[DanielBrenton]

A couple of comments:

I do feel there is a "big money" attitude surrounding The Secret, and this frankly puts me off to the product line.

I recently bought the DVD, and when I went to thesecret.tv I could not find a way of purchasing the DVD without becoming a registered member. Free or not, that meant I'd have to cough up some information for them, and I feel pretty confident that if I did do this (and if I was honest about it) I'd wind up on their spam list.

I'm sorry, but I DON'T LIKE SPAM!!!!!!

So I bought it on Amazon, and found a comment form on thesecret.tv and left a note that I was put off by this.

I wasn't surprised that I didn't get a response.

The bottom line here is that this is really another packaging of very old wisdom. I remember variations of this twenty years ago, and it wouldn't surprise me if you could trace it all the way back through recorded history.

As for attracting tragedy -- I remember Ruth Montgomery making the assertion in the 1960s that we choose our parents before we incarnate. (I suspect a certain psychic medium many of us know and love would say exactly the same thing.) So how is this different than being responsible for everything that happens in our lives? How is this different from attracting tragedy?

Joe Vitale had the audacity of saying something politically incorrect in the media's arena, which is one of our world's mechanisms for helping us escape a sense of responsibility for our lives. Yes, he's going to get slammed. As Voltaire said, "we should not be disappointed when a fig tree produces figs."