An Irish boy left the priesthood, crossed an ocean, and built a new faith out of the human mind.



This is the story of Joseph Murphy, the Irish-born minister whose single book on the subconscious mind has sold in the millions and has never left print. We begin with the boy who trained for the priesthood and lost his faith, the chemist who crossed an ocean, and the quiet preacher who found in a New York congregation a new American religion of the mind. From there we trace the tradition he inherited, the British judge whose ideas he carried, and the simple, startling model of two minds at the center of his teaching.


We follow his redefinition of prayer, his practice at the threshold of sleep, his promises of health and wealth, and the impersonal God he made out of the God of his childhood. And we ask the hard questions in turn, whether the teaching is kind, whether it is true, and why, decades after his death, the world still cannot stop reading him.



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00:00:00 The Boy Who Left the Priesthood

00:10:42 The American Religion of the Mind

00:18:11 The Judge Who Weighed the Soul

00:24:34 The Gardener and the Soil

00:35:26 The Law of Belief

00:41:13 The Book That Would Not Die

00:52:42 Prayer Without a Listener

01:01:34 The Doorway of Sleep

01:07:27 The Body That Believes

01:14:57 The Heat of Conviction

01:21:32 The Promise of Plenty

01:28:47 Rewriting the Self

01:39:45 What Became of God

01:47:29 The One Mind

01:54:04 When the Law Fails

02:02:38 How Would We Know

02:12:44 The Minister at His Desk

02:19:07 The Long Afterlife



Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest.


Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

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