Review of The Secret

Despite having happily avoided watching "The Secret", I have finally been convinced to do so. The conversation went something like this:

"Have you watched it?"
"No, I refuse to watch crap."
"How do you know it's crap if you haven't watched it?"

Naturally I recognise crappy crap crap when I hear about it, but so as to uphold my reputation as a rational skeptic, here follows my review of "The Secret" for nraider. Who clearly must hate me, for making me watch this crap.

[But just a side note first - an amusing coincidence. My good friend and I have discussed and mocked The Secret before, despite not having watched it. Tonight, after writing the above paragraph, I mentioned to him that I was going to watch it, and he told me that his landlord gave him the DVD yesterday. I might convince him to watch it on his side, with me, then we can continue our mocking ways together. Maybe we've both been secretly wanting to watch the film and that is why we both ended up here tonight, with a copy of the damn thing...but I doubt it.]

Note: I will be blogging about the experience while I watch the DVD. This means that the post will be very descriptive and information heavy. I will probably break the film down into several seperate posts, because I don't want to sit here for days on end. If you have the DVD, you can watch or listen to it while you read this. That way we can be tortured together.

{I press play}A pretty teal colour fills the screen. A white-haired lady comes walking towards me, dragging lots of luggage with her and talking with what sounds like an Australian twang. Apparently bad things happened to her, like her dad dying and her relationships not working out. But luckily for her, out of her "greatest despair would come her greatest gift". She takes a journal out of her suitcase and then a lot of dramatic stuff happens, very quickly. With a lot of whooshing sounds and crazy camera motions. The secret, I guess, is revealed to the woman in a burst of mental images that causes her to gasp.

After these dizzying revelations, the lady started tracing the history of the still unidentified secret. We are shown a man from an ancient civilization, frantically making rubbings of "the secret" off an emerald stone tablet. The vision tracing the history of the secret moves at a rapid pace. Everyone seems in a great hurry. Apparently "the secret was buried" in a place near the great pyramids. And then the Knights Templar were somehow involved.
And they needed weapons. Then they tell us "the secret was coveted". Ok. Obviously the Catholic church is also involved in the whole coveting business, because they're in the scene . But then "the Secret was Suppressed". Oh no. And a boardroom filled with men in suits did the suppressing. A typewriter dramatically informs us, through a close-up shot, that the secret will never be revealed to the public, by order of the men in the boardroom.

I'm yawning already and I'm not through the intro yet...

Oh, now it gets interesting. They show us a list of "the greatest people in history" who knew the secret, much to this lady's amazement. Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Emerson, Edison, Einstein - all these men knew the secret. Presumably women were too busy not being allowed to vote to find out the secret.

We continue the journey by finding other people alive today who know the secret. Oddly enough, all the people who knew the secret before this DVD was released were kind of suspicious looking. They're all saying words, but somehow the words aren't getting through to the linguistics section of my brain. I could go back, but I don't think the've said anything important yet. Then they pull out a creationist move and quote mine Emerson:

I can't find a reference to Emerson ever having said this, but if he did, I doubt he was referring to the same secret. Naturally, they don't say when or where he was supposed to have said this either. Ok, so they're going to be making stuff up. Fun.

Finally we get to what the secret is: "We all work with one infinite power. We all guide ourselves by exactly the same laws. I don't care if you're an Indian, if you're in Australia, New Zealand, Stockholm or London, or Toronto in Montreal [I think that's what he said...] or New York - we're all working with one power. One law. It's attraction."

More flashy bits. If you suffer from epilepsy, avoid this movie.

"The secret is the law of attraction."

Never heard of it. Must be all that science nonsense I tend to read. They have lots of laws, but no secret ones.

Oh dear. Mr Philosopher, Bob Proctor, explains that everything that is coming into my life, I am attracting into my life. Somehow, I don't think he's given this a lot of thought. Bad things happen. Good things happen. They tend to happen more or less the same for everyone. This indicates that good and bad events are due to chance. We can certainly live in such a way that we increase our chances for certain things to happen. I am unlikely to find a boyfriend if I never leave my house. But according to this "law", I can sit in my house and just think about getting a boyfriend and it will happen. Maybe it'll be the pizza delivery guy.

"And it's attracted to you by virtue of the images you're holding in your mind."

