There is a lot of hype out there surrounding the New Age book/DVD called The Secret, by Wanda Byrne. Everywhere I turn, someone is talking about it; it’s gotten press on Oprah, Larry King, and Saturday Night Live even did a skit about it. Being naturally curious (OK- maybe nosy is more like it), I wanted to know more about it. After watching two different soft-news reports on The Secret, I did some further digging and even watched the first 20 minutes of The Secret courtesy of YouTube, which basically consisted of misleading testimonials by slimy-looking people. What I discovered left me with a few thoughts: The Secret is just another well-packaged self-help fad; the claims from The Secret are incredulous; it amazes me what people are willing to believe and spend their money on. If I had to summarize in one statement, The Secret scam is for suckers!
Yet, there are a few things you need to know about The Secret , especially what’s right about it.
First, what is The Secret? The Secret is the “Law of Attraction”. Basically, according to the book, the Law of Attraction governs the universe and since like attracts like, you bring upon yourself whatever kinds of thoughts you are having. If you think positive thoughts, then positive things will happen to you. If you worry about negatives, then you are actually bringing those same negative things upon yourself. It’s an extreme form of the power of positive thinking mixed with a bit of telekinesis. It’s also the same ask-believe-receive teachings on TBN except some of the words have been changed to reach a broader audience: God is now “the Universe”, faith has been replaced with “positive thinking”, and the devil has been morphed into “negative thoughts”. Not surprisingly, The Secret is all about materialism and getting rich quickly. Not only are the claims The Secret makes pure fantasy, the science and psychology in The Secret has major flaws.
The Law of Attraction in The Secret states that EVERYTHING in your life YOU have attracted. So if you constantly worry about cancer, you will bring it upon yourself with all those negative thoughts. It also clearly states that victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks brought it upon themselves because everything that happens to someone – both good and bad – are the direct result of their own thoughts. This claim is quite preposterous, and yet scary, too, because people believe this and will react foolishly. Some who have fallen for this falsehood have gone out and made big purchases because they have visualized mysterious magical money bestowed upon them from the Universe. Some of the people I know who have gone out and bought this book and even passed it around are normal, seemingly intelligent people. It just goes to show you that 1) People are easily fooled and will believe almost anything and 2) a clever marketing campaign will go a long way, especially if you have the right celebrity endorsements.
The Secret has managed to be right about one thing, though: It is an example of smart marketing. First, the title makes people curious – who wouldn’t want to be privy to an age-old secret that some of the world’s smartest and most influential people, like Plato and Einstein, knew about? The cover, a red wax seal on parchment paper, conjures up mystery and authenticity – a la “Da Vinci Code.” The DVD starts off with a dramatization depicting The Secret being hidden and lost for years before being rediscovered. Then the DVD goes to documentary mode with testimonials, some by semi-famous people. The Secret is presented as if it’s a guaranteed scientific fact and some of the people on the DVD have fancy sounding titles- yet another clever selling technique. And maybe one of the smartest marketing moves is the author’s claim to how she discovered The Secret (in a time of great suffering she stumbled upon it and discovered how many of the world’s most influential used it) and now she just “wants to share The Secret with the world” (at $16.76 for the book and $34.99 for the DVD). And then there’s the ever popular topic that’s an easy seller: getting rich quickly without working. However questionable the claims of The Secret are, it has managed to be a big money-maker thanks to some clever marketing moves.
My advice concerning The Secret? Be informed, but don’t waste your money or your time on The Secret. It’s just a ridiculous nutty fad and all the the ill-deserved hype will soon pass. The power of positive thinking presented by The Secret is an extreme and faulty version and there is no such thing as The Law of Attraction as described in The Secret, or a Universe waiting to bestow upon you riches or misery, depending on your thoughts. The truth is that there is NO secret when it comes to success and wealth- just hard work, persistence, some know-how, and sometimes a bit of luck.
Choose for yourself what you will believe, but always be mindfull of what that has acheived. If your beliefs produce a mindset that allows you to be more effective, and those beliefs came from “The Secret”, then you have allowed yourself to be positively impacted by the beliefs that you chose. Therefore, the book has been a catalyst for benefit to you. However,there is a difference between having a “mindset” that is more usefull in carrying out your desires than thinking that your thoughts have influence over “hardened reality.” Hardened reality is, “chance”, and the laws of chance are distributed out based on the laws of physics that are known, and probably some that are not yet known. You flip a coin, the laws of probability will not alter, no matter how positive your thoughts may be. Therefore, hardended reality exists and is a factor that cannot be overcome with our current understanding and abilities. That being said; “The Secret” is a SCAM because it attempts to persuade you that “positive thoughts” do alter the results of the flipped coin. This simply is not so. If you believe it, and trust it in matters of hardened reality, you will at best be disappointed, and at worst killed. One point: The book doesn’t say that positivity can change “the flipped coin scenario”, but the message people get can be easily transmuted into this line of thought, for it is the ability to control hardened reality that “allures” people. Just a thought: If one person were to die that would not have died, simply because they read the book, is that life worth all the money that was made, and all the people who’s daily lives were enhanced because they read the book? Some will say yes, some will say no. Some will say the person was flawed and would have come to no greatness anyway, or their life would have been meaningless anyway. “They chose to be stupid and do something stupid, so they died.” These would be poorly thought out, first impulse ideas from the mind, and not worth the effort of discussing, since the person did not make the effort to think about it. When you get beyond the obvious and realize that none of these things is true, then you must admit that there is no possible way to be sure of your answer, other than in the comfort of your own imagination.
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