Word: psychiana
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Dates: during 1938-1938
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...Frank Robinson, now 52, is frank to admit, such a story "makes me sound nuts." Nevertheless he tells it to explain the founding of Psychiana, a non-Christian (but godly), mail-order religion which has enrolled between 500,000 and 600,000 people in 67 countries, and which is probably the only faith in the world which guarantees "money back if you are not satisfied." As a mail-order gospel, propagated by advertising (in 400 newspapers, 50 magazines), Psychiana passed a milestone last week when Founder Robinson motored from Moscow to Portland, Ore., placed an order...
Birley, who sent Robinson his photograph. That night Drug Clerk Robinson dreamed he saw Birley making mystic motions over a corpse, thought he heard him saying: "This is Psychiana, the power that will bring new life to a spiritually dead world." Next day the drug clerk wrote the cotton broker: "You are to be associated with me in this business. Please send $40,000." Fortnight later, a bank in Spokane, Wash. informed Robinson that $20,000 had been deposited to his account, that Mr. Birley promised $20,000 more the following week...
...druggist, "Doc" Robinson (as his friends now call him) never preached, soon came to disbelieve Christian doctrine. Said he: "My parents pumped hellfire and damnation into me until I was sick. I just vomited it up." He declares today that Heaven can be reached "here and now," that Psychiana is "God in operation." That this God-force can be utilized by people living moral lives is Doc Robinson's chief current thesis, and he has 10,000 letters in his files from people who believe they have drawn upon Psychiana's "mighty. never-failing power" to cure everything...
Moscow, seat of the University of Idaho, population 5,000, was a second-class post-office town when Doc Robinson settled there. It has jumped to first class, Psychiana having sent out more & more mail-$14,852.63 worth last year. A beginners' Psychiana course of 20 lessons costs $20, includes an examination and the right to ask Doc Robinson for personal advice. (On a typical day last week he voiced 387 replies by dictaphone, which three stenographers took down.) Advanced courses of ten and 40 lessons cost respectively $10 and $50. Sending these out keeps 60 Psychiana employes busy...
...same thing: make people think." A top-notch salesman. Doc Robinson has never forgotten how, in his behind-the-counter drugstore days, he once sold five one-gallon jugs of mineral oil to a man who came in to buy a pint. Besides its own building in Moscow, Psychiana owns three drugstores, a daily paper, the News-Review. An accomplished organist, the founder has an 800-pipe Wurlitzer in his big Moscow home, invariably includes organ solos (preferably Brahms) in his infrequent lectures. Though in those lectures Doc Robinson is inclined to blast the Christian churches, thus annoying many...