Do you know about The Secret? This was originally produced as a TV series by an Australian TV producer called Rhonda Byrne. It wasn’t shown by the TV channel which commissioned it and was turned into a DVD, book and now a whole movement it seems. Wikipedia has a pretty thorough article on the background story plus a presentation of the views of people for and against The Secret. According to their article, the book which inspired Rhonda Byrne was the 1910 The Science of Getting Rich by William Wattles. They also say the principles espoused are pretty much the same as those of the New Thought movement.
What is The Secret?
Well, it’s the “Law of Attraction” – which is the belief that if you ask for something, then the Universe will deliver it. Of course this will strike a chord if you ever read “Ask and you will receive” in the New Testament of the Bible, or if you came across the New Age “Cosmic Ordering” idea. These ideas have been around a long, long time but “The Secret” has packaged it up in a DaVinci Code kind of way to sell it to a new market.
I watched the film recently and found I had an enormous mix of responses. You can find a whole range of views and opinions about this film on the net – everything from the view that “The Secret” is the answer to life, the universe and everything to the view that’s it’s psychobabble nonsense. Actually, I think it’s neither of these things.
When I watched the film, which is basically a talking heads documentary, I enjoyed the graphics, but didn’t enjoy the rather trite little “drama” scenes used to illustrate the points, and the speakers, for me, ranged from inspiring to PU-U-U- LLEEEEZE – Let me OUT of here!!! (I’ll leave you to make your own judgement on exactly who fell into which category!)
It is EASY to be critical of this film – you could easily say it is simply positive thinking embellished to the point of magical thinking. However, there are useful and inspiring messages in it –
- Starting your day with thoughts of gratitude orientates you towards an awareness of the positive in your life.
- Having a positive mental attitude is likely to help you to greater happiness.
- What you focus is on is what you experience most in life.
But where it goes wrong for me is pushing it into the magical realm of a belief system that we entirely create our own reality and that our thoughts will be responded to by the universe which will give us exactly what we think. This lends itself to a blame-the-victim mentality where suffering is seen to be a result of the person’s own thinking – they brought cancer, or violence, or abuse, or whatever, down on themselves. This is distasteful and naive. It also lends itself to the no-effort-required view that you don’t have to strive for anything you can just lust after it hard enough and the universe will deliver it!
And yet, and yet……….
Here’s the most interesting thing for me about it so far. It’s not the positive thinking bit. I reckon that idea is difficult to challenge. There’s ample evidence from psychologists and philosophers that taking a deliberate focus on the positive can be beneficial not just in terms of mental health, but in terms of physical health, and recovery from serious disease. It’s also quite evident in life terms – from personal to business success.
Now it is quite clear to me that just thinking you can be whatever you want to be will bring that about is nonsense – as a 53 year old, 5 foot 5 inch man I will never get to play for the Harlem Globetrotters and I won’t run in the British 400 metre Relay Team at any Olympic games! You can NOT just “be whatever you want to be” – there ARE limits!
No, the interesting bit to explore is the idea that you create your own reality. I think this cosmic ordering kind of idea has got it the wrong way round. It doesn’t seem credible to me that there is some mysterious magical force in the universe which delivers your every wish if only you visualise it clearly enough and apply a type of faith to believing that whatever you visualise will come to pass. I do believe, however, that if you focus clearly on something, you raise your awareness to daily phenomena, events and circumstances which are relevant to that focus. I also think if you apply a highly motivated creativity to your focus then you are way more likely to actually achieve your goals. But I think this direction of flow is the opposite to that espoused in The Secret.
Stuff happens. Good stuff and bad stuff. We live in a chaotic universe. The development of scientific understandings of chaos and complexity shows us that chaos has both features of cause-and-effect and of randomness. Some things happen as a consquence of the actions of ourselves or those of others. But some things happen that are literally random. Nothing to do with anyone’s thought processes. How we cope with that stuff, how we adapt to that stuff……..that’s what radically alters our experience.
So our reality is created both by our experiences and by our reactions to our experiences. It’s not created by an intelligent or magical universe and it’s not created just by our thinking.
I’m glad I watched The Secret. Yes, its tacky focus on materialistic consumerism feels small-minded and is uncomfortable. But, it’s also thought-provoking and inspiring.
