Joseph Murphy (1898 - 1981) was New Thought minister ordained in Divine Science and Religious Science and author.
Murphy was born in Ireland, the son of a private boy's school headmaster and raised a Roman Catholic. He studied for the priesthood and joined the Jesuits.
In his twenties, an experience with healing prayer led him to leave the Jesuits and move to the United States, where he became a pharmacist in New York (having a degree in chemistry by that time). Here he attended the Church of the Healing Christ (part of the Church of Divine Science), where Emmet Fox had become minister in 1931.
In the mid 1940s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he met Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes, and was ordained into Religious Science by Holmes in 1946, thereafter teaching at the Institute of Religious Science.
A meeting with Divine Science Association president Irwin Gregg (The Divine Science Way - Irwin Gregg ) led to him being re-ordained into Divine Science, and he became the minister of the Los Angeles Divine Science Church in 1949. For 28 years his lectures were attended by 1300 to 1500 people every Sunday.
In the next decade, he married, earned a PhD in psychology from the University of Southern California and started writing.
Murphy was influenced by Ernest Holmes and Emmet Fox, both well known writers on New Thought principles, but his academic background was in Eastern religion. He spent many years in India, and was an Andhra Research Fellow at the University of India.
Dr Murphy spent a good part of his life studying Eastern religions, and was a scholar of the I-Ching, the Chinese book of divination whose origins are lost in history. Joseph Murphy, Ph.D., D.D., was a world-renowned authority on mysticism and mind dynamics.
He died in 1981.
His works:
• THIS IS IT: The Art of Metaphysical Demonstration (1948)
• The Miracles of Your Mind (1953)
• Peace Within Yourself (1956)
• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1962)
• The Miracle of Mind Dynamics (1964)
• Prayer Is the Answer (1965)
• The Amazing Laws of Cosmic Mind Power (1965)
• Your Infinite Power to Be Rich (1966)
• The Cosmic Power Within You (1968)
• Secrets of the I Ching (1970)
• Psychic Perception: The Magic of Extrasensory Perception (1971)
• The Cosmic Energizer: Miracle Power of the Universe (1974)
• These Truths Can Change Your Life" (1979)
• How to Use the Laws of Mind (1980)
• Songs of God (1982)
In reality we are all dreaming; when man fully awakens he knows that planets are thoughts, suns and moons are thoughts, and his own consciousness is the space which sustains them all. He begins to realize that the whole world is a thought. For example, he becomes aware of the fact that the body is not real, but it is a thought or idea held in consciousness. The body has no life apart from consciousness. He realizes that there is absolutely no reality to matter or the body of man; it is a group of ideas and opinions. Man gives life to ideas and opinions as long as he believes them. When he disbelieves the errors, these ideas have no life in them.
Man was never born and he will never die. There is no death. Death is an idea that exists in the minds of men. As long as man believes in death, he must witness and experience it. Man has no beginning and no end; he always was, just as God always was, is and shall be. “God and man are one.” “I am my Father are one.”
THIS IS IT: The Art of Metaphysical Demonstration
Church of Divine Science
1948
