Has anyone read "The Secret"?

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I'm fascinated by my irrelevance in universe... just love this feeling!

I used to always stare up at the stars and try to visualise myself in the vast emptiness of the universe. Very peaceful and perhaps spiritual feeling.

That about sums it up,

Was this book popular with Oprah? I suspect so.

http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/spirit/knowyourself/slideshow1_ss_20070208/1

BINGO!

Reminds me of the scammer evangelical types talkin bout God and Christianity like it's a game to be "played"...

I was wondering where my Cheddar went.

Sad but true, lol. positive thinking can help a lot but it doesn't cure anything. It just makes acceptance easier and it uplifts your spirit and mentality. It elevates mood. It's not easy being positive.

I have been around so much negativity I just absorbed it and now it's so deeply engrained in my being it's not easy to be an optimist and look on the brighter side of things.

I don't think I am as bitter as I once was but I battle with depression all the time.

Thinking positive = good.

Thinking positive just because a book tells you that it will make things happen magically and therefore doing nothing much more than thinking positive = plain laziness that will get you nowhere.

This is sort of an old joke, but I got to say, there's nothing wrong with thinking very hard about winning the lottery, but if you do and want this to manifest, at least buy the ticket!

Bah. This idea goes back in Western culture at least to the 1800s with William James, who, being a sufferer of depression himself, at least had the sense to know that there were only certain people for whom this sort of outlook to work, while others couldn't so blithely pretend that their problems weren't there. Recent interpretations of this theory have dropped that part, though.

But anyways... one of the main problems with the positivity theory in this case and similar ones is that it doesn't frame the solution in the right way. As it's presented, and has been elsewhere, believing that everything will go right for you --> success, and, conversely, therefore failure is the result of not believing enough. What this misses is the fact that there are extra steps between these two points. For getting from one to another, HOPE is necessary - not blind optimism. That hope, whether you believe/know the chance of getting what you want is .001% or 100%, will lead you to take the steps that might lead to getting it. The belief that it will just happen on its own if you think about it hard enough, however, is much more marketable, because it's both more definite and more lazy. Between a philosophy that says that yes, there is an OPTION of getting what you want, if you're willing to work for it, or one that says oh, if only you believe in getting it hard enough, it will come to you, which do you think most will subscribe to? In the end, it's the actions of someone that get them to success or failure, and their "half-full" or "half-empty" mentality may or may not have had a significant part in how they got there.

The other unfortunate thing about such theories is they have that nasty underlying message of "put up and shut up" for anyone who does have real problems that can't be solved with the Magical Power of Positive Thinking - or if they don't on their own, people often add it in, and therefore turn the "empowering" message on its head and make even more depressing for those unable to simply "turn that frown upside down" as easily as others tell them to.

Until I saw this thread I did not know about The Secret.

It is absolute trash. It would make people who believe in it less sympathetic to the poor or ill because "they attract" what they get from the universe. Could you really tell someone they attracted their cancer because of their attitude? That is such a load of manure!

It is just about greed. Do you see all those wealthy and famous people who have addictions and they are not happy at all? I think people should try to go after what will make them happy in their lives but often people don't really know what will make them happy.

Yes, "The Secret" is a New-Age variation on the same theme of the gospel of prosperity some preachers are so fond of spreading. Just replace "pray for wealth" with "wish for wealth", and the underlying mechanism shows to be the same.

I watched the video. I had trouble aprreciating it, however, because I thought it focused too much on money and materialism. But the moral of the story isn't bad.

The moral is not bad? IMHO the moral 'just sit back, hope for the best and everything will work out without any effort from your side' is evil!

Someone gave me "The Power of Positive Thinking" after I got pretty sick with thyroid problems and in the book, it said I had caused my own problem cause thyroid problems are due to "feeling like your voice is stifled". What a load of crap! Autoimmune disorders run in my family. I hate that crap like this spits in the face of science, for starters - and also, if you are gonna go against science, shouldn't it be to hope for a miracle, and to make people feel better, not worse?

I agree that The Secret is BS that Oprah can use to justify why she has more money than God and think she attracted it and deserves it all and can spend it all on Loubotins while not giving a s**t for people who need food around the world - all the while guilt-tripping her lower middle-class audience into donating $100 to the poor, while 10 of her shoes would help the poor more. But she attracted the shoes! If only the poor had attracted some food, they wouldn't be starving. Silly poor.