Briefly, "The Secret" and the Law of Attraction is mostly a bunch of new age woo woo nonsense. It’s pseudoscience.
But it’s not entirely gut rot either. There’s a tiny tiny kernel of something useful in there. That itty bitty kernel might be of use to you because we were talking about it earlier. Sort of. More or less.
The basic premise is that a person’s thoughts can directly change their life. I won’t get into the history of this thinking except to mention that it really took off when the author of The Secret, Rhonda Byrne, appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s show and that it is an amalgamation and warping of turn of the 20th century works by a Christian Socialism advocate named Wallace D Wattles and Thought Vibration or The Law of Attraction in the Thought World by William Walker Atkinson.
Also relevant is that Thought Vibration theory has been highly criticized by many learned and spiritual people, such as Ghandi. Yep, that Ghandi. It’s advocates tend to be fringe personalities like Napoleon Hill.
Okay, so basically it says that we are spiritual beings of light and energy. As such we resonate a cosmic frequency, or vibration. Your thoughts will either increase or decrease your frequency depending on whether they are positive or negative. So, go through your day humming that song from Peter Pan, You Can Fly.
You can see some of the problems immediately, right? The reason you don’t have a girlfriend is because your not thinking positive enough thoughts about the girlfriend of your dreams rather than that you are incarcerated, for example. Or unlucky, or whatever. If the girlfriend of your dreams happens to be a Deltoid, like off of Star Trek, you might be trying to positively vibrate the impossible as well.
Like attracts like under this theory. So if you want to "manifest" money or love or whatever into your life, you need to match your cosmic frequency to those things. Of course, this is the reverse of general magnetic principles of attraction where actually, opposites attract and same repels. Pesky electrons ruining a good thing.
All that said, when they get down to the nitty gritty of how you’re supposed to change your frequency, it’s not horrible advice, so long as you maintain some freaking perspective. A lot of it is stuff we’ve heard before, in fact.
Visualization. Not startling, we hear that in sports, the military, confidence and anxiety seminars, work, schools, etc. Probably the biggest place is in sports. So we’re mostly all familiar with that. And that’s not half bad. It’s a way to mentally practice things out and to refine a course of action etc.
Meditation. Hardly dramatic, meditation is just a mental exercise as well. It’s a way of recoding your brain, as an analogy, to look for opportunities. And to process bad events throughout the day. To recenter ourselves into a place where we can focus and self direct. We see this in prayer, in spiritual practices like Wicca, etc. For example, if I want to manifest money, casting a spell about money every day for a while will naturally get me to thinking about it, where I wouldn’t have otherwise. I might remember a reimbursement I had forgotten about. The money was always there waiting for me to do what I need to do to collect it though. It didn’t magically appear because I vibrate the frequency of money. Or, maybe I take a chance I otherwise would have talked myself out of and put in a resume for a higher salary. That kind of thing.
A friend of mine is a practicing witch and she’s been teaching her children to make spells. So her daughter casts a spell for money every week and uses a penny as part of the spell. She’s been finding pennies and other money, but mostly pennies and saving them for over a year. She’s made about $50. Now, these spells, or ‘manifesting' didn’t create the pennies. They didn’t even put them in her path. What’s happened is that now she’s looking for loose change all the time, everywhere and she’s gotten very good about knowing where to look. She’s created a habit. Vending machines, stair wells, along the edge of sidewalks, street curbs, in planters near seating areas, and the like. She scours those places everytime she sees one.
So, manifesting as a special power is bullshit. But training your brain to look for what you want is not. Neither is ocusing your mental energy into taking that chance instead of spending it on negative self talk. It’s not an absolute or a guarantee, of course, but it does significantly increase one’s chances to get what one wants.
Human beings have a terrible tendency toward horrible self talk. We train our brains to work against us in general and our deepest desires. Many of us are taught from an early age that desire is synonymous with sin. Others are badged throughout life with the message that they don’t deserve or are not good enough to attain their desires.
That terrible self talk is where our discussion took place last time. I’d hope that you would have thought through that discussion some more, but you may not be able to make that leap. You’re invested.
Last thing to mention here is that Wattles' work emphasized the necessity of work and action after the visualization process, otherwise you’re just dreaming. But The Secret by Rhonda Byrne bypasses that action step and promotes ideas of magical thinking. Like if you visualize Cindy Crawford or whoever the top model now is as a girlfriend, then Cindy Crawford, literally Cindy Crawford, will show up scantily clad at your doorstep begging you be her 'Daddy’. That’s where the Law of Attraction is a warping of New Thought philosophies from a century ago. Ralph Waldo Emerson was involved in the New Thought movement. Clearly, the modern version is far afield.
And that’s why you don’t understand it. It makes no sense and you’re not stupid. Depressed maybe, but not a blithering idiot. Congratulations. That puts you ahead of millions of others. That stupid book sold 19 million copies in it’s first year and that was more than a decade ago.
She’s had two more books on the same theme more or less since then. The Power published in 2010 and The Magic published 2012.
