Critique of "The Secret" and New Age narcissism

[feranaja]

http://in.integralinstitute.org/talk.aspx?id=858

Since this is precisely what I've long tried to say, but expressed so much more eloquently than I could, I wanted to toss it out to see how others here react. Lots of implications for New Age thinkers , Wiccans etc...

...The Secret, which can be found in both DVD and book form, has managed to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and maintain a firm grip on the top two spots at Amazon.com (http://amazon.com/), Barnes and Noble, and Borders for weeks. The central tenet of The Secret is “The Law of Attraction,” whereby one’s feelings and thoughts quite literally attract, manifest, and create real events in one’s life—the assumption being that most of us do this unconsciously, and making this process conscious is “The Secret” that “has travelled through centuries to reach you.”

As Ken and Julian agree, what can be so tricky when evaluating a new approach such as The Secret, is that at first glance it can appear fairly innocent, even if lacking any kind of critical depth. If it’s helping people feel empowered and positive about their lives, what’s the problem?

Well, the problem is that it’s not a basically solid approach with room for improvement, it’s a fundamentally confused way of understanding reality that misunderstands and contorts the genuine truths that it intuits. Some of the central points that Julian and Ken discuss are as follows:
• As with any “you create your own reality” schema, The Secret fails what can be called “the Auschwitz test.” According to The Secret, everyone who was murdered at Auschwitz—or Rwanda, or Darfur—created that reality for themselves, and therefore they are to blame for their fate. For obvious reasons, this position is an unconscionable as it is untenable.

• By teaching that the world quite literally revolves around you, The Secret encourages and entrenches narcissism. In developmental psychology, narcissism doesn’t mean an unhealthy obsession with thinking only about yourself, it means you can’t think about yourself. The capacity for self-reflexive awareness just isn’t there. The entire world and everyone in it is simply an extension of your-self, and you are literally unable to take the perspective of another human being. This is not mystical union; this is pre-rational fusion, and without the ability to take the perspectives of other sentient beings, the entire foundation for ethics evaporates.

• Actually, you are creating the universe moment-to-moment, but it’s not the “you” that you think. According to the great contemplative traditions, every person has at least two “selves”: the finite, temporal, egoic self-sense, and the infinite, transcendental, unqualifiable Self, or I-AMness. Your Self, your I-AMness, is indeed giving rise to the entire radiant Kosmos in this and every moment, but The Secret teaches that your separate self has the power to personally manifest a new car, win the lottery, or cure cancer… and this simply isn’t how things work.
• “The Law of Attraction” is true—as far as it goes. The problem is that The Secret takes this one relatively small piece of the puzzle and makes it the entire puzzle. A positive outlook will change your life and your intentions will co-create your reality, but so will brain chemistry, interior level of development, family relationships, natural disasters, cultural trends, language structure, environmental toxins, and, basically, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

• Developmentally, if one uses a scale ranging from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral to super-integral, The Secret teaches the magical thought structures that were humanity’s leading edge several hundred thousand years ago. As Ken explains, The Secret encourages childlike “primary process thinking,” which can be in the form of “the law of attraction” (e.g., if one black thing is bad, then all black things are bad) and “the law of contagion” (e.g., if this particular man was powerful, then a lock of his hair must be powerful too).

• The importance of understanding how unconscious psychological shadow elements color and affect one’s experience, and how The Secret can agitate, alienate, repress, or—perhaps even more worrisome—act on these disowned elements of consciousness.

