"The Secret" Exposed

This appeared on boingboing:

Friday, August 24, 2007

Exposing "The Secret"

Jody Radzik of the always-illuminating Guruphiliac blog says, "Here's an excellent explanation, deconstruction and debunking of that claptrap "The Secret." From "The Wrath of the Secretrons" by Connie L. Schmidt:

f you’re at all familiar with The Secret, you know that the big secret revealed therein is a centuries-old principle called the law of attraction, or LOA. In The Secret LOA is presented as a scientific law akin to the law of gravity. LOA believers maintain that whether we realize it or not, we “attract” everything that happens to us – the good and the bad, the sublime and the silly, the comical and the tragic. Financial success or failure, health or illness, a life of peace or one beset by violent crime or natural disasters, all occur because we somehow attracted them. Proponents of LOA explain that this happens because our vibrations are in sync with the events in question. If we learn to focus on the good and ignore the bad, we will “raise our vibrations” and attract more good things into our lives – including, and some would say especially, material goodies....[more]