I have to call bull on this one. I have been reading Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" and can heartily recommend it to you and Bob. The "images we're holding in our minds" have no power over anything outside our minds. This seems to imply that there is some sort of force all around us (let's call it the ether, shall we?) and wispy and mysterious things are happening inside the ether. Our thoughts exert a force on the ether and can affect change in the ether's behaviour. The ether is in fact responsible for everything happening to us and if only we can somehow harness its power, we can become successful. Luckily, we have our magical mental images. They're just the ticket.

What utter idiocy.

I sense that this DVD will be like attending a creationist seminar - so many fallacies uttered in such rapid succession that I won't be able to keep up. And I have a pause button. Bob just asked us why we think 1% of the population earn 96% of all the money being earned? He says that it is no accident, it is "designed that way, they understand something, they understand the secret". Ok, I don't know whether this statistic is correct. Googling for it gives me one hit - and it's about the secret and making money. So I'll call bull again, until they can come up with some sources. I won't even address the "it's not accident" line, except to say it isn't an accident that the rich are getting richer and the poor are having more children. But it's not by design either.

Next, the secret concept is being compared to a magnet by an entrepreneur, but the next man (an author) states that "very basically put, the law of attraction states that like attracts like". And we all know that magnets don't quite work that way. More crap, then, and we're only 5 minutes and 36 seconds in.

Here are some of the creepy looking people sharing their take on the secret with you:


The purpose of humanity is quickly defined as "our job as humans is to hold on to the thoughts of what we want, make it absolute [sic] clear in our minds what we want and from then [that?] we start to invoke one of the greatest laws of the universe, that's the law of attraction.

Bob points to his noggin and tells us that if we "see it in here", we're going to "hold it in here" [here he clenches his fist]. Mike Dooley sums the whole principle up for us in three. Simple. Words. No, he really said it like that. "Thoughts. Become. Things." I nearly laughed out loud at the simplicity and naivety, but it's late and people are sleeping.

Now we're treated to some images of a man hooked up to a machine interpreting the frequencies of his thoughts, I guess. Because yes, we can "measure a thought". Ok, now they're making me swear. If we think about what we want (that car, that job, that girl), we are emitting a certain frequency. A "magnetic signal" according to the metaphysician, Joe Vitale. What a load of utter crap! He continues to spout more crap, oh man, I can't watch this.

They're talking about wishful thinking - "see yourself living in abundance, then you will attract it." "It always works, it works everytime, with every person." I doubt that very much. Now we're treated to the problem. "Most people are thinking about what they don't want, then they wonder why it shows up over and over and over again." U-huh. We're all constantly walking around, thinking about what we don't want, right? Well guess what. Right now, I'm emitting the magnetic frequency "I really don't want Godzilla to flatten my house" out into the universe. Let's see the universe screw me over by giving me what I don't want! I'll let you know how it turns out. If Godzilla is a bit too large for the universe to handle, I'll also add this thought: "I really don't want ugly orange shoes." Let's see if the universe gives me what I don't want. Let's see if ugly orange shoes will show up. I'm attracting it! Right now!

The universe doesn't care about good, or bad, or what we want and don't want. It is only concerned with the signals we are sending out. So if we are thinking about "a mountain of debt", the universe will read this signal and return to us a mountain of debt. Because you know, that's the way the totality of known or supposed objects and phenomena throughout space works!

I admit that I've read about the secret and the crap in it before, but if I hadn't, now would be the point at which I'd be betting money that they're going to mention "quantum" something later on. Quantum mechanics, or quantum physics or quantum something.

If we are "looking at that thing we want and we are saying yes to it, we are activating a thought." Whoosh, a shockwave bursts forth from a lady's mind. Out into the jewellery store. She wants that necklace. The law of attraction will respond to that thought. That is why the lady is now being presented with that necklace she wanted. It's not that her partner is thoughtful - it's the universe again.

I'm at the point now where the law of attraction is to blame for long queues. By saying "no" to long queues in our minds, we're really causing the universe to cause the long queues. So it's not the slow cashier or the broken cash register. It's my mind. It's powerful. It controls the universe.

Right, this ends my first post. I'm at 07:59 of The Secret. I know, it's sad. I can't help they put so much crap in so little time. I even skipped over some of it.

Thus far, I'm not impressed at all. I knew it would suck, but I at least expected the graphics to be a little bit better. This was laughable. If you're watching it, look out for the first character grabbing that lamp, the way she reads everything with a magnifying glass, and how frantic everyone throughout The Secret's history was.

We'll continue the megalomania trip another day.

No Godzilla yet, and no orange shoes either.