Sunday, August 3, 2008

The SECRET is Not a Secret




A book called “The Secret” was highly touted a while back and frankly the ideas contained in it are nothing all that new.. Nor are they really a “Secret”. The theories of “As above.. So below” , “attraction” and “positive mental attitude” go back further than history records.

The word “Secret” makes the book more popular because everybody loves a “secret” and just like the word “Code” ( i.e. “The Bible CODE”, “The DaVinci CODE” ) tends to make any book a bit more popular… (hm? Maybe a book called “The SECRET CODE” would sell better than flapjacks…LOL).

Anyway, even though OPRAH recommended this book I would suggest one not actually make it a new “gospel” and yet many are approaching it as though “Think and Grow Rich” and “How to Win Friends and Influence People” are now passé’.

Positive thinking is a great idea yet positive thinking ALONE cannot do a thing without POSITIVE ACTION (“Faith without works is dead”)… But often people are looking for some kind of magical way to make only a “thought” bring them health, wealth and success.. And although THINKING is a great start if that is all you do then expect that you will be disappointed.

The following is a reprint of an article that appeared today on AOL NEWS regarding the book and theory and the real “secret” is there is no real “secret” to success.

“Success takes positive thought combined with positive action“…

… If you can understand THAT then you can save yourself some time and money on a book and begin to ACTUALIZE the true “secret” (as if there is one) to success!
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The Secret: Is It the Real Deal?
A theory about the power of positive thinking draws adherents -- and controversy.
By Denise Mann

WebMD Feature
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Imagine if all successful people knew something that you didn't -- something that enabled them to amass tremendous amounts of riches and live long, healthy, happy, and potentially disease-free lives.

Well, they just might, according to a hot new self-help book and a documentary DVD aptly titled The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. The Secret boasts a growing list of disciples including talk show host Oprah Winfrey. It basically takes the power of positive thinking to a higher ground.

Envisioning What You Want Will Help You Attract It

In a nutshell, if you think it, want it, and feel it, it can be yours -- whether it's good health, a new BMW, or even a spot on American Idol. According to Byrne and many who teach the tenets of The Secret, such luminaries as Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven, Einstein, and many more all knew this.

The Secret is really quantum physics in action, explains Anne Taylor, the Cleveland-based author of Secrets of Attraction and Quantum Success.

"The Secret is the law of attraction and that's about energy," she tells WebMD.

Like Attracts Like

According to quantum physics, we all project measurable energetic frequencies or vibrations, she explains. "We project energy in our emotions, beliefs, and thoughts, and that is really the source of what and who we attract and the basis of our sense of well-being," she says.

"If I am always depressed, that's what I project in my energy field -- and I attract people and situations that are even more depressing," she says. "It's about matching energies."
The Secret is "not wishing for something and thinking about it and focusing on it, it's about understanding and perhaps changing our personal energy," she says.

Take infertility, for example. "If you are urgent and desperate to achieve something like having a baby, then that urgency and desperation will sabotage your intention," she says. "You need to try to release the urgency. You will become more fertile and more likely to conceive if you are relaxed, not anxious, and not obsessing."

The Law of Attraction Plus Action

Amy Applebaum, a Los Angeles-based life coach and certified hypnotherapist, puts it this way: "The law of attraction is about attracting what you want. Like a magnet, you attract what you focus on," she tells WebMD.

"If you focus on the negative or the problems in your life, your life will be 'the problem.' But if you focus on solutions and what you want, your life will be 'the solution,'" says Applebaum, author of the forthcoming Bootcamp for Your Mind.

But, she cautions, "you don't get what you want just by sitting in a room and thinking about what you want. The key to all of this is action: Your actions must be in alignment with your thinking," she says. "Without it, you are sitting on the couch, dreaming up your life, but nothing is getting created."


The Secret Cure?

