Suza's Secret Thoughts On The Secret
Happy Easter everyone! Another beautiful day in one of the most idyllic places on the planet. No wonder so many Ojaians, alas, as millions of others, are so keen on that book I keep hearing about all over town, The Secret. I read the previous posts from Free-Thinking Ojai Sceptics, but I kept quiet. I'm a bit late, so I'll take advantage of being a Post Author and reveal what I secretly think! It's been akward standing at the counter at Rainbow Bridge listening to people rambling about The Secret. Once it's your turn at the register it's hard to cut loose and shout that you think it's the slimiest form of snake oil you've ever avoided slipping in. Or if, for example, you are getting a haircut and the topic of The Secret comes up and you don't say anything because you don't want the beautician who is cutting your hair to unconsciously snip your bangs too short if you say you think that The Secret version of the Law of Attraction is much too simplistic. And that's putting it mildly! My father is a survivor of the Atomic Bomb. He survived unbelievable atrocities in a Japanese prison camp. He was transferred into the mountains to work in the coal mines a few days before the Atomic Bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If he had not been transfered, the "I" I am, would not be here. I ask myself, why did he live, why did others die? Was it The Law of Attraction? I don't have the answer, but I will share with you another view on The Secret from today's Washington Post.
Self-Help's Slimy 'Secret'
By Tim Watkin
Sunday, April 8, 2007; B01
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.
watkin.tim@gmail.com
Tim Watkin, former deputy editor of the New Zealand Listener magazine, is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
(For previous post by Heather McKenzie and more on what Ojaians think of "The Secret," see http://www.ojaipost.com/2007/03/the_secret.shtml)
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Comments (14)
Suza, you better watch your step here..... You are putting out a lot of negative comments about "The Secret"..... According to the Law of Attraction, that means you are going to be attracting a lot of negativity back into your own life!! So if anything bad happens to you in the next year or two, you can be sure it is because of the critical remarks you have posted here!
Comment #1 Posted by: david moody | April 8, 2007 08:50 AM
Great article, great post.
I'm all for positive thinking, but I'm totally bummed that I wasted my money only to have a book that I'm no longer interested in reading.Thanks for the negative carma. ha ha
-Good to hear from you Suza-
Comment #2 Posted by: Dana and Alyeska-kg6amv@yahoo.com | April 8, 2007 09:42 AM
Dear Dana and Alyeska-If it helps, you can probably sell it on amazon-used-books. Thanks for being here now!
Comment #3 Posted by: Suza | April 8, 2007 09:52 AM
Suza,
I honor you for your bravery, introducing this subject. It strikes me as an Easter gift of life, intimately connected to the death which Good Friday represents. Happy Easter.
The Secret is emotionally loaded, since so many have so much invested in it, financially, mentally and spiritually.
I was hit by a sad feeling when the author above spoke about the poor folk coming to the store to buy a book they heard about on Oprah. It was a tip off to me about the dark side of The Secret: it's mostly about attracting money and materialistic feel-good paybacks.
Wait. Hold your fire. Materialism is not bad in itself. It's a half truth, and it can be very dangerous when divorced from its polar partner.
Is there anything wrong with attracting good feelings and material goods? Of course not, if...
...those good feelings and material goods are not contributing to the bad feelings and material suffering of yourself and others.
There's the rub. If you are aggressively seeking to attract good feelings and a materialistic good life for yourself without also doing that for everyone else, you are creating an unbalanced state which will boomerang on you. As the author stated above, like does not attract like; it attracts its opposite.
In other words, if you attract to yourself wealth and good feelings, the opposite comes with it.
Also, if I'm spending much of my energy trying to feel good and be rich, I will not be spending energy on something else, for example, understanding why I do not feel good in the first place.
In other words, being successful at feeling good and becoming rich can be a failure in the long run when the bets are called in by a much higher power. Then all the emotive props and material insurances collapse like a house of cards.