Heroes Not Zombies 
Thanks for the review. It’s my first time to read about it and I totally agree with you. I’m still curious to watch the movie though.
Bob,
Thank you for your well-reasoned review. I think you show great patience with it. It’s sort of a secular/materialistic religion. I am rather saddened at just how popular it is.
You point out some good things, but you also point out that they are, and have been, the wisdom of ages.
I don’t think you can be grateful just by someone telling you to be. I think it comes from personal experience (and suffering).
I enjoyed reading your post.
I like the message of The Secret, but I also thought the movie was beyond cheesy.
I want my own spaceship and I want off this planet!!!
great t.v show
peace.
Christopher, patience is one of my great strengths! (It’s what makes me good at “slow”!). I agree with you about the gratitude thing. It doesn’t sit easily with me – however – the closing scene of American Beauty where Kevin Spacey’s voiceover talks about being grateful for every little bit of his life I find INTENSELY moving! What I take from the gratitude recommendation is to bring positive elements of your life to the fore and I do think that’s a good thing.
Abarclay12 – cheesy is a good word – hey, dianarn, maybe your spaceship will take you to the cheesy moon! (The moon really IS made of cheese, isn’t it?)
Thanks for commenting kashifalvi – can I ask you something more? Did watching it change anything for you? Or, rather, did you change anything after watching it?
I’ll let you know when I see it. 🙂
And maybe one day I’ll fly over to your hospital and check it out a bit. I wish we had something like that here… we really need it.
It’s the pseudosceintific babble that annoys me: all this talk about “vibrations” and “fields” and even trying to shoehorn quantum mechanics into it.
None of these terms or concepts are used in any sort of intelligible way.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking positive: it’s a great idea, and more ritualized practices can help you stay on that track. But talking about that as if it were some sort of formalized scientific system, that there is more to it than your own motivations and thinking and how that affects what you DO, is just highly misleading nonsense.
There are many many ways people can fool themselves into believing that certain magical thinking has effects: confirmation bias, superstitious movement, etc. Heck, have you ever gone bowling, and found yourself trying to “steer” the ball with your hand even after it’s already halfway down the lane? Stuff like this is why you cannot entirely trust your own judgment or anecdotal experience as a guide to how reality actually works.
I agree Bad, the bit on quantum physics is one of the wobbliest bits by far. I like magic I must say but only in magic shows and fantasy – it can be a lot of fun! However, learning to live in, and enjoy, the real world instead of trying to get it to conform to our fantasies is definitely a good idea!
I have watched this movie in the beginnig of the year. The concepts in it has helped my life in many ways. There are many who critisize it too. It all depends on the way we look at it.
I am very grateful to the producer of that movie for presenting that in a very dramatic way. But one must not take everything in it literaly. If you can take the messages in it, it can transform your live. It has for me. So I know.
Gratitude, feeling good and positive and focusing on what u want are very good behaviours one must have. There are laws in this universe that works without us knowing them. Science has not found everything in this universe. So what I believe is that, if u align yourself with these laws then you can knowingly become what you want to be.
One think I believe now after watching this movie and exploring some other books and from my own experience is that, what we call good luck is something good that we attract to our lives without knowing why. Bad luck is something bad we attract to our lives without knowing why.
We often expose our subconcious mind to different information and it moves us along the line of those information it store as beliefs. And things happen in our lives without us knowing them.
So what I decided in my life after all these new information is that, I will not let my life go in Auto-Pilot mode. Instead, I can choose what my live would be in many areas. That is the biggest thing I learn from this movie.
I have given it to my friends because I think it will gives good message if a person is willing to listen with an open mind and I encourage people to see it as it can change our perception. However, it a person takes it literly and wait magic happen without doing the required action, then it will be a dissapointment.
Thankyou Nuwan for sharing your experience with this.
I do think that if people decide to live their lives more consciously, to more deliberately become involved in their own lives, then they benefit.
I think there’s something in this good or bad luck attracting more of itself but I also think that there really is randomness in our universe. Things happen that are really nothing to do with the way we think – the consequences of random events aren’t right out of our control however – we have choices.
I’m glad to hear you’re choosing not to go on auto-pilot or into zombie mode.
You’re being the hero of your own story.
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