Secret teacher John Assaraf, CEO of OneCoach, a San Diego-based consulting firm that helps entrepreneurs and small-business owners increase their profits, says he harnessed the power of The Secret to cure his ulcerative colitis, a debilitating condition marked by inflammation of the colon and diarrhea.

At age 21, Assaraf was taking 20 pills a day, receiving shots of steroids, and undergoing two enemas per day to treat the condition. Frustrated by this regimen, he began to visualize his body as healthy, recite daily affirmations, meditate, and eat a bland diet replete with vitamins and minerals. He even dumped his pills in the ocean.

"In three weeks, my symptoms started to get significantly better, and by five weeks, I was back to normal," recalls Assaraf, who talks about this in the book and movie version of The Secret. "For me, this was a great awakening of the power of the mind and my first real lesson that everything is energy -- and that my thoughts control the energy and vibrations in my body and that all the cells in my body respond to these thoughts," says the author of The Street Kid's Guide to Having It All.

According to Assaraf, our thoughts and environment can reverse and prevent disease despite what is in our genes.

"We all have within us the ability to heal ourselves," he says. "We have an incredible pharmacy in our brain that can produce more potent chemicals than any drug known to man," he says. By contrast, "consistent negative thoughts send consistent negative chemicals into the bloodstream."

Doctors' Views

Not so fast, says Gilbert Ross, MD. He is the executive director and medical director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a New York City-based consumer education-public health organization. Sure, "studies show that people that are optimistic do tend to do better than people with a pessimistic outlook. But The Secret doesn't sound kosher to me," he says. "I don’t believe it, and there is absolutely no scientific basis for these effects."

"Those who try to convince people who are suffering from various diseases -- most of whom are desperate -- and would link to any offer of hope, no matter how farfetched, are doing a terrible disservice," he says. "One cannot hope a sunny disposition will replace appropriate medical evaluation and care."

Stephen Barrett, MD, a retired psychiatrist in Allentown, Pa., who operates Quackwatch.com, a web site devoted to exposing quackery and health fraud, agrees with Ross. "There is no evidence that thinking can modify disease other than occasional relaxation exercises," he says. "Thoughts have nothing to do with physics. They are talking about a concept of energy that cannot be measured."

"The energy involved in physics can be measured in a number of different ways," he stresses. "There is nothing real about what they are talking about. They are talking about imaginary energy. The idea of a secret remedy is a classic quack claim."

Secret Rx for Health?

Another Secret teacher, entrepreneur James Arthur Ray, the president and CEO of the Carlsbad, Calif.-based James Ray International, recently appeared on Oprah to discuss The Secret.

"The Secret is based upon the scientific evidence that all things are energy. And like energies are attracted to each other and dissimilar energies repel," says Ray, the author of several books including The Science of Success: How to Attract Prosperity and Create Harmonic Wealth Through Proven Principles.

For instance, "if you're constantly thinking and feeling broke, and acting upon those thoughts and emotions, you'll never create and experience prosperity."

When it comes to chronic diseases, "Michael J. Fox is a great example of noticing his situation is a gift," Ray says. Fox has Parkinson's disease and has been widely quoted as saying that he is grateful for his Parkinson's disease and that his life is richer for it.
In addition, "there are mounds of research of complete turnaround and remission with all these [chronic] diseases," Ray says. "At minimum, [The Secret] will give anyone practicing a sense of peace and a better quality of life."

Maurice A. Ramirez, DO, the founder of High Alert, a disaster preparedness consulting firm in Kissimmee, Fla., is also in on The Secret.

The former emergency room doctor can't count the number of times he or fellow doctors have said 'by all rights this person should have been dead' when they go on to survive and thrive.

The common denominator? "Those who believe in something, whether God or a spirit or just in the fact that they will get better do, in fact, get better, get sick less often, and do better," he says. "We see this in health care every day."