Hold your fire. When I use the word "you," I include myself. Bitter experience with those who claim to know secrets has made me poorer in finances but richer in wisdom.
My experience is that The Secret has money written all over it. That, plus a whole lot of opposites that it drags along with it.
It is ironic that the secret Secret has so many religious trappings, when religions have so often warned of the dangers of materialism and greed.
Trying to attract something to the egotistical self is self defeating in the long run, and is exactly the thing that genuine religions have opposed.
The Secret's success is an indicator of how corrupt spiritual values have become. When spirituality allows itself to be co-opted by materialism, it loses its reason for being.
Again, I must place a disclaimer to forestall ad hominem attacks upon myself, which don't hurt me but just waste time and energy. I am not claiming that materialism is bad. Secrets are two edged swords and if you don't know how to handle them properly, you can get hurt, and worse, can hurt others.
Why would the law of attraction be called a secret? It's the law of supply and demand. If someone claims he knows a secret and implies that others do not, he creates a false scarcity which enables him to corner that particular market, and drive the prices up. He is in on the game first so he will reap the greatest reward until the pyramid scheme collapses. Then the game is up.
As I said above, The Secret is emotionally loaded. People who are emotionally invested in it will attack others who question their investment. Bad feelings are drawn along in the wake of trying to attract good feelings.
I suspect that the law of attraction is a hoax even if it works, especially if it works, because that sets up an addictive situation.
The mind is very tricky. It's got the attraction game down. It knows how to attract just about everything not nailed down to itself.
There's a bigger game in town called Love. One wisdom tradition put it this way: "You can't serve God (God is Love) and mammon (money/materialism)."
Another wisdom tradition said: "A sucker is born every minute," and "A fool and his money is soon parted."
I think the law of attraction works. That's the good and bad news.
The question is: what am I attempting to attract? Should I be cautious because I will get what I program?
This so called newly discovered law is based on a lie if the promoters are touting the idea that it is new. It's as old as the hills. The tradition I grew up in, which itself needs a lot of critical analysis, said: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so he becomes."
Thanks again for this Easter post. It has stimulated my mind to take a closer look at itself.
There are many so called secrets which are cleverly crafted smokescreens to move money from one pocket to another.
I take as my guide the rules: follow the money and follow reason. They generally lead an open clearing where smokescreens are blown away.
I am happy to be part of a community that has brave souls and courageous hearts.
Happy Easter to all.
Comment #4 Posted by: Dennis Leary | April 8, 2007 10:23 AM
Well folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Get ready for the grand sequel to the bestseller about positive thinking. Coming soon, HARRY POTTER DISCOVERS THE SECRET.
Comment #5 Posted by: Sholom Joshua | April 8, 2007 01:38 PM
Some required reading:
1.
2.
3.
and listening:
Comment #6 Posted by: secretLee | April 8, 2007 01:45 PM
For more of Ojai's thoughts on "The Secret," see http://www.ojaipost.com/2007/03/the_secret.shtml
Comment #7 Posted by: heather | April 8, 2007 03:37 PM
Thanks for posting this, and the comments. My favorite part of the article was this passage: "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." A brave writer to say such a thing in 2007.
Comment #8 Posted by: John Crowley | April 8, 2007 04:10 PM
The following response is from an e-mail from Lyn Hebenstreit:
Good article. I'm no fan of the Secret - after being ripped of for 30 bucks to see the DVD. I think the Washington Post article even missed one the most troubling aspects of the book, its orientation to the left hand path as we call it in the esoteric field - using Divine Law in the exclusive pursuit of ones own personal desires, ambitions, etc. without consideration of the needs of the greater whole or the welfare of others.
Comment #9 Posted by: Suza | April 9, 2007 07:14 AM
The following is from John Nelson, author of "The Remembering, A Novel of Karma and Global Peril."
