A brief review of The Secret DVD…. The Secret is a masterpiece of circular logic. A triumph of selective perception over scientific rigor. If you have time to waste and a free copy (for goodness sake, don’t buy it–that’s just what they want you to do–’prove’ them more right by making them wealthy!!!), slap this baby into your DVD player and prepare to hurt from the gullibility and absurdity. Warning: if you know someone that’s caught up in “The Secret” method, this may be an agonizing experience, too….
Tags: circular logic, psychology, selective perception, the secret
June 9, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I read THE SECRET and felt kind of like the ideas were there but the applications were not. I was visualizing and working on attracting the things I desire into my life, but not much was happening. I wanted results.
So I decided to attend a few seminars and ended up at James Ray’s Harmonic Wealth Weekend. (James Ray was one of the teachers in The Secret.) I have to say the weekend was the most amazing two days imaginable! Talk about results – I was able to move past some major barriers that had been weighing me down for years and come up with decisive ways to bring more wealth into my life on an everyday basis. I highly recommend this weekend and James Ray’s new book, Harmonic Wealth, to anyone who is ready to actually make some changes and stop making excuses. My life is on the MOVE!
Here’s to making it happen: harmonicwealth.com/read
June 9, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Making breakthroughs in one’s own psyche is great. Positive thinking is great – it’s much more effective than negative thinking. I’ll even say that having a positive attitude tends to be an ingredient in achieving success in life, whether it’s healthy relationships with others or simply accomplishing goals, including financial success.
But life is a symphony inside chaos. Our ability to create our own reality is very limited. For example, let’s say you “do everything right,” get a college degree, have a successful family, but then you’re in an auto accident, hit by a drunk driver, your kids are killed and you and your wife are paralyzed. The other driver had no insurance and was killed. All the wealth you amassed is spent on your medical bills, and you’re left in debt, too.
Is it your fault this happened? Was it your lack of a PMA (positive mental attitude)? Of course not. This is just an extreme example of how our ability to influence the path of our own lives is limited and subject to outside influences that can range to very small, to massively powerful – so much so that we are helpless to fight some of those influences. This is an example of an extremely powerful influence, but other, smaller influences play out in our lives every moment, all the time, just as we are influencing others.
For us to think that our own PMA will influence our life for good but have a net-zero impact on other people’s lives is also delusional. We influence others’ lives for good and bad all the time, without even knowing it most of the time. If you start a successful business selling widgets you decrease the market for someone else to sell widgets, and now they are poor, and they go kill themselves when they go bankrupt as a result. This is another extreme example, but you get the point – and it happens! No matter what you do, good or bad, you will affect “the universe” both positively and negatively.
Seeking a healthy psyche and a PMA is like mowing your lawn. We mow our lawns to do our part to try to make our little piece of the world look nice, but we have no idea if we will die while doing it, or the next day, or a terrorist will nuke our city block the next week, rendering our efforts moot. But we do it anyway – it’s a calculated risk we engage in that tends to favor benefits for us.
But it is delusional to fool yourself into believing that a PMA will bring you wealth, or that your PMA is universally beneficial in the universe. Even more dangerous are the offshoots people of such delusions fall into – “Conservative” notions that if a person is poor or struggling, then they have a negative attitude, haven’t worked hard enough, or are some how otherwise solely “responsible” for the problems they are having. This is justification for greed, not any sort of “truth.” These notions have rotted western civilization to it’s core. Fortunately, Europe has begun to see through these fallacies, but America is still mucking around in this mental sewage….
“The Secret” and it’s proponents that try to suggest that wealth comes to you if you do X are simply systems of control designed to enrich their proponents. Only some of the adherents are enriched – and that’s all they need to maintain the system – a few examples of “success” will delude millions of new recruits. And we humans love to believe in things…