(Rhonda Byrne, The Secret. New York: Atria Books, 2006)
I had heard a lot about the book that followed the sensational video production. I looked for an opportunity to read it. And in the recent months almost every bookshop I entered had the book exhibited at the entrance among bestsellers. I couldn’t get to read the book since I kept giving out as gifts the copies I had bought. Then mysteriously one day the book came to me. That is THE SECRET: you get what you want!
I thought the people – young people – who had received gifts of this book from me also deserved a serious review of the same. Secrets are always tempting. It is important to look at them critically.
To begin with, let me summarize the contents of the book in the following simple points:
1. What is this book about? It is about a law: The Law of Attraction states that like attracts like. It is an infallible law of nature which brings you whatever you are thinking about. That is, thoughts become things.
2. “Our job as humans, therefore, is to hold on to the thoughts of what we want.” You become what you think about most, but you also attract what you think about.
3. How does this work? Our thoughts produce vibrations or frequencies. If you are thinking a thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency on a consistent basis. Universe responds to the frequency of the thought and produces corresponding result. The thoughts thus attract things. “See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it.”
4. 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. The law of attraction does not compute ‘don’t, not, no….’ So your negative thoughts too unexpectedly become reality.
5. So it is important to have your thoughts well focussed. You can control your thoughts by monitoring your feelings since there is an invariable relationship between the two. So, the key is our emotions. Our thoughts produce corresponding feelings. It is easier to become aware of our feelings than our thoughts. Emotions let us know what we are thinking. Therefore by monitoring our feelings we can control also our thoughts.
6. Our feelings, and subsequently our thoughts, can be monitored through meditation and awareness. Secret shifters, such as pleasant memories, may also be needed to shift our emotional level from unwanted state to the wanted state of good feeling and thought.
7. The most beautiful emotion is love, with highest frequency. The greater love you feel and emit the corresponding frequency the greater the power you are harnessing.
8. How to make the secret work?
Step 1 – Ask : Be clear of what you want. Sometimes it is necessary to write it down, or have Visual Board where you stick up images of what you want.
Step 2 – Believe : Act, think, speak and behave already as if you have received what you want.
Step 3 – Receive : feel the way you will feel once your desire has manifested.
9. There are two powerful processes to realize the secret:
a. Process of gratitude: live your daily life in an attitude of gratitude for whatever life offers, and this attitude produces a situation of abundance.
b. Process of visualization: visualize often what you want and what you want to be; this focuses your thought, and produces the frequency and the corresponding effect.
10. The secret to money is to focus on a feeling of abundance and prosperity and thus to attract abundance. This abundance approach also makes you be generous. And the more you give the more you get.
11. It is the same to relationships. When your thoughts, words and actions are focussed on good relationships you do attract them. It begins with you: when you treat yourself with love and respect, you will attract people who show you love and respect.
12. The law of attraction can also be applied to health. The placebo effect is a proof of this: “when a patient truly believes the tablet is a cure, he receives what he believes and is cured.” Health and eternal youth are attainable by just focussing on them.
13. Life is meant to be abundant. Instead of focussing on the world’s problems then, give your attention and energy to trust, love, abundance, education and peace. To change anything in the world, go within and emit a new signal with your thoughts and feelings.
14. Conclusion: Everything is energy. You are energy. We are creators of the Universe. We create with our thoughts. Universe emerges from thoughts. You get to fill the blackboard of your life with whatever you want. The only thing you need to do is feel good now!
The thoughts offered in the book are simple, logical and pragmatic. Right? No. Reading between the lines, if you are a sharp reader, you will realize it is a trap. It is not Christian. And it is not so simple, after all! Let me share with you some of my spontaneous reaction to the content of The Secret:
a. The secret itself is nothing new, as the book also concedes. Sages of ages past have said it. But more recently there have been a lot of literature on similar thought. Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, first published in 1952, and has sold over 20 million copies in 41 languages. A less popular book in similar style is Merlin R. Carothers’ Power in Praise (1972). Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), first proposed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970’s, is built on similar principles of conditioning our thoughts and self-talk to achieve what we want. Still more recently motivational books and talks by Antony Robbins’ on Awaken the Giant Within (1991) reiterate the same concept. But what is special about The Secret is that it absolutizes the relationship between our thoughts and reality in a law of nature, the Law of Attraction, as it calls it.
b. The book, that is merely a collection of quotations and hence also full of repetitions, tends to brainwash the reader and to propose the law of attraction as the panacea to all problems. The solution to life-problems seems so easy that you are really duff if you do not know it! But we know life is also full of mysteries: sickness, old age, death, loss of dear ones, etc. Do they all occur just because someone does have a thought about them; or can they be averted by merely being focussed? The Secret seems to claim to offer health and eternal youth, just by focussing on them.
c. More intriguing in The Secret is the question of God. Here is where one can see a trace of the so-called “New Age Movement”. Much like Buddhism, the book is creating a religion without God – at least bereft of a personal God that you can relate to. God is simply energy, the universal mind or the universal order, what Buddhism calls, “Dhamma”!
I thank God, that I am a Christian. I have a possibility to relate to a God who is a Person, and above all I can see, hear and touch this God in the person of Jesus Christ (1Jn 1:1-3). The God I believe in lets me build a personal relationship with Him, and to experience Him in my life. Christianity also gives me the serenity to live with and find meaning in the mysteries of life: birth, sickness, death, after-life!