David Schirmer is one of the experts featured in The Secret. Within the past hour, I watched a rather disturbing YouTube video clip about him after a forum member posted a link to it. Some of David’s seminar customers accused him of taking money he was supposed to be investing on their behalf (to the tune of thousands of dollars per person) and never paying it back or giving them any of the promised returns. So A Current Affair in Australia set him up and confronted him about this in a TV interview. I’ve never seen anyone squirm under the lights like that before.

The reporter from A Current Affair cornered David into agreeing to pay back his customers’ money — with specific deadlines. Two follow-up videos show that David at first appeared to cooperate but then cut off all communications with the reporter.

Here are the videos:

The third video shows David sharing a meal with Bob Proctor (also from The Secret), while David attempts to ignore the reporter who’s grilling him with questions. (Update: As you may have heard, Bob Proctor released an audio program with content plagiarized from StevePavlina.com, much of it word for word identical.)

I don’t know what the current status of this situation is, but the videos were posted to YouTube in May and June 2007. Did David eventually refund his customers’ money and/or pay their returns? Or was A Current Affair biased, and we’re not getting the whole story?

Here’s a direct quote from David’s Schirmer’s Trading Edge company web site:

[David Schirmer] now drives the car of his dream, the latest BMW M5, owns real estate, has numerous businesses and this year will make a personal income from trading and business in excess of $1.5 million.

What’s the lesson?

Perhaps you’ll find your own lesson here, but for me it’s a personal reminder that people must always come before profits and that genuine wealth comes from honest self-expression. While David Schirmer may have a nice car and house, the man I saw in those videos was, in my opinion, more impoverished than wealthy. And I think the same could also be said about the so-called investigative reporting, which used what many would consider dishonorable tactics.

As a former kleptomaniac myself, however, how can I judge such people except as a process of raising awareness of my own shadow, whose energy I must continually rechannel away from fear and greed? My ego wants to affirm that other people are completely separate from me, but my soul knows that isn’t true. Consequently, I can hold nothing in my heart for such people except unconditional love and acceptance. To do any less is to resonate with the problem instead of the solution.

After you experience your initial reaction to these videos and the follow-up, what response will you consciously choose?