Okay, here's the thing.
When I started this blog in February, my very first idea (after writing about how difficult it is to choose a blog name) was to write about "The Secret," Oprah Winfrey's book choice and latest pet philosophy. (Note: technically I suppose that it's not even her latest pet philosophy - now she is on to Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth ..." but it's one of her more recent ones.) I had vaguely heard of this book and film, but happened to catch an episode of Oprah that featured the bestseller when I was home sick.
I learned from the program that "The Secret" is based on "The Law of Attraction" which basically goes like this: Your thoughts either attract good things to you or bad things to you. If you think positively about things, you will attract positive things. That's it. That's the big, stinkin' secret. Do you feel better? Do you feel that your life has been revolutionized?
Of course, I do believe in the power of positive thinking. It makes perfect sense that you will be happier if you try to view your life with a positive attitude and remember that you are lucky for the things you have. But "The Secret" very explicitly states that if you think "properly" about what you want, you will get it, regardless of what it is. A perfect body? No problem. A million dollars? Easy! A trip around the world? Just think it, you'll get it! According to "The Secret," the Law of Attraction is essentially a giant cosmic vending machine.
In order to illustrate the incredible power of the Law of Attraction , Oprah interviewed a woman who had employed a Secret-endorsed "vision board" to achieve her goal. The woman was remodelling her kitchen, and pinned a picture of a stove that she really wanted to her bulletin/vision board so that the stove would "come to her." Then she went out and bought a stove! Wow! Cue heavenly chorus of angels singing in delight!!
See, before I watched "Oprah" I would have thought that she had acquired the stove through the Law of the Exchange of Money for Goods and Services. But no! It was the LAW OF ATTRACTION.
Oprah then interviewed a second woman who was single a year earlier. She read "The Secret." Then she met somebody and, a year later, got married. It was the Secret in action! How else could she have possibly met a member of the opposite sex? Cue heavenly chorus blah, blah, blah.
I was so fired up about this ridiculous Oprah episode that I immediately turned on my computer in order to write about "The Secret." But then I hesitated; should I write my second blog about a book I have never read? Won't that cause my 2.1 readers to question my journalistic integrity? I reluctantly decided to postpone the blog until I had read the book.
This created a problem for me, as I was determined not to spend one red cent on the book itself. I must admit that I did toy with the idea of stealing it from a bookstore. I figured that if I got away with it, I could attribute it to the Law of Attraction ... I wanted to read "The Secret" and it "came to me!" How's that for a scientific trial? But then I realized that I probably didn't have this "attraction" stuff down yet and I would probably get arrested and then fired from my job and I certainly wasn't risking all of that for the damn "Secret."
I decided to turn to the Toronto Public Library. I checked the online catalogue and learned that despite the fact that there are 274 copies in the Toronto library system, I was number 511 on the "hold list." So I resigned myself to waiting for 6 weeks until the book finally came in to my local branch. And then I started to read it.
My problems with "The Secret" are as follows.
1.) It's not a "secret." That's right ... these questionable ideas have been around for ages, and no amount of cover art featuring an unbroken wax seal will change that fact. (You can see from the picture that I'm not even joking about this. What, like the wax seal is going to prevent me from OPENING THE BOOK? I guess it will sell a lot of books to fans of "The Da Vinci Code" though.)
2.) Here's what you may not know, middle America. When you want something, and you create a "talisman" (say ... a picture of a stove on a "vision" board) and focus your energy on it, you are essentially following the dictates of pagan spellcasting. Yep - you are purchasing repackaged Wicca! I'm open minded, middle-America, so the fact that you're choosing to cast spells certainly doesn't bother me! But I'm willing to bet that it bothers you! Doesn't it, minivan-driving Oprah fan?
3.) It is essentially a license to be lazy, which may be one of the reasons for it's runaway success. According to the book, you just have to think positively and you will amass incredible wealth. Seriously. No job required. Same goes for losing weight - if you are carrying around extra weight it is because ... you guessed it ... you attracted it to you! Just stop doing that, will you? Attract money, not weight! Jeez, how much easier can we make this?
4.) The Law of Attraction only seems to "work" for shallow, lame-ass requests. A stove? A fiancee? What about the research scientists who have dedicated their lives to finding a cure for Cancer, Cystic Fibrosis or HIV/Aids? Are they not thinking "positively" enough in order to "attract" the cure? Surely the collective power of ALL of the people in the world who have been affected in some way by these diseases and want them eradicated should be enough to do the trick. Shouldn't it?
5.) And what about the people who SUFFER FROM those diseases? Did they "attract" the illness? And what about people who have suffered around the world? What about the Jews, the Slavic people, the disabled and the homosexuals who were massacred in the Holocaust? What about the Kulaks in the Ukraine under Stalin? Did they "attract" their fates? What about people who are starving around the world? Why aren't they "attracting" food? Is the fact that they are starving their fault?
When I started this blog in February, my very first idea (after writing about how difficult it is to choose a blog name) was to write about "The Secret," Oprah Winfrey's book choice and latest pet philosophy. (Note: technically I suppose that it's not even her latest pet philosophy - now she is on to Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth ..." but it's one of her more recent ones.) I had vaguely heard of this book and film, but happened to catch an episode of Oprah that featured the bestseller when I was home sick.
I learned from the program that "The Secret" is based on "The Law of Attraction" which basically goes like this: Your thoughts either attract good things to you or bad things to you. If you think positively about things, you will attract positive things. That's it. That's the big, stinkin' secret. Do you feel better? Do you feel that your life has been revolutionized?