But, he cautions, "it's not just enough to think yourself healthy, you still have to act on it by exercise or eating a healthy diet or in some cases, by taking your medicine, and by taking good advice," he says, adding that the flip side is also true. "Action without belief is futile."

The secret of The Secret -- applying the law of attraction to success -- is not new, explains Judy Williamson, director of the Napoleon Hill World Learning Center at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, Ind. Napoleon Hill, a reporter-turned motivational speaker, first wrote Think and Grow Rich in 1937 -- and some say this idea even goes back further. Hill interviewed more than 500 of America's most successful self-made businessmen to uncover the secrets to their success.

One of Hill's principles involves learning from adversity and defeat. "When you have a setback or any kind of trauma, Napoleon Hill says that there is good within the bad and you need to take that mindset and look for whatever it is that could be good within the bad," Williamson says.

"If we maintain a positive mental attitude, we can achieve anything in life," she says. "It's not going to cure cancer, but an attitude of hope may allow a person to look for cures or treatments that they may not have before."

It Can't Hurt -- or Can It?

"It tends to blame the victim -- the one who didn't think correctly," points out Neil Fiore, PhD, a Berkeley, Calif.-based psychologist and author of Awaken Your Strongest Self: Break Free of Stress, Inner Conflict, and Self-Sabotage. "It can cause people greater stress by worrying if they're causing cancer by having the wrong thoughts and emotions."
According to Fiore, The Secret makes people afraid of their genuine emotions of depression/sadness and anger/upset. "This is just wrong and counter to the research on the benefits of expressing difficult "negative" emotions and the negative effects of stoically acting as if you're being positive."

orig Published March 2, 2007.
(AOL NEWS REPRINT)

BE LOVE & BE LOVED!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Secret is the latest and by far the worst example of a HIGHLY profitable trend where self-help gurus with fabricated new age titles and little relevant education, credentials or legitimate expertise brainwash us into believing that they know what is best for us, our marriages and our families.

Often their only contribution to society is introducing some exotic sounding, new age philosophy. However, they often cleverly form an incestuous group of like-minded “experts” who cross-promote each other by swearing their success is due to following the beliefs of another member of their “cult!” All the while, they ply the airwaves jockeying for an ever-larger audience by appearing in the national media to garner third-party endorsements.

The Self-Help Movement has become the Self-Destruct Movement by diminishing or destroying our critical thinking skills to choose and evolve on our own. We have given up the freedom to build healthy lives, marriages and families based on our unique history and life experience. Instead many victims, blinded to the value of their own life experiences, are attracted to the latest secret in self-help, in an attempt to find out what they should think, feel and how they should act... this is the definition of a cult.

The solution is a return to our (common) senses! The best way out of this learned “self-helplessness” is to go cold turkey. Stop following ALL self-help gurus now. Begin, instead, to reclaim your natural, God-given ability to think for yourself. The common sense that was once readily available to all of us is still there free of charge and waiting to be applied to just about any challenge we might face in life… all you have to do is use it.

Please, let's all work together to stop the flock of "sheepeople" who blindly move from one UNPROVEN concept to the next, looking for the answers to life's challenges that you already possess and that is the OBVIOUS!

Jesus of Zion said...

Thank You for sharing this.

On anything considered Spiritual, religious or philosophical it is hard to share and not be judged as being leading or preachy... I suppose it's enevitable when one has a strong opinion.

The general idea of maintaining a positive attitude is undoubtedly the key to success but to sell this concept as sensationalistically and authoritatively as Oprah and others have done is to me like the marketing of a religion.

Often I share my beliefs in an "in your face" sort of way.. but NEVER would I SELL these beliefs or try to infer that people blindly follow without research and study of ALL SIDES!

All people may freely voice their opinions but many seem so very stuck on stupid or zealous in promotion without the wisdom, knowledge or authority do do more than parrot their favorite writer or speaker.

All too many people are just too simplistic and lazy to find out WHY THEY BELIEVE..WHAT THEY BELIEVE!