• The genesis of the pre/trans or pre/post fallacy, and how The Secret is a perfect example of elevating pre-rational childish impulses to trans-rational spiritual glory. Simply because both categories of experience are non-rational, they can easily be confused, and often are.
The extraordinary thing about this dialogue is that, for all the critiques Ken and Julian have of The Secret, it’s not meant as a put-down or a mean-spirited attack. As evidenced by its incredible popularity, there are millions of people who are starving for something other than traditional religion or modern science in their search for meaning. By using an Integral Approach, one is able to look at what new offerings like The Secret have to bring to the table, and assess in good faith what their strengths and weaknesses really are, for the health and nourishment of every soul who dare grasp for “something more”—and for what we consider to be the real Secret of transformation and human happiness, we recommend an Integral Life Practice (http://www.myilp.com/) and an Integral Spirituality (http://in.integralinstitute.org/faq-pdf.aspx?id=10), bringing together Body, Mind, and Spirit, in Self, Culture, and Nature.

[Sibylle]

I completely agree with that review of The Secret. Thanks for sharing that.

[Radiant Star]

• “The Law of Attraction” is true—as far as it goes. The problem is that The Secret takes this one relatively small piece of the puzzle and makes it the entire puzzle. A positive outlook will change your life and your intentions will co-create your reality, but so will brain chemistry, interior level of development, family relationships, natural disasters, cultural trends, language structure, environmental toxins, and, basically, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Wonderful find Fera, brilliant review indeed.

Coincidentally, I was only remembering someone this morning who told me once that all I had to do to be completely healthy was to think positively. I wonder what will happen to her belief when she is in her last years, maybe dying of some dreadful disease and she finds out the truth that, yes, a positive approach may help her feel better and whatever else, but ultimately, she will die.

[feranaja]

Glad you ladies enjoyed it. :)

Well, I've been critiquing New Age stuff for some time but I always felt I sounded a bit mean spirited. I just find it rampant in society now. People I respect intellectually sagely advised me that Luke died because he had finished his work here and wanted to go (he died from environmental toxins ffs) and that my personal struggles are all things I chose to get the lessons I needed. Now, I agree I am able to derive meaning from things like suffering, but that doesn't make the leap into "I chose it". I find this view very uncompassionate - your example, Ricci, is exactly what I fear can come from this mentality.

It also strikes me that for many working a magical path, at a pre-initiatory level, the idea is that the ego actually causes things to happen by intent alone, eg the casting of spells incessantly which either dont work or have to have a heavy handed interpretation of events laid on them to appear to have worked. (Such as; someone hates me, I suffer a misfortune, ergo it was their doing) We've all seen this. but on a more advanced level of course we can create change in accordance to will once the higher self is engaged. It's simply that it requires years and years of effort to understand and master all of this, and by the time any of us do, we won't use it, or at least, use it very often or for immediate, materialistic desires.

Enough rant, I need coffee. I'm glad you both appreciated it.
fera

[Zaii]

While I certainly don't think that you can have everything you want in your life just by thinking about it long and hard enough, as life requires action, I do think that wherever you are in your life, it is your responsibility, by and large, if not necessarily how you got there, most definitely where you are going to go from there.

I read this bit last night about a man who was trapped in a concentration camp amongst various other "undesirables" during the holocaust. He escaped and went on to live, whilst most of the people who were captured with him died a horrible death. Why? He asked better questions, and was positive, instead of hopeless. Every day of his imprisonment, rather than say "Why me?" or, "Why, God?", or "This is hopeless. I'll just work hard and hope I survive.", he asked "How can I escape, and today?", and eventually it paid off. He held the idea in his mind that escape was not only a possibility, it was an inevitability. One day he saw a pile of corpses, as they were about to be transported beyond the boundaries of the camp, and instantly acting on the idea that came to him, hid, stripped naked, and used the right moment to dive into the pile of corpses. He waited hours for the truck to take the bodies and his own beyond the walls of the camp, and then waited hours still in the mass grave into which he and the corpses were dumped. He then got up, and travelled 25 miles nude to freedom.

I am in no way shape or form saying that the people who ended up in concentration camps deserved to be there. That's ridiculous and inhuman. What I am saying is that people, from all walks of life, no matter where they are, are 100% responsible for the choices they make, and that with the right combination of thought and action, I believe you can get almost anywhere. Impossible is a word that should be used with the utmost caution.