I've Got The Secret
What happened when I followed the best-selling book's advice for two months.
By Emily Yoffe
Posted Monday, May 7, 2007, at 5:17 PM ET
Decades before the best seller was published, my father knew the secret of The Secret. He was aware there were people with esoteric knowledge who controlled all the wealth, had all the power, and were specifically excluding him from getting any. He bought the books of his time that promised, like The Secret, to unlock these mysteries. I loved listening to him spin his theories about how things really worked—until either I got too old to believe him anymore, or his spinning took him further and further away from reality. He died with nothing, living under an assumed name.
So, I will acknowledge that I came to The Secret with a negative attitude. When I bought it, I quickly stuffed it into a plastic bag, glancing around Barnes & Noble to make sure I saw no one I knew. The last time I was this embarrassed at a bookstore was when I bought The G Spot, another best seller that provided instructions for achieving bliss. For the Human Guinea Pig column, I usually do things that readers are too embarrassed or too intelligent to do themselves—like entering a beauty pageant or entertaining at a kid's birthday party. I wanted to see if applying the rules of The Secret to my life would bring me the perfect happiness that it promises. But millions of you have already beaten me to this one. There are now 5.3 million copies of the book in print in the United States, and publisher Simon & Schuster says it is selling about 150,000 a week. A separate DVD version has sold at least 1.5 million copies. Groups have formed to discuss how to best live by The Secret's rules. It is a No. 1 best seller in Australia, England, and Ireland, and it is scheduled to be translated into 30 languages.
There's no secret to The Secret. The book and movie simply state that your thoughts control the universe. Through this "law of attraction" you "manifest" your desires. "It is exactly like placing an order from a catalogue. … You must know that what you want is yours the moment you ask." "See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It works every time, with every person." The appeal is obvious. Forget education, effort, performance. Everything you want—money, power, comfortable shoes—is yours simply by wanting it enough.
There are certain caveats. Apparently the universe has a language-processing disorder and doesn't comprehend standard English usage of the words don't, not, and no. So, as the book explains, if you summon the universe by saying, "I don't want to spill something on this outfit," the universe translates this as, "I want to spill something on this outfit." If only Rhonda Byrne, the television producer who is the author of the book and creator of the DVD, had been there to counsel those negative authors of the Ten Commandments!
Byrne says Shakespeare, Newton, Lincoln, and Einstein all owed their achievements to their understanding of the law of attraction. She asserts that "the discoveries of quantum physics … are in total harmony with the teachings of The Secret." To prove this, she explains, "I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them." (Pop quiz, Rhonda: What is the energy of a single photon [in eV] from a light source with a wavelength of 400 nm?) The book is dotted with quotations from great men of history that supposedly back up The Secret's assertions. Take this one from Winston Churchill: "You create your own universe as you go along." Something about this struck me as sounding not terribly Churchillian. I looked it up and it turned out Churchill did write it, but it was his mocking characterization of the metaphysical twits of his day.
Given my skepticism, how could I make myself believe in The Secret enough to give it a fair test? To quote one of The Secret's avatars, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Clearly, The Secret is drivel, but why should that stop me from sincerely throwing myself into seeing if it worked? I am already deeply susceptible to superstition and seeing signs—if I find a penny (faceup only), I pick it up knowing something good will happen to me. As self-absorbed as I already am, I loved the permission the book gave to sink deeper into a Jacuzzi of megalomania. As The Secret points out: "You are the master of the Universe. You are the heir to the kingdom. You are the perfection of Life." Just as I'd always suspected!
So, I vowed to follow Byrne's simple rules for abundance and see what happened. The book encourages one to start big: "It is as easy to manifest one dollar as it is to manifest one million dollars." But I thought starting with the million-dollar manifestation was like saying, "I love you" on a first date; I didn't want to scare the
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