Reviews by Hubie Goode: Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, Kevin Trudeau, Your Wish Is Your Command, Sorcery, Success Motivation

The Sorcerer’s Accomplice
Part 2

Many of today’s masters of business success and positive mental imaging have been seduced by the call of sorcery and are spreading it like wildfire throughout society. Much of what we know about these sorts of success motivation techniques can be traced back to a man named Napoleon Hill. A commentary from the Success Motivation Institute has this to say about Mr. Hill:

“Without question, Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill’s most famous book), has had a greater influence on the lives, accomplishments and fortunes of individuals than any other work of its kind. All over the world there are literally thousands of successful men in all lines of work who are where they are today because they once bought a copy of Mr. Hill’s book, and they will be quick to tell you so.

I’ve sat in richly paneled, carpeted executive offices and listened to world-famous business leaders, some of them old enough to be my father, tell me that everything worked out just fine once they read Think and Grow Rich.

Why has this one book out of all the thousands of self-help books remained the one towering giant? When the last page of this book is read, the hand which put the book down on the table was a different hand. The man who then stood up and walked out into the world was a different, changed man. The man was now the possessor of the unique, unseen talent for turning dreams into reality, thoughts into things, he who had been the passenger was now suddenly the captain.”

Super salesmen and top motivational speakers list Think and Grow Rich as one of the twelve greatest books of all time. Many of Mr. Hill’s books are offered all around the world in Christian Book stores and also recommended by Christian leaders. Another book titled, Making the Most of Your Mind, had this to say:

“In recent years a number of secular books have related success to the power of the mind. The authors of these books have begun to plumb the depths of the reservoir of potential God has placed in the human mind. Napoleon Hill was one such secular writer, after twenty years of research he wrote an eight volume omnibus called The Law of Success, parts of which are condensed in his best selling book, Think and Grow Rich, he probably did the most useful research in history.”

Napoleon Hill’s large following of both businessmen and Christian leaders is hard to understand when you admit to his open advocacy of sorcery. His books are chock full of the most blatant occult teachings anywhere. Yet the Christians who recommend his writings only caution others as to Hill’s emphasis upon wealth. In fact, in the book aforementioned, Making the Most of Your Mind, the author’s quote time and again from Hill’s book, and then in the end, run a disclaimer that they are only quoting from the book because of the focus on the attitudes of the mind, not the development of wealth.

Not coincidentally, it is Hill’s teachings on the mind that are the real problem, not the smokescreen of emphasis upon wealth. Hill explains OPENLY in his book, that he learned the mind-power techniques he writes about from disembodied spirit entities. Demons masquerading as Ascended Masters used Hill to deceive the millions who have adopted the “success” they gave him. Hill himself declares:

“Now and again I have had evidence that unseen friends hover about me, unknowable to the ordinary senses. In my studies I have discovered there is a group of strange beings who maintain a school of wisdom. The School had Masters who can disembody themselves and travel instantly to any place they choose, to give knowledge directly by voice. Now I knew that one of these masters had come across thousands of miles, through the night, into my study. I shall not set down every word he said, much of what he said has already been presented to you in the chapters of this book, and will follow in other chapters. (They said:) “You have earned the right to reveal a Supreme Secret to others.”, said the vibrant voice. “You have been under guidance of the Great School... Now you must give the world a blueprint...”*

* Napoleon Hill: Grow Rich with Peace of Mind, pp. 158-160

The mantra of this Supreme Secret is of course: Anything the Human mind can believe, the human mind can achieve. This seductive idea is the basis behind the human potential movement, better known to us as the New Age movement. If what they say is true, that we can do anything we can imagine, then indeed we must be gods. This secret of the ages is also known from Hill as the Magic Power of Belief. The idea here is that the human mind has secret powers that are capable of creating one’s own reality, i.e.: Truly, deeply believe that you can have great wealth and you can have it. This is the sorcerer’s counterfeit faith and the basis of “Positive Mental Attitude”. Hill and others believe they have written guides for tapping into the great “universal storehouse” that is just waiting for you to claim its riches.
Hill explains Positive Mental Attitude:

“PMA is the catalyst which makes any combination of success principles work. PMA attracts good luck. Success is achieved and maintained by those who try and keep on trying with Positive Mental Attitude."

