Affirmation #15
You Already Know the Secret
Rethinking the Law of Attraction
The first time I was introduced to The Secret, I was twenty three, and I had just moved into my first apartment in a small town in rural Minnesota.
Red Lake Falls is beautiful. Situated between Crookston and Thief River Falls, the small community lies along a single road which dips gently into a valley before crossing the Clearwater river. On spring evenings the pathway leading to the bridge is lit by fireflies.
I rented an apartment on the main strip for about $400 per month. It was my first time alone, so a friend, to wish me well, gave me a copy of The Secret — a 2006 best-selling documentary, which I watched on my laptop.
The documentary is about the titular secret — the magic technique that will bring someone success, love, attainment, and happiness.
I hated that documentary from the moment I pressed the play button on my laptop screen. It took years to understand why.
At root, The Secret is repackaging of New Thought — a philosophy that originated with the work of a New Hampshire clockmaker, Phineas Quimby, in the early 1800's. It has patterned self-help literature ever since.
New Thought is an extension of mesmerism, which began by asserting the power of the mind to cure illness, and progressed to asserting the power of the mind to cure everything else. The Secret is a modern take on the New Thought movement, with quasi-pyschedelic overtones adopted from 1960’s LSD culture and a liberal dose of particle physics stolen from the 1980's.
The “secret” of The Secret is The Law of Attraction, which postulates that we have a metaphysical “vibe” that we cast out into the universe, and that the universe echoes back in the form of serendipity.
There are some normal, mundane ways in which this is true, but The Secret extends this idea very far, suggesting that visualizing what we want sends a signal to the universe that actually brings it about. In other words, imagine an elephant hard enough, and the universe will put one in your path.
I find this strain of thinking to be deeply repulsive. I have a bad history with it. I have seen good people…
