The Secret Flaws

The Secret is mostly about The Law of Attraction. It posits that what we focus on, we attract into our lives. To further state the point, we have to decide what it is we want. This may seem absurdly simple, but many people go through their lives not doing this: making specific their goals, deciding what exactly it is they mean to get out of life.

Wishy washy wants and likes don't count. Say what it is you want. Make the decision.

The Secret seems to me to fail in the sense of only painting the first step in a process. A good analogy is a book like Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled. It provides a great context, and great paradigm for affecting change. The problem is, now that you've decided who are, and what you want to do (essentially, something you can do on the couch, or lying down), what do you DO then, and HOW do you DO it? In this sense, a great follow on to The Road Less Travelled is Gray's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habits are what? Things we reguarly DO. The first book provides an idea of who you are and why you should do what you should do. The second explains HOW to do what you'll be doing.

The Secret breaks off after Why and Who you are. There are a few incidental remarks about acting on where our focus is. They're assuming an awful lot, that masses of indebted, overweight and otherwise lazy people are going to focus on Mercedes Benz' and holidays in the tropics, and somehow the Mercedes is going to drive itself into the driveway and they're going to be beamed up, at no effort, to their island paradise. Sorry, not going to happen.

The Secret is true in the sense that when we visualise what we want and what we intend for ourselves strongly enough, we are also able to both recognise opportunities and motivate ourselves to respond to them in ways we were perhaps not conscious of before.

I can testify to the fact that I have been inspired to lose weight and gain fitness. That's who I see, and what I see. But doing so requires commitment and effort over a period of time. Do abs magically appear just because I focus on them? No. But that focus is the reason I was at gym at 7am this morning, and the reason I was able to put in that extra effort. It's also the reason I will go again and again and again. It starts with focus, but after that, it comes back to effort, willingness, commitment (all factors of motivation).

The other chronic flaw in The Secret is this: there is an insane sense of entitlement implicit in The Secret. They suggest that every human being can attract abundance, and that there are no limits to the abundance we can attract. Re he he heally? Actually, there are limits, and these limits are very real. Not every human being can own a car on this planet. Right now the human population is approaching 7 billion. There are still less than 1 billion vehicles, although this figure is increasing quickly. Even so the resources to fuel less than 1 billion vehicles are being strained in terms of supply. Can the world support a car per person? Can we produce 7 times as much fuel as we do now? Get real! We can't do that; not the way the world is currently configured.

This idea of abundance is true in the more important sense: in terms of happiness and love. But it is grossly incorrect to assure people that every person can have abundance in terms of material possessions in particular. The entire planet is sick because of our collective compulsive shopping habit, many species are becoming extinct as human beings suck away resources, leaving fewer for other species, and polluting the environment as they do so.

There is a way to live in abundance, and it doesn't involve dominating other human beings, or taking away resources from other living things. It is by connecting ourselves to the world, and the universe. The Secret acknowledges this, and that energy forms the basis of everything. It flows through everything. Do we not realise that we human beings are gorging ourselves with disproportionate amounts of energy? Each human being living the Western ideal uses up fantastic amounts of energy on the average day. Are we so irrational that we really believe every human being is entitled to his own house, his own transport device, various boxes and gadgets for music and sound, heating, cooling and communication, all of which requires a lot of resources to build, and many more to run? Are entire forests worth liquidating so that people can drive themselves to the mall to watch movies?

While The Secret is to some extent valid and spiritually astute, it nevertheless betrays an implicit and subtle delusion that masses of people subscribe to - entitlement, greed, investment in things above people. Our relationship with ourselves, each other and the other living creatures, and also non living elements, is what determines the extent to which not only the universe but also ourselves are in balance. Right now, the species of homo sapiens is supremely unbalanced and unhinged. To reach equilibirum will require massive cultural and lifestyle shifts, and new, more modest levels of consumnption - at least until we can harness technologies like fusion that allow us to get something for nothing.