This is a universal law, that we translate into physical reality, the thoughts and attitudes we hold in our minds, no matter what we are.”

Far from having the gracious and loving but sovereign God as its object of trust, this power of belief enables one to command forces to obey their thoughts. If anyone can make a miracle happen, then it isn’t a genuine miracle from God, but sorcery, the man is now playing God. It is not only the liberal media and the left wing that has followed this lemming over the cliff, but one need only look to many a Christian station and program or in many evangelical churches to get an ear full of success gospels. One pastor, Robert Tilton of Texas, used to have a program on the PTL network called “Success in Life”, and he preached an automatic “trigger” that could be thrown in order to receive blessings from God. All one had to do was send in a pledge that made you sweat a little and you would receive many times over the amount you sent in to God’s work. That was in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, and if Mr. Tilton had perhaps used more of his own advice, perhaps he would still be around on TV to the extent that he was back then. Anyone heard from him lately? (Talk about the “Great Falling Away” of the last days!)

Anyone who believes that just because you think a thought long enough and hard enough, or say something a number of times and you’ll change reality; has slipped into sorcery and also a covert type of atheism. To believe that an all encompassing God can be “plucked” from merely because of some action we humans take, is to deny the God of the Bible or else to turn him into a cosmic Coke machine, which only needs a certain amount of quarters to be motivated... if you get my meaning.

And this motivation comes despite perhaps the superior wisdom of God, the superior love of the creator to know what is good and what is bad for us before we are even born. None of that counts for these success people, we’re smarter than any blind universe or loving God, we know what’s best for us and what we should always have. You need only look at the lives of famous people in the news, or at the financial markets of our day to see that this is the truth. (SIC)

Much of what Hill has to say can indeed be inspiring, but the fact that so much of the sorcery practice that is mixed into the good he has produced has captured the hearts and minds of not only the secular but also the Christian church, is a big red alarm bell if you are paying attention. It’s important that Christian’s not be overcome with the “feel good” messages of the world and begin to substitute the truth of the Gospel, sometimes this can happen over time without even being aware of it.

While writing this, I was inspired to flip through some cable channels on a business TV and “just happened” to come across an informercial I couldn’t believe. If you are anyone who has been around this sort of success motivation type stuff, and also has read my other post on “The Nouveau Tech Deception”, you’ve come across a man named Kevin Trudeau. He is the author of a book called Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About, as well as other volumes, and as I have said before, he is indeed affiliated with Nouveau Tech/Neo-Tech, a known atheist organization.

He now has a new informercial called: “Your Wish Is Your Command” , a CD package of mentoring success. Ask anyone who has read Trudeau’s books and you’ll find that the information he promotes isn’t anything that isn’t already out there for those who are not so lazy as to find it for themselves. What Trudeau outlines in his informercial is pretty much the same things that Nouveau Tech promotes , and in fact he even uses much of the same terminology right down to the “five minute miracle” approach. In his program he talks about Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and how it doesn’t work for most people, and the reason for this is that there is a “missing ingredient” and if only you had this missing ingredient, then you could succeed and call anything you want and desire, “all the riches, happiness, love and peace....” or whatever you want for yourself, in much the same way as you would a “genie in a bottle”.

Trudeau places himself in the position of being the good guy who is going to snitch on a secret society he is a part of and let the public in on the secrets to wealth and power only a few in this secret society are privy to. When I heard him say this, I became worried, for if indeed powerful people were out there sitting on top of the world, with all the power and influence any ordinary man could dream of, then Trudeau is a dead man. But, of course, he hasn’t been assassinated for his knowledge or even roughed up to keep him quiet. Why do you think this is the case? Because he really has nothing new to say. He is simply assembling and marketing the same old information that even his buddies at Nouveau Tech have charged high prices for in huge volumes of esoteric prose.

