Heroes Not Zombies

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.

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