Decoding "The Secret" (from Newsweek)
Eric Python
Oprah lives by it. Millions are reading it. The latest self-help sensation
claims we can change our lives by thinking. But this 'new thought' may just be
new marketing.
By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
March 5, 2007 issue - If you're a woman trying to lose weight, you had your
choice of two pieces of advice last week. One, from the American Heart
Association, was to eat more vegetables and exercise an hour a day. The other
was from a woman named Rhonda Byrne, a former television producer who has
written what could be the fastest-selling book of its kind in the history of
publishing with 1.75 million copies projected to be in print by March 2, just
over three months since it came out, plus 1.5 million DVDs sold. Byrne's
recommendation was to avoid looking at fat people. Based on what she calls the
"law of attraction"—that thoughts, good or bad, "attract" more of whatever
they're about—she writes: "If you see people who are overweight, do not observe
them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect
body and feel it." So if you're having trouble giving up ice cream, maybe you
could just cut back on "The Sopranos" instead.
You'd think the last thing Americans need is more excuses for self-absorption
and acquisitiveness. But our inexhaustible appetite for "affirmation" and
"inspiration" and "motivation" has finally outstripped the combined efforts of
Wayne Dyer, Anthony Robbins, Dr. Phil and Mitch Albom. We have actually begun
importing self-help—and from Australia, of all places, that citadel of
tough-minded individualism, where just a couple of years ago Byrne was a
divorced mother in her 50s who had hit a rocky patch in her business and
personal lives. It was in that moment of despair, when she "wept and wept and
wept" (as she recounted to Oprah on the first of two broadcasts devoted to her
work), that she discovered a long-neglected book dating from 1910 called "The
Science of Getting Rich." In it she found how to let your thoughts and feelings
get you everything you want, and determined to share it with the world. She
called it "The Secret."
And it was that stroke of marketing genius that turned what might have been a
blip on the Times's "Advice, How-To, Miscellaneous" best-seller list into a
publishing phenomenon that Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, says "could
become this decade's 'Tuesdays With Morrie'." "Nobody," she adds, "ever went
broke overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public."
Self-help books roll off the presses with the regularity of politicians'
biographies, and sell much better; Wayne Dyer all by himself has written 29 of
them with sales estimated at 50 million. But Byrne had something else going for
her. "It was an incredibly savvy move to call it 'The Secret'," says Donavin
Bennes, a buyer who specializes in metaphysics for Borders Books. "We all want
to be in on a secret. But to present it as the secret, that was brilliant."
To a tired genre full of earnest bullet points and windy exhortations, "The
Secret" brings breathless pizzazz and a market-proven gimmick, an evocation of
ancient wisdom and hidden conspiracies that calls to mind "The Da Vinci Code."
Torchlights flicker on the 90-minute DVD and the soundtrack throbs portentously
before it gets down to giving you the secret for getting your hands on that new
BMW. The book is a miracle of cover art, a jacket suggestive of a medieval
manuscript punctuated by a crimson seal. "It evokes the film, with the secret
scrolls and all," says Judith Curr, executive vice president of Atria Books, a
division of Simon & Schuster that brought out the book in partnership with
Portland, Ore.-based Beyond Words Publishing. Its very size, small enough to
hide, adds to its aura. "It feels special, like it contains really important
information."
What it doesn't contain, though, is a secret. That should be self-evident to
anyone who has ever been in an airport bookstore. The film and book are built
around 24 "teachers," mostly motivational speakers and writers (dressed up by
Byrne with titles like "philosopher" or "visionary") who have been selling the
same message for years. Jack Canfield is probably the best-known of them. Is it
really true that a cabal of elites has conspired to keep the rabble from getting
their hands on "Chicken Soup for the Soul"?
The "secret" is the law of attraction, which holds that you create your own
reality through your thoughts. You can, if you wish, take this figuratively, to
mean that by changing your thoughts you can feel better about your situation in
life. Or you can view it as a source of inspiration—that by believing you will
succeed, you will perform better in the race or the test or your relationships.
But that's not what "The Secret" is saying. Its explicit claim is that you can
manipulate objective physical reality—the numbers in a lottery drawing, the
actions of other people who may not even know you exist—through your thoughts
and feelings. In the words of "author and personal empowerment advocate" Lisa
Nichols: "When you think of the things you want, and you focus on them with all
of your intention, then the law of attraction will give you exactly what you
want, every time." Every time! Byrne emphasizes that this is a law inherent in
"the universe," an inexhaustible storehouse of goodies from which you can
command whatever you desire from the comfort of your own living room by
following three simple steps: Ask, Believe, Receive.
