By now, you’ve probably heard of The Secret – it’s been on Oprah twice and has gotten lots of press since. For the most part, I see the movie as inspirational. I have no problem with the movie’s positive thinking message. Yes, you should be confident in your own abilities and believe in your own success. That said, the pseudo-science behind the movie is utter bunk. It drives me up a wall to hear people appealing to quantum theory when they obviously don’t know what they’re talking about. And that’s what this article will be about.
So, let me start with what is The Secret?
According to Bob Proctor
“The Secret is the law of attraction!Everything that’s coming into your life you are attracting into your life. And it’s attracted to you by virtue of the images you’re holding in your mind. It’s what you’re thinking. Whatever is going on in your mind you are attracting to you.”
The book would lead you to believe that this Secret – the “law of attraction” was known yet suppressed by many of the famous people throughout history – even that it was recorded in stone in 3000 BC. (Sadly, there’s no source) The Secret and the Law of Attraction actually grew out of the New Thought Movement of the 19th century.
The book and movie claim that “The law of attraction says like attracts like, and so as you think a thought, you are also attracting like thoughts to you” or as Mike Dooley puts it “Thoughts become things.”
The Secret teachers would like you to believe that “Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think, those thoughts are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency. Everything sent out returns to the source. And that source is you.”
This wishful thinking is great to believe – if I only think about obtaining a million dollars, it will land in my lap in a few days. All I have to do is ask… believe… receive. Sadly, real life doesn’t work this way. eSkeptic author, Ingrid Hansen Smythe, explains the two conflicting ideologies that lie within the movie:
“The Secret relies heavily on fuzzy thinking, and nowhere is this fuzziness demonstrated better than by the fact that The Secret is actually proposing two completely different systems for achieving one’s goals and then blurring the line between those systems — in effect, selling the system that works on the back of the one that doesn’t. On the one hand, we are told that all that is required to get what we desire is to ask, believe, and receive. For example: A little boy wants a bike, he believes he will get a bike, he gets a bike (as dramatized in The Secret DVD). On the other hand, we are told that we can’t merely ask, believe, receive. “A lot of people watch The Secret and they say, ‘Well, I’m sitting around visualizing my millions coming into my lap.’ Well, they’ll come take your furniture away. And then how are you going to visualize [when you’re living] on the curb? You’ve got to act on it.†So, a little boy wants a bike, he gets a paper route to earn money to get a bike, he gets a bike. In the first scenario, the supernatural is required. In the second scenario, a paper-route is required. The second scenario is the one that most of us recognize as the only one that will actually work, in which a person has an “idea,†then acts on that idea, and then gets the desired results. The second system renders irrelevant the first system…
Perhaps the believer in The Law of Attraction imagines that to use both systems in conjunction is more powerful than using just the one. It seems to me that this is like a woman using some form of birth control and then lying back and affirming “I will not get pregnant! I will not get pregnant!†It seems obvious that it is the birth control, and not the positive thinking, that is getting the job done. Certainly affirmations alone do nothing to prevent pregnancy — any woman who believes otherwise is undoubtedly a mother.”
Or to summarize – do you think you received what you wanted because (1) you wished for it or (2) you worked for it?
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