Thanks again for this insiteful commentary of your take on the subject.

BE LOVE & BE LOVED!
JoZ

Nancy from www.Mindbridge-loa.com said...

Hi to John Curtis and to Jesus. Those who have studied the Law of Attraction are far from the self serving, mambie pamby, cultists you seem to think they are. They advocate taking 100% responsibility which, by definition, is the opposite of "self-helplessness." They are not dependent on anyone but themselves.

I would like to quote from Conversations with God, by Neil Donald Walsch:
On page 180 of Conversations With God, Book One, God says, "the best so-called affirmation is a statement of gratitude and appreciation. 'Thank you God, for bringing me success in my life.' This produces wonderful results when it comes from true knowing; not from an attempt to produce results, but from an awareness that results have already been produced. "Jesus had clarity. Before every miracle He thanked me in advance for its deliverance. It never occurred to Him not to be grateful, because it never occurred to Him that what he declared would not happen. The thought never entered His mind...."

If now there is something you choose to experience in your life, do not 'want' it-- choose it."

Now, I'd like to ask you John, did you ever know a successful person who wasn't grateful and who didn't have a belief in himself, and a good idea of what he wanted to accomplish and who didn't choose to be successful? In my experience, the complainers and the blaimers don't do well in the end.

This "New Thought" movement started, I think, in the beginning of the last century. It has been around for a long time. I believe that it has recently gained popularity and notoriety because we, as a society, have been looking for a way to change, not just our lives, but the world. It's not just about changing our lives but about helping others to change their lives as well.

If you are interested, I have more information at www.mindbridge-loa.com.

Good fortune to you both,
Nancy

Jesus of Zion said...

Thank You Nancy,

I appreciate each and every person who gives my Blog even a moment of consideration irregardless of viewpoint.. so long as what they offer is respectful and thought out .. I would like to think this Blog attracts the spiritually intellectual and independant.. the TRUE SPIRITUAL FREE THINKERS.

(BTW to me a true "Free Thinker" is not an Atheist.. an Atheist is often as sure there is NO GOD as the most devout follower of a religion IS sure THERE IS...a True Free thinker is open minded enough to at least be Agnostic if they don't believe in a God per se' because an honest person admits it takes FAITH to believe either way).

I believe fully that the answer to all things is based first in the idea of LOVE... I mean "REAL" LOVE.. where the person giving it loves so deeply that he or she would take a bullet even for an enemy just to save a life. A Love which is willing and ready and able to serve more than being served.

Undoubtedly any success is not based on desire alone.. Action must always follow desire (Faith without works is dead) and so before one can expect to receive they must give.. Over time the giver will see the reward but I have found by experiance to "expect without asking and ask without expecting" and the result ends up being GOOD.

Those who only seek to GET and never wish to give will eventually fall by way of their own ego.

I have found that whatever I give with no expectation comes back in unmeasurable reward ultimately... One might call it "Reciprocity" and it's strange.. but it's NO SECRET!

Thanks again guys for the comments.

BE LOVE & BE LOVED!
JoZ

Nancy from www.Mindbridge-loa.com said...

I wholeheartedly agree!

And, point made about generosity. Not only do the complainers and the blaimers fail, but the competitive and the greedy also suffer.

Thanks for your clarity and honesty! They are much appreciated.

-- Nancy
from Mindbridge-loa.com

Anonymous said...

John Assaraf did a fantastic job cracking the entrepreneur's code and teaching people how to grow any business by first reconditioning their mind for success, in his recent book "The Answer." He also taught people how to reach fulfillment in life in “The Secret.” John is actually holding a free conference call Wednesday, August 20th @ 5pm PST. He will give his insights and tips on how to "have it all" in life. He'll also select a few lucky people to personally mentor. Check out details and register for the call here... http://www.JohnAssaraf.com/hia/challenge.htm?s=hiac2008

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