In a dramatized interlude in the film, a young woman ogles a necklace in a
window, and the next thing you know, it's around her neck. A child imagines
himself with a new bike, and it appears outside his door. No need to do a lot of
boring chores or get a newspaper route: the universe provides. Contrariwise, a
worrywart who obsessively checks the locks on his bicycle returns to find it
stolen; the law of attraction has called down on him just the predicament he
hoped to avoid. A financial consultant reliably finds parking, just by
visualizing an empty spot—which implies, by another law of the universe, the one
about two objects occupying the same space, that he believes his thoughts can
induce someone else to leave. Is this someone you'd trust with your investments?
Perhaps this proposition has not been analyzed closely enough by fans of "The
Secret," including Oprah, who exuberantly told her audience that she'd been
living her whole life according to the law of attraction, without even knowing
it.
On an ethical level, "The Secret" appears deplorable. It concerns itself almost
entirely with a narrow range of middle-class concerns—houses, cars and
vacations, followed by health and relationships, with the rest of humanity a
very distant sixth. Even some of the major figures in the film confess to
uneasiness with its relentless materialism. "I love 'The Secret' but I also
think it's missing a couple things," says "metaphysician" Joe Vitale. "If I were
producing it, I would have added something more about serving others." Vitale
defends the dream homes and sports cars as baubles to draw people in, in hopes
they will employ the law of attraction for higher purposes. Not that the law has
any bias toward higher purposes. On the contrary, Byrne writes, it is totally
impersonal and "it does not see good things or bad things." In the film, the
Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith compares it to the law of gravity: "If you fall
off a building it doesn't matter if you're a good person or a bad person, you're
going to hit the ground."
Which is equally true if someone pushes you off a building—or, let's say, beats
your brains in with a club during a bout of ethnic cleansing. The law of
attraction implies that you brought that fate down on yourself as well. "The law
of attraction is that each one of us is determining the frequency that we're on
by what we're thinking and feeling," Byrne said in a telephone interview, in
response to a question about the massacre in Rwanda. "If we are in fear, if
we're feeling in our lives that we're victims and feeling powerless, then we are
on a frequency of attracting those things to us ... totally unconsciously,
totally innocently, totally all of those words that are so important."
She has seen evidence of this in her own life, she says, where "many tough
things" happened to her. "The Secret" devotes several pages to the weight she
gained after her pregnancies. Unaware of the law of attraction, she mistakenly
believed that eating made her fat. She now recognizes her error: "Food is not
responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible
for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight."
And today, she maintains an ideal weight of 116 while eating anything she wants.
A woman in the film claims to cure her breast cancer in three months, without
chemotherapy or radiation, by visualizing herself well and watching funny movies
on television. Whatever you think of that as medical advice—Byrne insists she's
not telling people to avoid doctors—it makes psychologist John Norcross, a
professor at the University of Scranton who is an authority on self-help books,
wonder: what about the people whose cancers don't get cured? "It's
pseudoscientific, psychospiritual babble," says Norcross. "We find about 10
percent of self-help books are rated by mental-health professionals as damaging.
This is probably one of them. The problem is the propensity for self-blame when
it doesn't work."
On a scientific level, the law of attraction is preposterous. Two of the
"teachers" in the film are identified as quantum physicists, which they are,
although on the fringes of mainstream science. One, Fred Alan Wolf, is mostly an
author of science books with a quasi-mystical bent, and the other, John Hagelin
(who has run for president on the Natural Law ticket), is affiliated with
Maharishi University of Management, in Fairfield, Iowa, which does research on
transcendental meditation. Both of them, contacted by NEWSWEEK, distanced
themselves from the idea of a physical law that attracts necklaces to people who
wish for them. "I don't think it works that way," says Wolf dryly. "It hasn't
worked that way in my life." Hagelin acknowledges the larger point, that "the
coherence and effectiveness of our thinking is crucial to our success in life."
But, he adds, "this is not, principally, the result of magic."
