Last weekend a colleague of mine brought to my attention some vaguely familiar-sounding self-help phenomenon called, evocatively enough, ‘The Secret’. In a matter of a couple hours she was accosted by three different people each empathically promoting the significance of ‘The Secret’, and being an admitted self-help junkie and susceptible to naiveté she wondered if this was a sign from above, something more than mere coincidence. As if infectious she asked if I wanted to see the video attached to one of the emails sent to her regarding this ‘secret’ and absentmindedly I accepted.
I have watched about an hour of the video so far and initially I found it is a bit overproduced for self-help fare and almost satirically shrouded in the pageantry of a Dan Brown novel. There is a perverse pleasure to be derived from watching something with such hokum showmanship, and I admit it, I watch self-help seminars and infommercials on late night television for the sheer theatrics of it all, and this falls into that category of curiosity. Oh, and apparently ‘The Secret’ has caught the public’s imagination after Oprah Winfrey and Larry King both gave air time to it, and I am like the last person to know about it. There is a built in eventness to watching this video, but I hazard to suggest that there may be something more then pomp and circumstance at work here.
I suspect that ‘The Secret’ is the sort of phenomenon that polarizes public opinion, where there are those who believe wholeheartedly in its base claims and those who bombast it as the very worst of pseudo-science, nothing more than a gigantic marketing ploy. I would not be mentioning this thing at all were it not for the fact that at its core lies a very interesting and I still think undecided question: is thought a force? While the program cherry picks choice quotes and events in history to account for a lineage to the notion of its central thesis (“the law of attraction”) aspects of what is being discussed coincide with my ongoing interest in the power of belief and man’s capacity for self-configuration in the spirit of the Nietzschean superman. Also, in the very first month of The Pagan Agenda I wrote a post (will be added again shortly) which posed the very same question, is thought a force? Unlike what I have seen so far from ‘The Secret’ my argument was taken from an actual scientific experiment, one my former roommate and quantum physics grad student had to coach me through.
Please, if you have not seen this video take a look at it and perhaps initiate some constructive discussion on the matter of its central thesis. Despite the glossy packaging, the off-putting anecdotes and choice references from history… the underlying message may have a pragmatic purpose that is worth addressing. Is life ours to create? If you are wearing rose-coloured glasses is it a matter of empirical evidence that what you encounter appears rose-tinted? I would like to hear persuasive arguments for and against… the first thought that came to me while watching this is: does the orphaned Ethiopian child choose his/her state of impoverishment?
Confused? Watch the video…