"The Secret"

For months now, I've been hearing about this mysterious book called The Secret, which supposedly contains a heretofore unrevealed formula for prosperity. A friend of mine read the book and immediately began to put it into practice. In fact, she believed in its precepts so much that she threw all common sense aside. Daily, she envisioned herself living in a custom-built, million dollar home in one of the best neighborhoods in the city. Despite the fact that neither she nor her husband were employed at the time, they placed an order for their dream home. Then they watched construction begin and visualized moving in to their new home and furnishing it in grand style. As time went on and with no job prospects in sight, it became evident that their dream home was just that...a dream. Eventually, they had to pull out of the deal and, as a result, they lost their $10,000 deposit. So much for The Secret.

A friend recently loaned me a DVD of the film version of The Secret, so I finally got to watch it and find out what all the brouhaha was about. To say that I found the film disappointing would be an understatement. Oh, don't get me wrong...the production was very professionally done. The source of my disgust was the emphasis on materialism that pervaded the entire film. The basic premise is that we can attract anything we want simply by asking, believing, and then receiving. A series of vignettes showed people who had acquired large sums of money, expensive cars, and multimillion dollar homes just by putting The Secret's simple principles into practice. According to The Secret, all that's required to receive money and things is to ask, receive, and believe. Follow those three steps and the Universe will deliver. This sounds just a wee bit trite to me. And where is God in all this?

Perhaps the greatest irony was the film's reporting that the some of the greatest minds in history knew The Secret. It mentioned Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Winston Churchill, to name a few. Now I don't claim to have studied much about the other men, but I do know for sure that Ralph Waldo Emerson shunned materialism and focused on developing virtue, which I believe is the real secret. This world would be a better place if more people embraced Emerson instead of getting excited about The Secret, which in my mind is yet another "get rich quick" scam wrapped in slick marketing.