Seduced by the 4.6 rating on Goodreads, I got the audiobook version of The Secret to listen to during my work commute. OMG, this was a pile of pretentious crap. What the actual f&^k. The chapters are like

• The secret revealed
• What is the secret?
• Like attracts like
• Attract the good
• Power of your mind
• Summary
• The secret made simple
• The greatest emotion
• Summary
• How to use the secret
• Creative process (Ask, Believe Receive)
• The secret and your body
• How long does it take
• Create your day in advance
• Summary
• Powerful processes (Expectation, Gratitude, Visualization)
• The powerful processes in action
• Summary
• The secret to money
• Attract abundance
• Focus on prosperity
• Give money to get money
• Summary
• The secret to relationships, health and world (diff chapters)
• Think Thoughts of perfections
• Laughter is the best medicine

If I haven’t convinced you based on the title that this is a pile of steaming poo of a self-help book catering to the people lacking direction in life and willing to throw money to something that reads like a cult book, yeah, … check this out.

The book uses quotes from many famous people throughout history to say that if you want something – just BELIEVE you have it with all your heart and you will get it. Don’t “want” it or dream about someday having it – instead, believe with every fiber of your being that it already is yours. If you want to go on a cruise, act as if you already have the tickets. Don’t go around saying “I can’t afford that” – believe in your heart that you can afford it.

I think most of us can see the problem here. If you have an instant gratification personality, you will easily believe these things – and go max out your credit card. You will honestly believe you CAN afford these things, that you WILL have money soon to cover all your bills, then bankrupt yourself and destroy your life. I know people who have done that.

When I see people unhappy because they believed in ‘The Secret’ only to find out much further down the line that it never delivered, that they never got richer, didn’t look younger, didn’t get the love interest they wanted, then it makes me want to warn others not to be sucked into it through them giving even more money to already extremely wealthy people. And make no mistake, when it doesn’t work out how you believed it would, then they will tell you that you have done something wrong, or you must have blocks somewhere in your subconscious that need removing, (you can then buy more books to ‘help’ with this) or you need chakra clearing, (more books, and CDs too to buy!) or it must be that you need to love yourself more, because you can’t love yourself properly or it would work for you.

The rich are rich because they think of themselves as rich so they keep and attract more money. It obviously has nothing to do with inherited wealth nor with ability, talent, hard work or social connections.

Even mass death is the result of people believing that they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time (and then finding themselves thus). The book doesn’t devote much to such grim subjects, though – there is perhaps a paragraph about that and it singularly fails to address instances of mass suffering caused not by being in a wrong place at the wrong time (as in a case of a natural disaster for example) but by active, deliberate pursuit of evil ends by other human beings as happened during the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide or Khmer Rouge murders to pick just three random, obvious examples.

On some levels, “The Secret” is quite funny. It states, fore example, among other bits of nonsense, that according to the Bible, Jesus “was a prosperity teacher” who lived “a more affluent lifestyle that many present day millionaires could conceive of “(I am NOT making this one up, it’s on page 109).

Quantum physicists emphatically DO NOT tell us that the entire Universe emerged from thought.

All diseases are NOT a result of stress.

Healthy emotions do not guarantee a healthy body (though they might help recovery).

Ageing is not caused by thoughts, and even if you believe you can’t catch something you still can if you are exposed to the infectious agent.

And the oil in Belize was not created by the belief of the team that discovered it.

I could go on for much longer, but these examples are sufficient to show to what lenghts this book goes. It’s a pile of trite, mercenary, offensive and very, very silly nonsense.

And here is the question: does it matter?

Yes. It matters.

It suggests we should look inward and change our minds, instead of looking outward and trying to change the world.

It also implies that those who suffer exploitation, murder, robbery, rape, slavery, extermination, torture, abuse, poverty and inequality are responsible for their sorry situation, and that the best thing to do is to start thinking positive thoughts, grow self esteem and start “emitting frequencies of love and abundance”.

It’s positively destructive and deeply immoral (and IT DOESN’T WORK).