Wolf said he used his time in front of the camera to talk about the relationship
between quantum mechanics and consciousness, but all that evidently wound up on
the cutting-room floor. What he might have said is something like this: modern
physics says that atomic particles influence one another in ways that violate
our ordinary understanding of space and time, a phenomenon called "quantum
entanglement." The question is whether quantum signals can be perceived on the
scale of something like a neuron, a brain or a human being. Overwhelmingly,
physicists dismiss this idea. A minority, very much out of the mainstream, think
it's worth investigating, and a few claim to have experimental evidence that
thoughts can influence physical objects, such as the circuitry in a
random-number generator. But the effects are tiny, on the order of a few
hundredths of 1 percent. And there's no evidence you can use it to move a BMW
into your driveway.
But modern physics has reinvigorated a long tradition in American philosophy,
one in which "The Secret" stands squarely. "I can show you books written 100
years ago that say the exact same thing," says Beryl Satter, a professor of
history at Rutgers. Long before there was a "New Age," Satter says, there was
"New Thought"—a self-help movement that drew on 19th-century Americans'
suspicion of elites and on the Protestant tradition of looking for the "inner
light." You don't need doctors to heal you, priests to save you or professors to
instruct you: the secrets to health, success and salvation are within you. A
best seller in 1869 called "The Mental Cure" unleashed a flood of imitators,
which increasingly evoked "science" in their titles, hoping to capitalize on the
fascination with inventions like the telephone. "It was a short leap from 'You
can use the telephone to send messages' to 'You can use your mind'," Satter
says.
It was one of those books, "The Science of Getting Rich," by the long-forgotten
Wallace D. Wattles, that Byrne's daughter handed her one day in 2004, when she
was struggling with her various setbacks—the recent death of her father and a
budget overrun on a series, "Sensing Murder," she was producing for Australian
television. (She was a longtime producer on an Australian version of "The
Tonight Show," and her company was behind a reality series about marriage
proposals called "Marry Me.") Wattles's book struck such a chord with Byrne that
she plunged into a crash course in Western, Eastern, ancient and modern thought,
devouring "hundreds" of books and articles in just two and a half weeks. "That
was in December," she told NEWSWEEK. "In January I told my team we were going to
make the greatest film in history to date. They thought I'd gone mad." Inspired,
she flew to the States in July 2005 and began lining up people to interview; the
film was finished six months later and she began trying to find an Australian
network to air it. The top-rated Nine Network was intrigued by her proposal, but
the finished film struck Len Downs, the program manager, as just "a whole range
of talking heads giving their basis of the secret of life." (It eventually ran
in Australia just a few weeks ago, and, says Downs, it didn't do all that well.)
But armed with the law of attraction, Byrne was confident things would work out.
A Web company just blocks from her office in Melbourne had a technology for
distributing streaming video over the Internet. Last March, her site
(http://thesecret.tv) began selling downloads and DVDs, one of which found its
way to Cynthia Black, president of the New Age-oriented publishing house Beyond
Words. Black, who had recently entered into a relationship with Atria, saw its
potential; by late November the book was in the stores and soon after got its
first break when Ellen DeGeneres featured it on her show. By the time Oprah ran
her first segment on it, on Feb. 8, it was already a huge success.
Byrne herself seems nonplused by her success, and remains a somewhat elusive
figure; she is sparing with interviews and didn't even appear on the second of
the two hours Oprah devoted to "The Secret." Her family in Australia said they
were told by Rhonda not to talk to reporters, although her mother, Irene Izon,
did offer this assessment to NEWSWEEK: "The thing is that Rhonda just wants to
bring happiness to everybody. That's the reason it all began. She just wants
everybody to be happy."
And to give her her due, she might actually be achieving some of that. There is
nothing, in principle, wrong with thinking about what makes you happy. Here is
someone she did make happy: Cheryl Cornell-Powers, 59, a Chicago training
consultant, who saw Byrne on "Oprah" and then watched the film. She discounted
the idea of curing one's own cancer, but liked the segments that emphasize
gratitude over resentment. "We look at our money and say, 'What fun it would be
to go out to dinner to places that are on our budget,' not, 'We can't do this
because we're on a budget'." Even a serious academic like Harvard psychologist
Carol Kauffman is willing to credit the idea that you can change your life by
consciously directing your thoughts in a positive direction. "Basically, it's
chaos theory," she says. "I don't think you can actually attract things to you.
But if you're profoundly open to opportunity, then when ambiguous events occur,
you notice them. I think what positive thinking does is raise your consciousness
to possibilities so they can snag your attention. We're starting to see some
empirical studies on that now."