, we can." In his 2011 State of the Union address, Obama echoed one of Reagan's signature lines when he declared: "This is a country where anything is possible." The one recent president who complained that he couldn't master "the vision thing," George H.W. Bush, was not returned to office.

Political Psychology

In Reagan's private life, positive thinking didn't always allow for deep relationships. Reagan's campaign aides and White House staffers were sometimes seriously hurt by the manner in which he would forget all about people and relationships that no longer suited a new phase or role in which he found himself. This was his habit in all areas of lif—and it layered him with a kind of emotional buffer. While recovering from an operation for colon cancer in 1985, Reagan pointed out to Time magazine that he did not "have cancer"—rather he was a man who "had cancer," past tense. "But it's gone," he explained, "along with the surrounding tissue . . . So I am someone who does not have cancer."

That is how Reagan dealt with almost every challenge: He found the terms to conceptualize himself in the strongest possible manner based on the demands of the moment. That talent could make him seem shallow and insincere, yet it allowed him to adapt in unexpected ways. Just as the young New Dealer of the 1930s transformed into the law-and-order conservative of the 1960s, so did the man who campaigned as a flinty Cold Warrior transform into a global peacemaker during his second term.

In the latter years of his presidency, Reagan was one of the few world figures who not only believed in the authenticity of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union (as most conservatives at the time did not) but who possessed a vision of what the post-Soviet era would look like (as most liberals then did not). In a mixture of dream making and idealism, Reagan firmly believed that his "Star Wars" initiative would rid the world of the nuclear threat and open the borders of all nations to peaceful commerce and exchange.

For those who looked carefully, his global outlook had been foreshadowed during his Hollywood career. Soon after World War II, Reagan joined a group called the United World Federalists. The organization advocated a worldwide government organized along a United Nations–style system of rulemaking and dispute resolution. It was precisely the kind of "big picture" idea that excited Hollywood politicos of the mid–twentieth century (and that evokes deep suspicion in Tea Party activists of the twenty-first century). Globalist peacemaking touched something in Reagan's earliest ideals. "I went through a period in college," he later recalled, "in the aftermath of World War I, where I became a pacifist and thought the whole thing [i.e., the war] was a frame-up."

Reagan's penchant for science fiction has been widely noted. The United World Federalists could seem like the kind of universal government that sometimes showed up in sci-fi entertainment, like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, or the Galactic Republic (replaced by the evil Galactic Empire) in the Star Wars movies. Perhaps not coincidentally, Reagan also spoke openly of his belief in UFOs for much of his life. According to family friend Lucille Ball, Reagan insisted in the 1950s that he and Nancy had a close brush with a flying saucer while they were driving down the coastal highway one night. The couple, Ball recalled, arrived almost an hour late for a Los Angeles dinner party at the home of actor William Holden. They came in "all out of breath and so excited" and proceeded to tell shocked friends about witnessing a UFO. As president, Reagan more than once assured Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that an interstellar threat would unite U.S. and Soviet societies. Gorbachev honestly seemed perplexed as to whether Reagan was kidding, but ultimately decided he was not.

Reagan's Irish ancestors might have called that side of him "barmy." But this aspect of Reagan should not be dismissed as shallowness or mental weakness. Reagan thought in epic, picturesque terms—about the Soviet Union as "evil," about himself as a man of destiny," about the mission of America as "mystical." Reagan's mother, Nelle, left him with a sense of enchantment about the power of big ideas. One of the ironies of twenty-first-century politics is how the nationalistic, anti-immigration activists of the Tea Party often extol Reagan as their hero. However passionately Reagan favored tax cutting or getting rid of "government waste," his outlook was fundamentally globalist and even a touch utopian.

Reagan also inherited his mother's passion for self-improvement. As a boy, he learned to read before starting school. He mastered scripts and later policy papers with rapidity. Critics thought Reagan was not a details man, but that wasn't exactly correct. Reagan could voraciously digest information that tapped his enthusiasm; he ran on enthusiasm, and without it he was adrift. In adulthood he maintained reading habits that extended to seven daily newspapers. Unlike his avowed admirer Sarah Palin, Reagan would never be caught dead on camera unable to cite a daily paper he read or to identify a favorite Founding Father. Part of Reagan's ire toward student activists while he was governor of California stemmed from how the small-town college boy in him felt an Ozlike wonder toward the University of California and the motto on its coat of arms: "Let There Be Light." He resented those who he believed desecrated its intellectual opportunities.

It must also be said, however, that Reagan's style was to read selectively and to question narrowly. As soon as he homed in on a position—such as his belief in massive welfare fraud—he would constantly happen upon fact after fact, usually in the form of stories or an offbeat statistic, to buttress his conviction. Campaign aides told of sometimes "misplacing" the chief's favorite magazines in order to avoid his glomming on to a factoid—such as trees causing air pollution—that would later prove an embarrassment. If there is an adjunct to Reagan's credo "Nothing is impossible," it might be: "If I believe it, that makes it so." That outlook may have helped a poor Depression-era boy adopt a powerful (and needed) faith in self. But it could reflect a dangerous self-indulgence in the realm of policy making.

Reagan, like Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and other positive thinkers, had so thoroughly, and subtly, convinced the public over the course of decades that what you think is what matters most that by 2010 few objected or even noticed when New York's Democratic senator Charles Schumer defended a scaled-down jobs creation bill by claiming that it was the very act of passage, rather than the policy particulars themselves, that made the difference: "The longer I am around, I think it's the market's psychology that matters dramatically." In substance, it was not much different from mental healer Phineas Quimby concluding a century and a half earlier: "Man's happiness is in his belief."

Mitch Horowitz, a TS member, is editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin books. An excerpt from his previous book, Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, appeared in Quest, Fall 2009. This excerpt has been reprinted from his latest book: One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. Copyright ©2014 by Mitch Horowitz. Published by Crown, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc.