Add to My Profile | More Videos
This page is in direct response to the nonsense of "The Secret" that seems to be deluding some individuals in this country.This concept takes the power of positive thinking to a higher level telling you "This is The Secret to everything - the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted."Some people have seen their loved ones go out on shopping sprees because, "The checks are just going to start coming in the mail!!!" They won't tell you who from.Some of these people won't go to the doctor, because all they have to do is "Think themselves healthy." If I were an amputee, could I THINK myself a new arm? or leg? Hell, even a finger? NO. If I have lost teeth, can I THINK them back into existence? NO.Look, a positive attitude is great. Even having a daily mantra is good. Focusing on your goals is a wonderful idea. But believing that you attract good or bad things to you based on what you are THINKING??? What about a child who is miscarried? Did they die because of their negative thinking? If THIS site won't convince you that this is all a marketing scam, I'm not sure what will. If that didn't do it, try THIS page.Some blogs and links on the subject. Want to add yours? Just let me know. The Secret Behind The Secret: What is Attracting Millions to the Law of Attraction?
THE SECRET LIE – Check out this Link NOW!!!
The Truth About Negative Thinking and Bad Moods
The truth "lies" somewhere in between it's no secret
The Secret shhhh
Oprah's Ugly Secret
New House, New Job,that new BMW? just ask
The Secret ...Don't be a ZOMBIE!
Slimy Secret
Self-Help's Slimy 'Secret'
By Tim Watkin
Sunday, April 8, 2007
It's the publishing phenomenon of the year so far, a small book with a parchment-brown cover engraved with the image of a red wax seal.
"The Secret," its title proclaims matter-of-factly, as if the slim volume held the answer to life's deepest mysteries. Which is precisely what it purports to do. Written by an Australian television producer, this latest contribution to the bursting shelves of New Age self-helpiana has come out of nowhere to sell more than 1.3 million copies in the United States alone.
Yet as bookstores nationwide have sold out of it again and again, controversy has begun to swirl around "the secret." Working in a bookstore recently and discussing the book with customers lured by the promise of instant success, I finally delved into its message myself. And where the buyers I talked to hoped to find the path to a better life, I found a disturbing little book of blame.
The secret of "The Secret" is, very simply, the "law of attraction." Despite claims on the book's Web site that it is revealing hidden wisdom "for the first time in history," the idea dates back nearly 3,000 years to early Hindu teachings that "like attracts like." But author Rhonda Byrne takes it to a new level. She told Australia's Herald Sun newspaper in January that she stumbled upon "the secret" while mourning the death of her father in 2004, via a 1910 book called "The Science of Getting Rich," by one Wallace D. Wattles.
The revelation that inspired her? "Everything that's coming into your life you are attracting into your life," Byrne writes. "You are the most powerful magnet in the universe . . . so as you think a thought, you are also attracting like thoughts to you."
Despite the rather inexact science -- when it comes to magnets, it's opposites that attract -- Byrne asserts that this secret is a natural law as "precise" as gravity. It was the power, she argues, behind geniuses such as Plato, Newton, Beethoven and Einstein. Of course, none of these gents is alive to vouch for the accuracy of her claims, so Byrne has rallied support from a Who's Who of the self-help industry, including John Gray, author of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," and Jack Canfield, who wrote "Chicken Soup for the Soul." Oprah Winfrey had Byrne on her show and raved about "The Secret."
They all endorse a book, with its clever "Da Vinci Code"-like cover, that presents the law of attraction as the ultimate shortcut to success and the American dream. Anyone who wants it badly enough can be a millionaire, the president, even an American Idol.
What's missing from this recycling of an old egalitarian ideal is the Protestant ethic and Enlightenment beliefs. Hard work, talent, education, even luck go unmentioned. As "The Secret" puts it, all you have to do is "put in your order with the universe." Ask. Believe. Receive. That's the mantra.
In the book, investment trainer David Schirmer describes his own experience. He used to receive bills every day. "So I got a bank statement, I whited out the total, and I put a new total in there," he says. "I thought, 'What if I just visualized a bunch of checks coming in the mail'? Within just one month, things started to change. It is amazing; today I just get checks in the mail. I get a few bills, but I get more checks than bills."
You'd think an investment expert might be wary of sharing a secret like that. But you can even print out a check from "The Bank of the Universe" off "The Secret's" Web site. Write in the amount you want. Imagine spending it. Then sit back and watch the cash roll in.
It's all so laughably nutty. And it would be harmless but for the millions buying the book and DVD and the exposure that "The Secret" is getting from the likes of Winfrey and Larry King. And for the danger lurking in its philosophy.
I saw that danger at the Barnes & Noble in Northern California where I worked for several months. Three times in less than two weeks, the store sold out of "The Secret." Time and again, the customers coming to the counter were working-class people, spending their hard-earned money on this piffle -- $16.76 for the book and $34.99 for the DVD. When I started asking why, they said they'd seen "The Secret" on "Oprah."
Winfrey first featured it on Feb. 8. According to Nielsen BookScan, the book had sold 18,000 copies the week before. During the week of the show, sales rocketed to 101,000. The show did a follow-up on Feb. 16, and sales that week reached 190,000.
Yet none of the how-the-Secret-changed-my-life stories on "Oprah" mentioned the dark side of the book's pie-in-the-sky pitch. In February, Los Angeles Times editorial writer Karin Klein reported that local therapists were seeing "clients who are headed for real trouble, immersing themselves in a dream world in which good things just come." Klein told me in an e-mail that she had heard from readers who were worried about friends who "suddenly start buying things, certain that the money to pay for them will just show up."
Still worse is the insidious flip side of Byrne's philosophy: If bad things happen to you, it's all your fault. As surely as your thoughts bring health, wealth and love, they are also responsible for any illness, poverty or misery that comes your way.
