Did New Thought land a gorgeous pin-up model in my lap?
New Thought, also known as positive thinking, is the idea that we can make things real simply by thinking about them. It is, as New Thought expert Mitch Horowitz writes in his book One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (2014), "the most enduring effort in modern history to forge a truly practical metaphysical approach to the needs and urgencies of daily life.” Horowitz explains it this way: “I do not believe in the ultimate power of any single principle. But if the premise of positive thinking is defensible, something that I consider in these pages, it seems to rest upon, and be measurable through, the degree of an individual’s hunger for self-change.” Horowitz also believes that quantum theory is also starting to prove what positive thinkers have claimed for decades—that our thoughts can become reality.
I know Horowitz a little bit. He used to be the top editor at Tarcher, but then felt called to investigate the esoteric, weird and occult. His books include Practical Magick: Ancient Tradition and Modern Practice (2025), Happy Warriors: The Lives and Ideas of the Positive-Mind Mystics (2024), Modern Occultism: History, Theory, and Practice(2023), The Miracle Habits: The Secret of Turning Your Moments Into Miracles (2020), and Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (2009). Horowitz is a solid researcher, a friendly dude and terrific speaker who’s instantly recognizable for his rich baritone voice, leather jacket and punk rock t-shirts.
For years I thought that the ideas Horowitz explores were bizarre, not to mention the kind of occult stuff that Catholics like me rightly avoid. Yet his scholarship is top-notch. In his books Horowitz explores how starting in the 19th century, as he writes in One Simple Idea, “a loosely knit band of psychical researchers and religious philosophers, mental-healers and hypnotists, Mesmerists and Spiritualists, Unitarians and Transcendentalists, suffragists and free-love advocates, black liberationists and Christian socialists, animal-rights activists and Biblical communists, occultists and Freemasons, artists and freethinkers, embarked upon a grand and sprawling project to investigate the parameters of the human mind.”
They wanted “to determine whether some mental force—divine, psychological, or otherwise—exerts an invisible pull on a person’s daily life. Was there, they wondered, a ‘mind-power’ that could be harnessed to manifest outcomes?” Was the law of attraction a reality—that if you think it, it can come true?
A couple of years ago I found myself willing to give New Thought a try. At the time I was struggling with the trauma of surviving cancer and a nasty 2018 political hit, the latter which almost destroyed my life and made me consider suicide. After it was over I retreated to things I enjoyed as a kid—comics, movies, skateboarding—and voluptuous pin-up women.
The pin-ups were particularly comforting. One of my greatest possessions is the $80 Taschen book The Art of Pin-Up. It’s a book that’s about the size and weight of the obelisk in 2001—although unlike that block of sci-fi darkness, The Art of Pin-Up is a gloriously white, life-giving oracle of positive colors and flowing erotic energy. It comes with a suitcase and features gloriously reproduced paintings from the golden era of postwar American cheesecake. All the masters are here: Gil Elvgren, George Petty, Alberto Vargas. The models are gorgeous, representing an archetypal feminine ideal—curves, solid thighs, apple cheeks, cute, knowing smiles and full breasts. The book’s fully feminine and very healing. It’s sexy but not degrading like pornography.
After 2018 I wanted a new direction, and while I didn’t want to use a Ouija board or conduct a seance, what harm could there be in directing some positive thinking? I played sports when I was younger and we were always taught about a tough mental game and how to visualize a positive outcome. Also, Horowitz notes that in the 1980s, “Ronald Reagan’s America-can-do anything philosophy, for good or ill, reshaped the nation’s political landscape (and, not incidentally, sounded a lot like the mail-order self-improvement courses to which the president’s father subscribed during the Great Depression).” Reagan’s positive-thinking “oratory compelled every president who came after him, whether Republican or Democrat, to sing praises to the limitless potential of the American public.” Horowitz claims that “positive thinking is our national creed.”
One of the tenets of positive thinking is that you’re not supposed to obsess about it. You’re just supposed to think or write down what you want, and then forget it. In my case I did something very simple. Part of the political hit against me involved an attempted honey trap and former girlfriends trashing me in the media. I wanted to trust women again. As I thought that thought—I want to experience that women are not evil and insane—standing like a mighty fortress in the corner of the room, was The Art of Pin-Up. I didn’t try to make anything happen. I just quietly wished for peace and positive feminine energy.
After about 10 days, something happened. I got an email from a woman who’d read about me, and then read my book The Devil’s Triangle, which recounts the political hit that was put on me. “You don’t know me,” she wrote, “but I love the way you stand up for what you believe, and how you say what so many are thinking but don’t have the courage to say. What you went through and survived, coming out stronger—I have so much respect for you. In moments when I get scared so I can write freely and not be censored, I just hold my copy of The Devil’s Triangle and I know that it will be okay. It’s your courage that comes through.”
I thanked her and we exchanged some friendly emails. I’ll call her Zoe after Zoe Mozert, one of the great pin-up artists of all time. A few days later, Zoe sent me a picture. I opened my email and found myself face-to-face with a glorious modern pin-up girl. Zoe was sitting down and in a comfortable laid-back pose, wearing nothing but a zip down hoodie. Her creamy white legs were right out of Gil Elvgren, her reading glasses, fun smile and lipstick playful echoes of the girls in the classic 1950s and 1960s calendars. Right in the center were the two of the most beautiful DDD breasts I’ve ever seen. It was a classic pin-up girl come to life.
Dear God, is Mitch Horowitz right? Is there some porous membrane only comprehensible through quantum theory that had slowed my pin-up though to manifest in reality? Zoe’s chest is about as real as it gets. I kept in touch with Zoe, discovering that she’s intelligent, very funny and a great conversationalist. I’d tell you more, including what happened when we met, but the mojo is so good I don’t want to mess up. The key to New Thought is to not think about it too much.