Monday, March 12, 2007

The Secret secret

One of our readers posted a comment about The Secret, the latest empowering video released to great acclaim touted by everyone from Larry King of CNN fame to Oprah. The concern is that The Secret isn't really that much of a secret, just a repackaging of an earlier empowerment series from the past.
Although we haven't seen the video (yet) a little research suggests that this isn't so much a repackaging job so much as it is a grand slam of motivational authors such as James Arthur Ray and Jack Canfield or Chicken Soup fame to former NASA psychologist Denis Waitley presented in a pretty stirring video format.
The Law of Attraction, pre-visualizing, faith whatever you want to call it has been around for a long time, and sometimes this industry has to reinvent itself to stay current and this looks very much like what this is.
Maybe some of our readers would like to comment on this.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

According to The Secret video, many of the greatest and more 'englightened' minds (Einstein, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Ford, to name a few) have always known about the secret, while the rest of humanity has apparently been left in the dark, or so the makers of the video would have you believe. In fact, spiritual teachers have always been trying to educate the masses about the concept of positive visualization techniques, and how they can change one’s life, but nobody listened until it was repackaged as you say, and Oprah touted it as the second coming. Wayne Dyer, for instance, has been writing about it for years in the "You'll See It When You Believe It' in 1989, and "The Power of Intention" in 2004, as have many, many others. (I was actually quite surprised when he wasn’t one of the speakers in the video.)

In light of what’s going on around the globe, whether or not The Secret is cause for concern because it's an old concept that’s been repackaged is irrelevant. What is a cause for concern is whether or not we as a race are going to survive the next century. The inspirational speakers in the video (or the “awakened ones”) are simply suggesting that we all ‘wake up’ and start using the power of our minds to focus on the positives instead of the negatives to heal ourselves and in turn, the planet. This is an exciting time, but a critical one, all the power to the makers of The Secret for creating the message in a way that has grabbed the attention of millions.

The good news is, it really works - if you believe it will, that's the rub (and the secret). When I began counting my blessings instead of my sorrows, when I started applying the principle of ‘you attract what you think’, an explosion of mind-boggling, and unexplainable "coincidences" occurred. The list is too long to mention. Suffice to say that I went from being terribly unhappy in my job of over twenty years, to pursuing a life long dream of attending university to become a psychologist, without having to worry about financial hardship even though I am a single mother. How can it be possible that money is not an issue when I haven’t had to take out a loan (not from relatives or government sources or anyone else), I haven’t had to get a job, I haven’t won the lottery, and I certainly don’t live with anyone rich. I applied for a free scholarship and got it. Lucky? Coincidence? Or was it because I envisioned every single detail and believed with all my heart that it was possible?

No one can convince me that these laws of the universe do not exist. That’s what spiritual teachers have been trying to tell us all along – that we all have more power than we are using to create the things we want, and to create a better world in which to live in. It really is so simple. As we believe, so shall it seem to be. What would you rather believe?