Hi Suza - Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this shameless bullshit. Ah, wouldn't it be great if "wishing will make it true." Actually the basic premise that we create our own reality, called "constructionism," is far from original or secret, as it goes back to Kant in the 1700's, Hegel and Schopenhauer in the 1800's, and Heidegger and Satre in the 1900's. It's partially consistent with the Buddhist principle of "mutually dependent co-arising," which views reality as emerging with the confluence of subject and object, dependent on both. Joanna Macy wrote cogently on this.
However, lot's of things happened and were perfectly real before the last 4 million years when primates first began to observe them. Were they created by the law of attraction? Hardly.
Bruce Gladstone is working on a column about this - probably in Friday's OVN.
Comment #10 Posted by: Suza | April 10, 2007 10:36 PM
Thank you. As an abuse survivor with family members that were slaughtered in the Holocaust, I'm disaffected by the Law of Attraction's foundational concept too.
I've also had significant health crises that I don't believe I "attracted" with some errant "thought."
I believe in Conscious Creation, but not in the same way. I posted about my belief in Conscious Creation VS LOA on my blog.
I linked to three mini-movies that represent my concept of Conscious Creation.
Comment #11 Posted by: energie | May 9, 2007 02:30 PM
Thank you Energie, I enjoyed visiting your site. I especially liked this: "
To quote zen buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh in Interbeing (pg 31):
“When we grow a lemon tree, we want it to be vigorous and beautiful. But, if it isn’t vigorous and beautiful, we don’t blame the tree. We observe it in order to understand why isn’t growing well. Perhaps we have not taken good care of it.
We know it is funny to blame a lemon tree, but we do blame human beings when they are not growing well. Because our brothers, sisters, and children are humans, we think they should behave in certain ways. But human beings are not very different from lemon trees. If we take good care of them, they will grow properly. Blaming never helps. Only love and understanding can help people change. If we take good care of people, we will be rewarded by their pleasantness. Is this much different from the rewards we recieve from our lemon tree?”
I’ve also heard the popular belief that bad and terrible things happen to enable us to learn and grow. I don’t believe we are put through the fire of pain and suffering because we “needed” it to “learn and grow.” That too, is another way of blaming and faulting ourselves or the victim, by saying an individual “needed” pain and suffering in order to learn and grow.
People blossom on love. Love is the greatest fertilizer in the universe. Yes, we can grow through pain and suffering, but it’s not what we need! It’s something that happens because we live in a broken world with violent people and random tragedy.
Saying we need suffering to learn and grow is like saying, “I’m going to throw you naked, barefoot, and supply-less out into a woods thick with huge, sharp thorn bushes and sharp, pointy stones blanketing the ground. If you make it out, it will be a learning and growing experience.” Well, you might make it but you will be wounded in mind, body and spirit and emotionally scarred. The sheer trauma of it will have squandered your potential, hindered you from developing on a positive path, and savagely stolen priceless time from you that you can never get back.
The truth is pain and suffering impedes, encumbers, and squanders. You may learn and grow from it if you live through it, but it’s the longest and most devastating route possible to learning and growth.
The truth is, some people don’t come through it with their humanity, sense, and compassion intact or increased; pain and suffering turns many people into damaged, hate-filled individuals that harm and destroy other people.
The truth is, there are bad things and bad people in this world and bad things happen to good people for no good reason.
Comment #12 Posted by: Suza | May 10, 2007 11:15 PM
Much obliged to you Suza for posting my post, or most of it, anyway! I'm starting a new blog under a new name, so as not to be confused with the Law of Attraction.
Will visit you again soon with my new URL.
Comment #13 Posted by: energie | May 15, 2007 09:33 AM
As my friend Cody LePow once said in a song of his (get your notebooks out now): "The secret is there is no secret."
It's all revealed to us eventually. The unseen, too, has a way to make itself known through the visible part of the world. Even the realization that some things are better left unseen is a revelation. Our awareness is the key to finding the solutions to our problems.
Comment #14 Posted by: Anonymous | May 15, 2007 10:56 AM