November 30th, 2009    The Secret

Every so often, Rebecca and I plop The Secret into the DVD player and watch. Now, if you haven't heard of The Secret, it was a DVD that came out a few years ago and took the New Age community by storm. It teaches about the Law of Attraction, and the basic message is that you can have anything you want in your life just by thinking about it.
Now, we're the first ones to admit that The Secret is hokey. It's over-dramatic, and was definitely made to be marketed more than it was made to actually help people. However, the basic principle – the Law of Attraction, is something that even skeptics like ourselves have come to embrace.

The idea is that as we think about things, we create our realities. If we're always thinking about getting out of debt, for instance, then the reality we're attracting is a reality of 'getting out of debt'. Not being out of debt, you notice, but getting out of debt. Meaning that we're creating a reality where we'll always be getting out of debt, and never actually arrive at our debt-free destination. The same goes for health – if we're always trying to be ultra-healthy because we're afraid that if we aren't, we're going to get sick or get cancer, then we're attracting a reality where we're going to get sick or get cancer – simply because we're giving those things so much mental energy.

This idea is old. The witches knew this, and in the practice of folk magic this idea of 'like breeds like' is rampant. Many herbs were used medicinally or magically because they had a taste, smell, or appearance that suggested the desired effect or resembled a particular bodily organ.

This might sound like mumbo-jumbo, but it works. Some of the Law of Attraction's effects can be explained with logic. If we believe that we're attractive, we're going to carry ourselves differently and be more social, and sure enough, people will tend to be more attracted to us. If we consider ourselves to be in vibrant health, we won't be stressing about our bodies and thus we'll spend a lot more time being healthy (since stress is probably the #1 contributor to ill health).

Other aspects are more difficult to explain. The laptop I'm typing on came into our lives literally the day after my monitor died on my PC. The monitor bit the dust, Rebecca and I said, “Let's just ask for a new monitor and see what happens,” and the next day Rebecca's mother told us that she had just won a computer, and did we want it? We didn't just get a monitor – we got an upgrade.

This has happened innumerable times in our lives, and by now we know that if we really want something, we just need to 'ask' for it. We're not asking anyone in particular, we just sort of 'wish' for it, and more often than not, some peculiar circumstances occur and our wish comes true.

Though we've used this 'magic' selectively in our lives, we're starting to wonder what would happen if we made it habitual, and started using this positive thinking in every aspect of our lives. The best thing about it is that it encourages us to think positive thoughts, and to have fun with those thoughts – the result is that it's difficult not to smile all day long, even if external circumstances don't look all that positive.

The whole affair is getting us to think about where we put our life energies – if nothing else, it can help us start to realize how much energy most of us devote to running negative messages over and over in our heads – messages that do nothing but bring us down and take away our smiles.

It's all about focusing on the positive, and encouraging ourselves to develop more compassionate, joyful, and passionate outlooks on life. Even if The Secret is all a bunch of hocus pocus, there's nothing wrong with thinking that induces us to smile. =)

Back to the Journal