Book: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind Author: Joseph Murphy In one line: A 1963 New Thought self-help classic teaching that the subconscious accepts whatever you repeatedly and emotionally believe - so change the belief and, the book claims, you change the life.
1 · Two minds, one master
The conscious mind reasons, judges, and chooses; the subconscious simply accepts. Whatever the conscious mind hands it repeatedly and with feeling, it takes as a command and works to bring about. On this view you are not fighting circumstances so much as instructing an inner servant.
2 · You get what you believe
The subconscious does not argue - it is fertile soil that grows whatever seed you plant. Your dominant belief, not your stray wish or spoken hope, is the seed it acts on. Plant fear and it grows fear; plant faith and, the book says, it grows the wished-for result.
3 · Impress it before sleep
The drowsy, relaxed state at bedtime is when the subconscious is said to be most receptive - the conscious guard is down. Hand it a calm, positive picture as you drift off, the book teaches, and let it work overnight while you rest.
Murphy’s central claim is that the mind works on two levels. The conscious mind reasons, weighs, and selects; the subconscious mind accepts uncritically whatever the conscious mind hands it repeatedly and with emotion - and then quietly works, day and night, to make it real in health, wealth, and relationships. On this view the subconscious cannot tell a vividly imagined scene from a lived one, so belief and mental imagery become the true levers of a life. Change what you habitually believe and picture, the book teaches, and outer circumstances follow like a print follows its negative.
It is worth saying plainly at the outset: this is an inspirational classic, not science. Murphy writes in the New Thought tradition and repeatedly calls his method a “law” and a “science of mind,” but the healing stories he offers are anecdotes, not controlled evidence, and the mechanism he describes is not how modern psychology or medicine understands belief and the body. Read it, then, as a technique of mindset and autosuggestion and a period document of a very influential idea - not as a proven account of how the world works.
Held at that angle, the book still earns its place. Its practical core - watch your dominant thoughts, refuse to rehearse fear, and deliberately feed your mind calm, confident, present-tense pictures - overlaps with ideas people find genuinely useful. The notes below present its claims faithfully as the book’s own teaching, without endorsing them as fact.
Two levels of mind. The conscious mind is the reasoning gatekeeper - it observes, judges, and decides what to accept. The subconscious is the vast storehouse and worker beneath it. The whole method rests on this split: you use the conscious mind to choose, and the subconscious to carry out.
The subconscious accepts, it does not weigh. It has no sense of humour and no argument - whatever the conscious mind impresses on it as true, it treats as a command, whether that belief is helpful or ruinous. All the real censorship, Murphy says, happens up in the conscious mind before the idea is handed down.
Feeling is what impresses. A thought held with faith and emotion is what actually sinks in; flat, mechanical repetition without feeling tends not to take. The subconscious responds to the conviction behind the words, not the words alone.
The techniques follow from this. If belief plus feeling is the lever, then the practical tools are simply ways to feed the subconscious a chosen belief cleanly: affirmation, visualisation / mental imagery, autosuggestion, and above all using the relaxed, drowsy pre-sleep state, when resistance is lowest and a picture slips in most easily.
The subconscious accepts, it doesn't reason
It takes your dominant conviction as a directive - good or bad, wanted or feared - and sets about manifesting it. Why it matters: it reframes self-talk as literal instruction, so careless negative belief is treated as costly, not harmless.
Feeling is the switch
A thought held with faith and emotion is what gets impressed; idle repetition without feeling does not take root. Why it matters: it explains why half-hearted affirmations fizzle and puts the emphasis on genuine conviction.
Imagination outranks willpower
Straining by force of will backfires - the effort itself affirms the lack. Calmly picturing the wished-for end as already true is, Murphy claims, what the subconscious responds to. Why it matters: it points to relaxed imagery over gritted-teeth effort.
Imagined and real feel the same to it
The subconscious cannot tell a vividly rehearsed scene from a lived one. Why it matters: it makes the images you dwell on - anxious replays included - the raw material of what you become, so it pays to choose them.
Reprogram the negatives
Fear, worry, and self-limiting thoughts are commands too. Replace them deliberately with positive, faith-filled ones before they harden into habit. Why it matters: it turns mental hygiene into an active daily practice, not a hope.
Prayer as scientific technique
Murphy reframes “prayer” as a systematic method of mind - affirmation and belief directed at the subconscious - rather than a purely religious appeal. Why it matters: it is the book’s signature move, recasting a spiritual act as a repeatable procedure.
Health, wealth, relationships
The same law is applied across the board - bodily healing, money, harmony with others - through the same steps. Why it matters: it shows the book treats one mechanism as universal, which is both its appeal and its overreach.
The book opens by laying out the two-mind model and its core claim, then devotes most of its length to applying that single idea across the domains people care about. Early chapters establish how the subconscious works and how belief impresses it; a pivotal chapter recasts prayer as the scientific use of the mind. From there Murphy moves domain by domain - healing and health, wealth and success at work, marriage and relationships, sleep, fear, forgiveness, and ageing - each built on the same template: a principle, a batch of healing and success anecdotes, and a short technique or affirmation to try. It is less a linear argument than the same key turned in many locks, which makes it easy to dip into and repetitive by design.
Name one belief to change. Pick a single fear or “I can’t,” and write its positive opposite as a short, present-tense statement - specific, believable, and worded as already true.
Affirm with feeling. Repeat it calmly and often, feeling it as accomplished. The emotion, Murphy stresses, matters far more than the exact wording or the number of repetitions.
Visualise the end. Picture the resolved scene in sensory detail - as if it has already happened - rather than the striving to reach it. Dwell on the finished result, not the gap.
Use the drowsy pre-sleep state. As you fall asleep, quietly rehearse the affirmation or image and let the relaxed, receptive mind absorb it without conscious argument.
Reframe, don’t wrestle. When worry surfaces in the day, deliberately replace the thought with its wanted opposite instead of arguing with the fear - Murphy calls resistance a trap that only feeds it.
Refuse to rehearse the negative. Stop replaying feared outcomes and mentally rehearsing failure; treat those images as commands you would not knowingly give.
Persist without strain. Return to the practice steadily and expect it to work, dropping the anxious “is it working yet?” checking, which itself affirms doubt.
The book belongs to the New Thought movement - a late-1800s American current (Phineas Quimby, Ernest Holmes, and others) holding that mind shapes matter and that right belief brings health and abundance. Its claims are not supported by peer-reviewed science: the healing stories are uncontrolled anecdotes, and the “subconscious as literal command-taker” is a metaphor, not a mechanism from clinical psychology. Read critically, some of its practices rhyme loosely with things that are studied - the relaxing effect of calm bedtime routines, the way expectation can colour experience, the value of not endlessly rehearsing anxiety - but the book overstates all of it into a universal law. Its lasting influence is real: it sold in the millions and helped seed the modern self-help and “law of attraction” genre. Take the mindset and autosuggestion as tools worth trying; take the “science” framing with caution, and never as a substitute for medical care.
The book’s core principle: the subconscious accepts as true whatever the conscious mind repeatedly and emotionally impresses on it - and then works to bring it about.
Its refrain, paraphrased: change your thoughts, and you change your destiny.
The subconscious cannot tell the vividly imagined from the real - so guard the pictures you feed it.
Murphy’s reframing: prayer is the scientific, disciplined use of the subconscious mind.
On the pre-sleep state, paraphrased: as you drift off, hand your subconscious a quiet, positive suggestion and let it do the work.
As you think and feel, so you become - belief held with faith tends, the book claims, to become experience.