Of course, I do believe in the power of positive thinking. It makes perfect sense that you will be happier if you try to view your life with a positive attitude and remember that you are lucky for the things you have. But "The Secret" very explicitly states that if you think "properly" about what you want, you will get it, regardless of what it is. A perfect body? No problem. A million dollars? Easy! A trip around the world? Just think it, you'll get it! According to "The Secret," the Law of Attraction is essentially a giant cosmic vending machine.
In order to illustrate the incredible power of the Law of Attraction , Oprah interviewed a woman who had employed a Secret-endorsed "vision board" to achieve her goal. The woman was remodelling her kitchen, and pinned a picture of a stove that she really wanted to her bulletin/vision board so that the stove would "come to her." Then she went out and bought a stove! Wow! Cue heavenly chorus of angels singing in delight!!
See, before I watched "Oprah" I would have thought that she had acquired the stove through the Law of the Exchange of Money for Goods and Services. But no! It was the LAW OF ATTRACTION.
Oprah then interviewed a second woman who was single a year earlier. She read "The Secret." Then she met somebody and, a year later, got married. It was the Secret in action! How else could she have possibly met a member of the opposite sex? Cue heavenly chorus blah, blah, blah.
I was so fired up about this ridiculous Oprah episode that I immediately turned on my computer in order to write about "The Secret." But then I hesitated; should I write my second blog about a book I have never read? Won't that cause my 2.1 readers to question my journalistic integrity? I reluctantly decided to postpone the blog until I had read the book.
This created a problem for me, as I was determined not to spend one red cent on the book itself. I must admit that I did toy with the idea of stealing it from a bookstore. I figured that if I got away with it, I could attribute it to the Law of Attraction ... I wanted to read "The Secret" and it "came to me!" How's that for a scientific trial? But then I realized that I probably didn't have this "attraction" stuff down yet and I would probably get arrested and then fired from my job and I certainly wasn't risking all of that for the damn "Secret."
I decided to turn to the Toronto Public Library. I checked the online catalogue and learned that despite the fact that there are 274 copies in the Toronto library system, I was number 511 on the "hold list." So I resigned myself to waiting for 6 weeks until the book finally came in to my local branch. And then I started to read it.
My problems with "The Secret" are as follows.
1.) It's not a "secret." That's right ... these questionable ideas have been around for ages, and no amount of cover art featuring an unbroken wax seal will change that fact. (You can see from the picture that I'm not even joking about this. What, like the wax seal is going to prevent me from OPENING THE BOOK? I guess it will sell a lot of books to fans of "The Da Vinci Code" though.)
2.) Here's what you may not know, middle America. When you want something, and you create a "talisman" (say ... a picture of a stove on a "vision" board) and focus your energy on it, you are essentially following the dictates of pagan spellcasting. Yep - you are purchasing repackaged Wicca! I'm open minded, middle-America, so the fact that you're choosing to cast spells certainly doesn't bother me! But I'm willing to bet that it bothers you! Doesn't it, minivan-driving Oprah fan?
3.) It is essentially a license to be lazy, which may be one of the reasons for it's runaway success. According to the book, you just have to think positively and you will amass incredible wealth. Seriously. No job required. Same goes for losing weight - if you are carrying around extra weight it is because ... you guessed it ... you attracted it to you! Just stop doing that, will you? Attract money, not weight! Jeez, how much easier can we make this?
4.) The Law of Attraction only seems to "work" for shallow, lame-ass requests. A stove? A fiancee? What about the research scientists who have dedicated their lives to finding a cure for Cancer, Cystic Fibrosis or HIV/Aids? Are they not thinking "positively" enough in order to "attract" the cure? Surely the collective power of ALL of the people in the world who have been affected in some way by these diseases and want them eradicated should be enough to do the trick. Shouldn't it?
5.) And what about the people who SUFFER FROM those diseases? Did they "attract" the illness? And what about people who have suffered around the world? What about the Jews, the Slavic people, the disabled and the homosexuals who were massacred in the Holocaust? What about the Kulaks in the Ukraine under Stalin? Did they "attract" their fates? What about people who are starving around the world? Why aren't they "attracting" food? Is the fact that they are starving their fault?
Incredibly, according to the book, IT IS their fault. Read this quote ... if you can bring yourself to:
"Often people ... recall events in history where masses of lives were lost and they find it incomprehensible that so many people could have attracted themselves to the event. By the law of attraction they had to be on the same frequency as the event... If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they have no control over outside circumstances, those thoughts of fear, separation and powerlessness, if persistent, can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time ... Nothing can come into your experience unless you summon it through persistent thoughts. (page 28)
And that's the point where I stopped reading the book.
Sorry about my lack of journalistic integrity, but I simply can't keep going. I didn't even make it through 30 pages, and I feel filthy. I do stand by my original assertion that "The Secret" is incredibly lame, but now I have to add ignorant, poorly written, and a hugely offensive waste of time. I don't know if you could classify a work blaming genocide, disease and famine victims for their situations as "hate literature," but it certainly walks a line. And there were many more idiotic ideas in the first 28 pages that I could have written about as well, but I'm tired of throwing up in my mouth.
I'm taking the book back to the library tomorrow, and I will enjoy watching it vanish into the "returns" bin. But I have put a post-it note on page 28 in the hopes that a future reader will find it. It reads as follows:
"If you have read this page and you want to keep reading, read this page again. If you still don't see what's wrong with this book, then go back to the library and take out a history book. Any history book will do. If you still don't see what's wrong with this book, then certainly the "Law of Attraction" will bring you what you deserve."
And I think I'll skip Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth."
A
