Groan. I hate what is happening with The Secret. It's taken a quite simple notion...focus on what you want vs. what you don't want...and turned it into a joke.

I don't begrudge people making a living. Truth to tell, I wish _I'd_ thought of repackaging a bunch of superhyped/popular ideas in a skinny little book with evocative graphics and making a great Caesar's mint off of it.

But this phenomenon is backfiring and causing me trouble in my work. On one hand, I have a former client telling me that they recognize things I taught him in the text...but that he 'get's it' more now for some reason. On the other, people who shy away from anything that gets too big (Tony Robbins anyone?) rejecting things they could really use.

What's The Secret? I mean, are you allowed to tell me?

The Secret is Fight Club!

It's a book that tells you that all you have to do is sit around wishing for shit and it will come to you. Conversely, people who are like, dying in the Sudan are in their predicament because they were thinking too negatively.

Or, as my Very Wiccan big brother and I snarked recently, it's a book that takes the idea of making your will manifest and removes aaaaaaaaaalll the need for personal responsibility and work from it.

Basically, the Secret is a rehashing of the Law of Attraction , which is itself a rework of operant conditioning with a metaphysical sheen.

eta: Jilli said it much better. That is the crux of my problem with it.

Or, as my Very Wiccan big brother and I snarked recently, it's a book that takes the idea of making your will manifest and removes aaaaaaaaaalll the need for personal responsibility and work from it.

Yeah, from what I read, you can just sit around your apartment wishing you were a millionaire, and then... that's it, I guess.

Mom generally likes Oprah but because of the Secret she's rather pissed off at her for pushing such trash.

Slate just did a piece on it, evidentally you can't put any kind of negatives out there. So you can't think "I don't want to be sick" because the universe will read that as "I want to be sick" and you'll never be well again.

Slate just did a piece on it, evidentally you can't put any kind of negatives out there. So you can't think "I don't want to be sick" because the universe will read that as "I want to be sick" and you'll never be well again.

I don't want to be rich.

If I were going to be charitable, I'd say that there is a teeny chance of a well-meaning intention in it...but given that the author is a former tv producer who saw the benefit of corralling all the best selling self-help gurus into one big happy money printing machine...I dunno.

I joke with my clients that they don't need to read all the self-help books because I already have...and this one might be a sort of 'Reader's Digest' ploy.

It includes more than just think a thought and it will be done...to be fair...but because the content is so thin, I think it is really meant as a gateway drug to get people to go to the various author's websites and buy their programs.

In fact, the website for the book is basically a list of all the other places you can spend money once you've gotten a taste of the Secret.

It's a book that tells you that all you have to do is sit around wishing for shit and it will come to you.

oh, right. Boston Legal spoofed this with Denny Crane wishing for Raquel Welch. He got Phyllis Diller instead :)