I can’t say if he will invite folks to join Nouveau Tech once you buy his CD’s or if he really does have an organization called the Global Information Network, which is apart from them, to which he will invite a purchaser. I will say however, that the odds are good that you’ll be exposed to more atheism propaganda. Trudeau is no true writer, he is merely a re-packager, and if the information is out there, you can find it and not pay him $300.00 dollars for his assembly of this information.

Just look around your world and see what “works”. Go to any mall in America and you’ll see that franchises work. They are all around, and it’s the same ones everywhere you go. Ever see a poor doctor? A poor lawyer? (Well a public defender, not a prosecutor) Architects aren’t poor either, and I could go on and on. But my point is that what works is obvious. Any new secret that suddenly improves an entire large group of the public will quickly no longer be a secret. Business works, college degrees that result in high paying positions work. Sports careers, too. How many Amway salesman do you know? Any famous ones? Got someone down the block with a mansion and a pool who has made his success with a MLM property? Yes, they are needles in a haystack. In much the same way, miracles with mind power or some secret trick are old, centuries old, black magic strategies for manipulating reality, and you should thank God that most of them are hard to make work.

Keep in mind that most people who win the lottery lose their winnings within the first year. They have no clue how to handle such big amounts of money, and it is lost or taken away from them. Do you have that sort of discipline? Can you receive 10 millions dollars and simply put it away and keep on living as you do? That’s not reality. Just look at famous people like Tiger Woods. Do you think you would be any different in his position? Would you be able to say no to the “dessert trey” that he is presented with on a daily basis?

If you have never been in a burning building, no matter how much fire training you might have had, you really have no idea how you will react. It’s the same with getting everything you want in life, not all of it is necessarily a good thing, but according to “Name it and claim it” Trudeau and Hill and the Christian leaders who have joined this chant, YOU’RE the best judge of what is good for you.

We certainly see this in the public sector now, with all the marital infidelity, financial cheating, public political disgrace and the faltering American economy. Ask yourself, if everyone could just flip a switch and get anything they wanted, would that be a good thing? Where would it stop? Would it stop at all? What would the world look like if Jihadists in the middle east could mentally call up America’s destruction and we could mentally bomb them out of existence? If there is no superior control on the wants and desires of mankind, and the universe is an automatic bell hop that just needs to be called on by anyone and everyone, what would the world look like today? There is only so much gold to go around. If we create all the gold anyone anywhere wants, then gold is worthless.

Face it folks, mankind is no chorus of angels, and God will tell you this. It’s not possible to always be positive and yet contend for the truth. A lot of God’s truth that is taught in the Bible is negative truth, and it has influenced millions down through the ages both big and small in such a way that precludes the false gospel of universal bell hop that is being promoted to you. This destiny of the mind is an elusive thing, for it leads you to believe, for the price of a book or tape, that you can gain God-like control. But how much is enough? How can one measure the amount of effort that it takes to make these things they promise truly happen? How much is NOT enough? Those answers are never a part of the success book of the month club.

God’s primary purpose is your eternal spiritual position with him. Here on this Earth, in our fallen state, we each have an allotted period of time in which we are to choose whom we are to believe. Chasing after riches and trying to drive our own lives with “mind speak to the universe” is a huge distraction to the voice of God that is trying to reach you. God does want you to be happy and fruitful in this life, but not at the price of having no relationship with him. That sort of thing is simply not the reality of existence laid down in scripture. You and I are the creation, and we are caught in the unfortunate circumstance of other’s actions laid down long ago, both mankind’s and also in the spiritual world of God that surrounds us daily. But that is the temporary proving ground that we are faced with, whether we like it or not. There will come a day, when NO ONE will have a chance to change their mind. NO ONE will be able to say they were wrong and turn to God. NO ONE.

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

2 Timothy 3:1-5

Remember that scripture when Kevin Trudeau refers to people who are not like him as “losers”, ........the same people he wants to purchase his program.