Oprah and 'The Secret'

[hkalchemy]

I found a very well written article recently. The views expressed about 'the Secret' make for fascinating reading. I would like to quote a few lines and encourage you to read the rest. I'd love to hear your comments on this.


"Secret"-style belief is a perfect product. Like Coca-Cola, it goes down easy and makes the consumer thirsty for more. It's unthreateningly simple, and a lot more facile, sentimental and, perhaps paradoxically, intractable than the old-fashioned kind of belief. Like Amway, it enlists its consumers as unofficial salespeople, and the people who constitute its market feel like they're part of a fold. It's indistinguishable from, and inextricably bound up in, the Oprah idea of self-esteem, the kind of confidence you get not from testing yourself, but from "believing" in yourself. This modern idea of faith isn't arrived at the old-fashioned way, by asking questions, but by getting answers. Instead of inquiry we have born-again epiphanies and cheesy self-help books -- we have excuses for not engaging in inquiry at all. Let other people schlep down the road to Damascus; we'll have Amazon send Damascus to us.


The most powerful woman in the world is taking advantage of people who are desperate for meaning, by passionately championing a product that mocks the very idea of a meaningful life.

[Jennihul]

Or....

Rather than assuming The Secret is taking the low road in human inspiration and development, we can assume it's a way to begin to express to novices a concept so utterly profound and important to our soul development that it's New Millennium Introduction has been made simple and digestible for a reason.

And like me, one can assume that the mere fact that it is naturally being disseminated in such a wide-spread fashion is not an implication of it's lack of value, but an implication of how critically important it is for it to be disseminated at this time. Viral marketing doesn't automatically mean "unhealthy." Only to those with no vision and a lot of negativity.

That article and others like it is, unfortunately, a necessary evil with regard to humanity learning things such as the law of attraction. Because, as I am fond of saying, it's one way to separate the men from boys of spirituality. If something with such profound implications as LOA comes your way and a banal article sways you from the quest, then you weren't meant to be on that quest. Go back to the school yard and play with the boys.

Jennifer

[MartialDev]

Originally Posted by Jennihul

Or....

Rather than assuming The Secret is taking the low road in human inspiration and development, we can assume it's a way to begin to express to novices a concept so utterly profound and important to our soul development that it's New Millennium Introduction has been made simple and digestible for a reason...

Hmm, perhaps I should start mugging people on the street, to drum up business for my self-defense classes. I'll call it the Stimulating Awareness Project--because you have to start somewhere!

[Jennihul]

I'm not sure I see the analogy.

But, provided you didn't get caught...it could work.

Drug companies do that all the time. Invent a drug for which there is no real need and create the need based on re-designating boring regular old syndromes or conditions as full blown "diseases." Obesity was never a disease until there was a drug for it.

Jennifer