The Hubris of 'The Secret'

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Registered: 03-09-2001
The Hubris of 'The Secret'
6
Sun, 03-25-2007 - 10:48am

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/213/story_21359_1.html

"The Hubris of 'The Secret'
As a cancer survivor I'm not sure I buy the 'create your own reality' stuff in 'The Secret.' And if it's true, what about God?

By Valerie Reiss

When I was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, I was afraid to tell my New-Agey friends and acquaintances. Mainly, I was afraid they would say, "Why did you do that to yourself?" Not out of cruelty, but from a genuine desire to help me see how I had "created my own reality," a central tenet of New Age thinking. Thankfully, no one said any such thing. (Though one woman did ask if perhaps I should have just ingested a lot of wheatgrass instead of having chemotherapy.)

This choose-your-own-adventure thinking has caught fire recently with the wild success of "The Secret" book and DVD by Australian TV producer Rhonda Byrne. There are already 400,000 copies of the book in print and Simon & Schuster just announced they’re printing two million more, which is what happens when Oprah champions your book in two separate shows and says this is how she’s lived her own life for years.

The book and the documentary-ish film are essentially the same: a compendium of talking heads—philosophers, life coaches, and authors—all talking about how the essence of our thoughts affects, nay, creates, the world around us through the power of quantum physics, energy, and our interconnectedness. It’s similar in a lot of ways to "What the Bleep Do We Know," but without the narrative Marlee Matlin part.

Except this time the production values are better—everything looks very luxe and DaVinci-code-esque—and the heads are all hitting the same point home over and over: If you "align" yourself by feeling good, the Universe (New Age-speak for God) will provide limitless abundance. This is illustrated in numerous dramatizations: a woman wraps her thoughts around a necklace in a window, pretty soon it appears around her neck; a gay man who’s harassed for his homosexuality starts practicing the secret and soon finds people are offering him new respect.

The "secret" is kind of like prayer on steroids: Instead of a personal God processing and granting requests, a web of energy simply bounces your mindset back at you in material form. As one of the teachers in the film, Mike Dooley, sums it up, "Thoughts become things."

I first encountered the "secret" about 13 years ago when it was much less sexily called "The Law of Attraction" or "Intentional Reality" by many, many authors and alternative spirituality teachers, from Esther and Jerry Hicks to Wayne Dyer to Deepak Chopra. Living at a yoga ashram the summer between sophomore and junior year of college, two friends and I were walking through the woods. City girl that I was, I carried a stick, hoping to fend off dangerous animals or deranged woodsmen.

My curly-haired friend Scott looked at the stick and shook his head, "What you resist persists," he said, very much the 22-year-old sage. He explained that what we fear, we "magnetize" and manifest in our lives. So by holding the stick as defensive weapon, I was actually putting us in unnecessary peril. I reluctantly let it go. And proceeded to head-trip myself on and off for years about my negative thoughts, which were abundant.

I would realize I was thinking negative thoughts, which would trigger more thoughts about how awful I was for thinking negative thoughts and how I was ruining my life with those thoughts, and so on and so on, until my head was ready to explode with all the bad juju. The only thing that freed me from that loop was something else I also learned that summer at the ashram, meditation."

(article continues...)

I found this interesting. Many varying views of "The Secret." I related to her statement that "The Secret" just repackages old wisdom from a number of sources, because that is how I felt, taking a look at the web site. Nothing really "new under the sun," essentially. In a way I believe that all the wisdom comes from within us, and connecting to the wisdom coming from many spiritual traditions. Like pieces of a puzzle, those bits of wisdom, spiritual practices, "truths" that resonate within our own spirit and inner perception, we take into ourselves, to use as tools to further our understanding of how the Universe works, how we work as spiritual beings, in this physical realm. I believe it's very important to check new information coming in against our own inner spiritual "barometer," using and trusting our own intuition. I don't believe any one path or philosophy has the whole picture or is the "whole package" that we need, but that as we evolve, lifetime to lifetime, we put together this picture, this wholeness, piece by piece. Each person's journey and building wisdom, different from the next, but containing just as much truth.

Comments? Thoughts?

Gypsy
)O(



Blessings,

Gypsy

)O(



iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sun, 03-25-2007 - 12:00pm

I felt the same way Gypsy.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-09-2001
Sun, 03-25-2007 - 3:07pm

This "information" is absolutely nothing new. New packaging, is all. And a large scalpel cut away from the balance and integrity necessary to wield Magic, which is all this really is. Working with energy of the Universe, uniting yoruself to it, with your own power, and implementing change to your reality. Without integrity, like a spiritual base of gratitude, do no harm, etc., it's just another way to exercise the "gimmee, gimmees," IMO. Unbalanced energy. When I wield such energy or Magickal workings, it is always, ALWAYS with DO NO HARM *and* leaving the details and the "best outcome" to my Goddess and God.

I have to remind myself, though, that while this is "old news" to many of us, to some folks out there, who haven't read what we've read, studied spiritual wisdom in the ways or to the extent or breadth, we have, this could very well BE "new news." I just think it's unbalanced and because of that, it can be dangerous to one's spirit, in the long run. JMO, though.

Gypsy
)O(



Blessings,

Gypsy

)O(



iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Sun, 03-25-2007 - 6:50pm

Good point... while it's not new to us, it is to some.

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2001
Mon, 03-26-2007 - 12:17am

Well, I still haven't seen the Secret movie in its entirety, and I didn't go to the link you provided to finish reading the article but I have to say that I can completely relate to this:
>>>I would realize I was thinking negative thoughts, which would trigger more thoughts about how awful I was for thinking negative thoughts and how I was ruining my life with those thoughts, and so on and so on, until my head was ready to explode with all the bad juju.<<<<

b/c that's exactly how I felt after hearing about the whole negative thoughts thing!
lol

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iVillage Member
Registered: 08-20-2001
Mon, 03-26-2007 - 12:21am
I agree with you- the part with the woman looking in the store window at that necklace freaked me out!!! I just thought it was so...eerie, I don't know-- definitely something weird about it. Good point, too, about "I have this" rather than "I'm working on that".
:-)
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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-22-2003
Mon, 03-26-2007 - 6:33am

Your posts reflect my sentiments exactly.