That isn't just implied, it's spelled out: "The only reason why people do not have what they want is because they are thinking more about what they don't want than what they do want." By this logic, Holocaust victims brought it on themselves, as did those who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. Come on, New Orleans, get over it! Think positive!
For a few weeks, I joked with customers about this nonsense. One evening, I was talking to a regular who said she had come in to buy "The Secret" to "see what the fuss is about." A problem with the book, we agreed, is that it says nothing about old-fashioned luck. We hit on the word at the same time and laughed. But after she left, I took a closer look, and all at once the book's blame-the-victim philosophy didn't seem so funny.
Not even "Saturday Night Live," taking a poke at "The Secret's" finger-pointing fallacies, could make it so. One recent weekend, the show featured a skit about a man in Darfur being interviewed by Winfrey and Byrne. They scolded him when he lamented that his people were starving, saying it was all the result of his lousy attitude. That was played for laughs, but later that week I watched Bob Proctor, author of "You Were Born Rich" and one of the "gurus" Byrne quotes most often, being asked on "Nightline" whether the starving children of Darfur had "manifested" -- that is, visualized -- their own misery. In utter seriousness, he replied, "I think the country probably has."
The book is not nearly so equivocal. "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of humanity's ills," Byrne asserts, in a stunning sentence that had me pondering how to perfect my thoughts, pronto.
Poverty? "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts."
Illness? "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can. . . . You are also inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness." So . . . got any sick friends who need a shoulder to cry on? Tell 'em to bug off! As for Elizabeth Edwards -- how selfish is she? By making people think about her cancer, she's basically giving them the disease.
What at first glance looks like the world according to Disney -- wish on a star, and it will all come true -- turns out to be a pretty ugly little secret indeed.
Winfrey, perhaps recalling how badly burned she was last year by James Frey's pseudo-memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," may have started to cotton on to that reality. A couple of weeks ago, she "clarified" her views on the "law of attraction." Although she didn't apologize for endorsing "The Secret," she said the law of attraction "is not the answer to everything. It is not the answer to atrocities or every tragedy. It is just one law. Not the only law. And certainly, certainly, certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme."
As I squeezed an endless stream of new self-help books onto shelf after shelf at the bookstore and watched the sales they generated, I realized just how many publishers and self-appointed gurus are making their fortunes serving up nothing more than snake oil to a ravenous public. Yet this latest little flimflam of a book seems to represent a new low for the industry. It takes the promise that "you can be anything you want if you just read this book" to its illogical conclusion: Simply believe and it will happen.
But the truth -- as M. Scott Peck, one of the earliest and best self-help authors, once wrote -- is that life is difficult. There are no easy answers. I'm hoping that "The Secret" will wake people up to the fact that anyone who claims otherwise is just ripping them off.
Wishful thinking? Maybe not, if I really believe hard enough.
Tim Watkin, former deputy editor of the New Zealand Listener magazine, is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
The SecretPosted on March 29, 2007
I've been hearing about this nonsense about "The Secret" and "The Laws of Attraction" here and there. Thank you, Oprah, for inflicting yet another ridiculous meme, as if you weren't already in the hole for Doctor Phil. They mentioned it on Girl Meets Girl/Makena Music a few weeks back and I just got an email from B&N.com about it. For the record, I don't believe that human cognition controls the physical universe. I don't believe just wishing really hard and focusing on something causes events to occur.
I do believe that human cognition, honed by millions of years of evolution, is one bad-assed pattern recognition engine. That usually helps us out, such as when we were able to spot meta-trends out on the plains. "Hey, it's getting warm again, that's when the mammoth come through here so let's maybe dig some pits and get ready for them" In modern life, that well-refined ability to find patterns in almost anything frequently works against us. That's all this "Secret" nonsense is. You focus on what you want to occur. Many things happen in and around your life, some good and some bad and most kind of neutral. This is the normal distribution or bell curve. When you engage your desire, though, things that happen on the good end get matched against the patterns. "Hey, that's the thing I'm trying to make happen!" So, things that either would have happened anyway by happenstance or things that happen because you are working to make them happen get counted as a success of the "Law of Attraction." The bad and neutral things get ignored. This is also the secret behind the power of prayer.
It's bullshit. You either made that happen yourself, or it was dumb luck you could take advantage of but nothing mystical occurred. I think it is shameful that people are willing to take their work and minimize it in favor of this woo-woo vague force. Why does that make you feel better than being an effective person that gets things done? What happens when two practitioners of the "Secret" are wishing for the exact opposite thing, say full custody of the same child? How does the universe resolve these conflicting wishes? What is the communication mechanism from your mind to the universe? There must be some particle or energy transmitted. Is it measurable? We understand the electromagnetic spectrum pretty well nowadays, so it's got to fit in there somewhere.
As always, we know who the beneficiaries of this are. It's the people selling the Secret DVD for $40, the hardcover for $20, etc. Like B&N.com and the distributors and the creators. If this rule really worked that well and they really wanted to change the world with it, why didn't they use the Law of Attraction to get them enough money to give away DVD's to all the households in America? AOL could do it for shitty software on a shitty dialup service, surely changing the universe would be worth it.
I will always stand against things where people place the faith and credit for things they do themselves in some mystical entity, be it god or allah or this vague force that magically does good things for you because it wants you to be happy. The universe is a cold place that cares nothing about you, only about converting energy to entropy. These moments of warmth and value and love are there because we put them there and no other reason. The Secret doesn't work because wishing makes things happen, it works because when you bust your ass things happen and because if you really want to be happy you can make yourself be.
So, I just saved you $40. You are very welcome.