A response to "The Secret": The Super Dooper Dooper Secret of All Humanity and All Creation! (j/k)
The Secret, the title for another self help book/dvd isn't much more than a reminder of the same principles self help books, movies and motivational speakers have been saying for decades, if not centuries. Books like these are making internal discord, strife and empty pockets more apparent. (the exact opposite of what they set out to do, i presume) Of course, there are some self-help books that can massage many of our "unfortunate" minds pointing towards insight, light, and perhaps an awakening. And sure, it is okay to support and consume them. But not in the same way television is watched hours on end, and not in the same way food is taken for granted and eaten mindlessly day out, day in. Who is this book being marketed to anyway? Is it for the peeps who watch Oprah on a daily basis; who buy only top sellers? Is it for the crying & trying everyday folk like me? Is it for everybody? Sure, the pursuit of happiness is human nature, right? So maybe we should all just read/watch this?
And if we ever do or have already, we need to know (if we don't) that there is way more to the formula than the Secret can offer. From the Integral Institute's conversation with Julian Walker & Ken Wilber:
As with any “you create your own reality” schema, The Secret fails what can be called “the Auschwitz test.” According to The Secret, everyone who was murdered at Auschwitz—or Rwanda, or Darfur—created that reality for themselves, and therefore they are to blame for their fate. For obvious reasons, this position is an unconscionable as it is untenable.
• By teaching that the world quite literally revolves around you, The Secret encourages and entrenches narcissism. In developmental psychology, narcissism doesn’t mean an unhealthy obsession with thinking only about yourself, it means you can’t think about yourself. The capacity for self-reflexive awareness just isn’t there. The entire world and everyone in it is simply an extension of your-self,and you are literally unable to take the perspective of another human being. This is not mystical union; this is pre-rational fusion, and without the ability to take the perspectives of other sentient beings, the entire foundation for ethics evaporates.
• Actually, you are creating the universe moment-to-moment, but it’s not the “you” that you think. According to the great contemplative traditions, every person has at least two “selves”: the finite, temporal, egoic self-sense, and the infinite, transcendental, unqualifiable
Self,or I-AMness. Your Self, your I-AMness, is indeed giving rise to
the entire radiant Kosmos in this and every moment, but The Secret
teaches that your separate self has the power to personally manifest a new car, win the lottery, or cure cancer… and this simply isn’t how things work.
• “The Law of Attraction” is true—as far as it goes. The problem is that The Secret takes this one relatively small piece of the puzzle and makes it the entire puzzle. A positive outlook will change your life and your intentions will co-create your reality, but so will brain chemistry, interior level of development, family relationships, natural disasters, cultural trends, language structure, environmental toxins, and, basically, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
• Developmentally, if one uses a scale ranging from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral to super-integral, The Secret teaches the magical thought structures that were humanity’s leading edge several hundred thousand years ago. Ken Wilber explains, The Secret encourages childlike “primary process thinking,” which can be in the form of “the law of attraction” (e.g., if one black thing is bad, then all black things are bad) and “the law of contagion”(e.g., if this particular man was powerful, then a lock of his hair must be powerful too).
AND ANYWAY, "it’s not about what they believe, it’s about why they believe, how they come to believe, how they don’t recognize they’re believers, how they treat people who don’t believe, and how they don’t recognize when they’re hypnotized by believing".~Steven Sashen
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