FIRST: THE BAD NEWS
The Secret movie included some dubious claims, the most notable being these three:
1. The Secret's claim: This secret is being revealed to the public for the first time. The secret is the law of attraction.
Rational response: There's nothing in The Secret about positive thinking that hasn't been openly available to people for thousands of years. The principles were variously derived from the Talmud, the Bible, the Quoran, also Hindu, Buddhist and other Eastern philosophies, also from native African, American, Asian, Australian, Celtic, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, Central European and many other ancient cultures. More recently they were documented and expounded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a number of individuals and movements in Europe and the USA, especially the New Thought Movement. It was mainly Thomas Troward (1847-1916), Wallace D. Wattles (1860-1911), William Walker Atkinson (1862-1932), Elizabeth Towne (1865-1960), and Charles F. Haanel (1866-1949) who directly inspired later communicators such as Rhonda Byrne and those that she featured in her 2006 movie The Secret. And it was Atkinson who coined the phrase "Law Of Attraction" in a book published in 1906, a hundred years before the movie in which Byrne and others called it a secret.
2. The Secret's claim: Everything in the universe is energy. Everything is made up of the exact same thing, whether it's your hand, whether it's the ocean, or whether it's a star.
Rational response: Statement made in 2011 to the Royal Astronomical Society from studies of 200,000 galaxies based on USA released data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and from data released from the world's leading scientifically recognized Siding Spring Mountain Telescope jointly funded by England and Australia: "Matter consisting of the materials that make up living creatures, planets and stars or anything with atoms, amounts to only 4% of the universe." When The Secret TV movie claims 100% with no evidence to back it up, and the world's most accomplished scientists in this field state that it's only 4% with the backup of reseach and evidence from top international scientific sources, now be serious - which would you believe?
3. The Secret's claim: If you war against the unwanted, you add power to it. Never be against anything, because what you resist persists.
Rational response: This is so blatantly ludicrous that it's hardly worth dignifying with a response. What about the American War
of Independence leaders who resisted and won against British colonial taxation without representation? What about the French Resistance that successfully fought and won against German occupation in the Second World War? What about the protesters and freedom fighters in Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, who finally brought about the collapse of the USSR, restoring human rights and democracy to East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania and other countries? What about the many millions of ordinary people all over the world who throughout our entire human history have successfully resisted and fought against horrific discrimination, oppression and cruelty by ruthless dictators? Millions upon millions of courageous people sacrificed their lives to give people everywhere the human freedoms that we now take for granted, and this simple fact outweighs any bland theory of the Swiss psychologist Carl Yung (1875-1961) who is credited with the quote: "What you resist, persists." Yung was a close associate of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), many of whose theories have also since been proved erroneous.
Perhaps we need to be reminded that although Yung had no involvement with Swiss politics or banking, the flaunted neutrality of Switzerland disguised dark and sinister aspects of his country's culture. Switzerland profited from victims of crime, and this was guaranteed by Swiss laws which attracted Nazis, Dictators, Mafia and international criminals of every description to deposit their ill-gotten gains in secret Swiss bank accounts and deposit vaults. Instead of receiving interest on their deposits, the depositors paid high fees to Swiss banks for secrecy backed by and guaranteed by the Swiss government. Its neutrality was not a moral stand based on pacifism, but a political strategy based on greed. The Swiss banks were enabled to use these secret deposits to make loans at high interest rates and to make investments both directly and via world stock exchanges, boosting their fees with profits and capital gains from money which was neither theirs nor their clients', but money stolen from the victims of their clients. This made Switzerland very rich, and this was the culture that conditioned and distorted Carl Yung's thinking.
Yung was not robbed of all his possessions. His family was not dragged off and transported on cattle trains to be starved, tortured and murdered in Nazi death camps thousands of miles away. Anonymous unsung heroes of resistance all over Europe rejected Yung's advocacy not to resist. Instead, they resisted with passion, intelligence and courage to defeat Hitler and in doing so they saved Carl Yung's life, because Hitler had plans to occupy Switzerland when he no longer needed its neutrality for the safe-haven storage of all the fortunes and art treasures that Nazis had stolen from countries they occupied.
In contrast, Jesus of Nazareth led by example not theory. He did not promote armed rebellion. But, far removed from hypocritical Swiss neutrality, the words and deeds of Jesus as documented in the Bible inspired nonviolent resistance to inhuman criminalities and injustices. Unlike the profiteering Swiss of Karl Yung's era, Jesus did not exploit war and crime to gain wealth from robbed and murdered victims.
Similarly, resistance to cruel oppressors by Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela also led to the freedoms eventually obtained for all their followers with no personal profit to themselves.
SECOND: THE GOOD NEWS
What The Secret movie did achieve and Rhonda Byrne deserves full credit for is that it scooped up long neglected and out of print books, then cut and repackaged their contents as a TV program to a far wider public. Just ask yourself, for example, how many Christians read the Bible in sufficient detail to quote verses such as "The Kingdom of God is within you" or "Seek and you shall find"? or "What things soever you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you shall have them"? or "Ask, and it shall be given unto you"? Not many. Most leave this to their priests or pastors. Even when they hear these quotes in a sermon, they normally go in one ear and straight out the other because the sermon is part of a detached and formal church ritual that gives some of the congregation a chance to doze off and doesn't stick in their minds as part of their everyday lives. On the other hand, TV entertainment does stick in people's minds. They chat about it afterwards with family, friends, school classmates, work colleagues. This is where The Secret movie scored. It got people thinking about these things. It got people talking about them. It got people following them up to find out more. They weren't secret at all, but previously most people had just ignored them.
THIRD: THEN WHAT NEXT? HOW CAN I APPLY THE SECRET?
For starters make sure that the latest version of Adobe Reader is installed on your computer. If it isn't or if you're not sure, click the icon below to download it direct from Adobe. It's completely free, and will be useful for all kinds of stuff you find on the web.
Click either or both of the cover pics below to download a FREE copy of each e-book. "F3 Filipino Feelgood Factor" is a short fiction story, plus (in the same digital edition) three of the century-old books that inspired The Secret TV movie. It's in PDF format so you will need the free Adobe Reader on your computer (click on above logo if you don't already have it).
Although F3 is recent and subject to copyright, our FREE e-book edition of it is now sponsored. All the original books on which The Secret was based are out-of-copyright, so there are no royalty fees to pay on them anyway. Their English language of around a century ago may seem old-fashioned today, but the selections are easy to read and will tell you everything you want to know in a lot more detail than either the TV movie or its tie-in book.
FREE is a pretty good deal for the books that provided The Secret with most of its material. It's a lot better than paying a mentor/coach to tell you exactly the same things, or buying expensive new books on the subject by authors who do nothing more than rehash the out-of-copyright books into modern English as if the original content was theirs.
The Rizal e-book (above right) was sponsored by Santa Rosa Magazine originally for Filipinos but is now available to everyone. It features Jose Rizal's non-fiction classic "The Philippines A Hundred Years Hence" with the same "F3 Filipino Feelgood Factor" short fiction story as a modern lead-in. This combo includes Rizal's ignored Defence and his banned Farewell Address.
Both e-books are freely downloadable by clicking their cover pics above.
FILIPINO FEELGOOD FACTOR HOME PAGE
MAGAZINE OF SANTA ROSA CITY LAGUNA PHILIPPINES SINCE 2007
SANTA ROSA CITY LAGUNA PHILIPPINES SPECIAL FEATURES
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