The Secret

A friend of mine encouraged me to read a book called The Secret - knowing that I am interested in spiritual topics, she thought I might be interested. From the cover and introduction, I could see that this book was packaged together with all the brand awareness of a Chanel campaign, but a lot of self-help and spiritual books are written that way these days. There might still be an interesting point or two.

So that morning, with not much to do other than to sit by the fire with a good book, I cracked it open and started out. It did not take me long to be terribly offended by this narcissistic and offensive book. The book takes a good idea - the power of positive thinking - and combines it with a lot of the pop-cosmology ideas of other spiritually-themed books and films (such as What the Bleep do We Know? ) to create something truly monstrous.

The book starts out by hyping a faulty scientific premise - the notion that the greatest force in creation is something called 'the law of attraction.' Of course, scientists would find this premise ridiculous, since in physics, cosmology, and quantum mechanics, there are many different attractive and repulsive forces acting, from gravity and electromagnetism to dark energy and strong interaction. There's no single guiding principle that is thematically behind all of it, tying your wish for a camera phone to the nuclear bond inside a proton. But I am nitpicking. It is the philosophy of this book that is offensive, not the quaint pseudo-science.

The premise of the book, I began to realize in horror, is not just that positive thinking leads to positive results. The idea, it turns out, is that you are somehow cosmologically creating reality by thinking it. By really focusing on that colour camera phone, you are beginning to make it happen. We create our reality, we are Gods, actualizing the universe with our mental accessorizing.

First of all, there's plenty of plain evidence that this just is not true. Think about the implications - juvenile leukemia? Parents must have been thinking bad thoughts. Terrorists attacked your city? You must have wanted 'em to.

But the idea's wrongness is still not what makes it offensive. The absolute arrogance of it, the pride and ego it takes to concoct such a silly fantasy, belie the very humble place we actually occupy in the cosmos.

The character Job from the Book of Job gets it right. He tries to understand how he has come to his desperate situation, as he discusses with acquaintances whether it somehow was his fault in some way, or some cruelty of God's. God then goes on a long discourse pointing out to Job, in great detail, that in fact he knows quite little about the universe, what it is made of, or about any of its creatures (such as the Leviathan.) God, in short, does not have to explain anything to anyone. Far from being a 'creator of his reality', Job is made quite clear on the point that he cannot even expect to understand his reality!

He responds to God, "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered. I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know. I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes."

Fortunately, I was able to pick up another book to clear my head of this noxious stuff; Dick Staub's "Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters," in which he uses Star Wars as a catechism with which to explain Christianity. He has a chapter entitled, "The Lord of the Force You are Not."

And I think that sums it up succinctly.

Think positive? Yes! Absolutely. But do not mistake yourself for God. For that, you are not. Nor am I.