posted March 05, 2007 10:56 PM         

you have to go within..Mind to OverSoul = GOD
and this connection, allows you to know thySelf
and SEE, past present and future...
now if we only image good things, then we are
not facing karma..and this is a must...
or you can forgive, and come full-serpent circle...ending the cycle of karma...

we have a purpose..we need to master
OurSelves..to pray and image
for the Good of ALL...

not only of OneSelf...

The big picture

we are all equal, we are all one...

LOve LOve LOve

posted March 06, 2007 12:18 PM         

just our physical body (shell) is...

and anything you manifest, by the way, only masters can manifest, for they are initiated
for the Good of ALL, and all must be manifested
with the condsideration to ALL, for we are all connected ...

the Secret, is false in my eyes...

the Big Picture is missing

and it seems only Self, is concerned
with what they want....

LOve LOve LOve

posted March 06, 2007 02:07 PM         

Well, I get knocked down, but I always get back up...

posted March 06, 2007 11:22 PM         

From my own personal experience, the 'Secret' (though it's not really much of a secret) is a real phenomenon. Contrary to what others might say, I don't think it's focused on the self, or at least not in the sense that the self is viewed as separate from the rest of the Universe (which is a delusion, I think). Philbird's advice is right on, imo. It's working for you whether you know it or not; the 'secret' is to bring it to conscious attention.

posted March 06, 2007 11:44 PM         

it's up to you, no one else....

posted March 07, 2007 12:09 AM         

Oprah's ugly secret

By continuing to hawk "The Secret," a mishmash of offensive self-help cliches, Oprah Winfrey is squandering her goodwill and influence, and preaching to the world that mammon is queen.

By Peter Birkenhead

March 5, 2007 | Steve Martin used to do a routine that went like this: "You too can be a millionaire! It's easy: First, get a million dollars. Now..."

If you put that routine between hard covers, you'd have "The Secret," the self-help manifesto and bottle of minty-fresh snake oil currently topping the bestseller lists. "The Secret" espouses a "philosophy" patched together by an Australian talk-show producer named Rhonda Byrne. Though "The Secret" unabashedly appropriates and mishmashes familiar self-help clichés, it was still the subject of two recent episodes of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" featuring a dream team of self-help gurus, all of whom contributed to the project.

The main idea of "The Secret" is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it -- and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it -- the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme -- is brilliant. But what really makes "The Secret" more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn't just endorsed "The Secret"; she's championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

Why "venality"? Because, with survivors of Auschwitz still alive, Oprah writes this about "The Secret" on her Web site, "the energy you put into the world -- both good and bad -- is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." "Venality," because Oprah, in the age of AIDS, is advertising a book that says, "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought." "Venality," because Oprah, from a studio within walking distance of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green Projects, pitches a book that says, "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts."

Worse than "The Secret's" blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced ************ . The titular "secret" of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that "like attracts like" and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite -- positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles -- and the rest of "The Secret" has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: "Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of." And worse than the idiocy and the ************ is its anti-intellectualism, because that's at the root of the other two. Here's "The Secret" on reading and, um, electricity: "When I discovered 'The Secret' I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good," and, "How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don't, do you?" And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of "The Secret," because it's why the book exists: "[The Secret] is like having the Universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, 'I'd like to have this experience and I'd like to have that product and I'd like to have a person like that.' It is you placing your order with the Universe. It's really that easy." That's from Dr. Joe Vitale, former Amway executive and contributor to "The Secret," on Oprah.com.

Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest women in the world, and one of the most influential. Her imprimatur has helped the authors of "The Secret" sell 2 million books (and 1 million DVDs), putting it ahead of the new Harry Potter book on the Amazon bestseller list. In the time Oprah spent advertising the lies in "The Secret," she could have been exposing them to an audience that otherwise might have believed them. So why didn't she? If James Frey deserved to be raked over the coals for lying about how drunk he was, doesn't Oprah deserve some scrutiny for pitching the meretricious nonsense in "The Secret"?

Oprah has a reputation for doing good -- she probably has more perceived moral authority than anyone in this country -- and she has done a lot of good. But in light of her zealous support of a book that says, in this time of entrenched, systemic, institutionalized poverty, this time of no-bid contracts for war profiteers and heckuva-job governance, that "you can have, be, or do anything," isn't it reasonable to ask about why she does what she does, and the way she does it?

Oprah recently opened, with much fanfare, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa, and as I watched the network news stories about it, I couldn't get "The Secret" out of my mind. I kept wondering what would happen if professor Sam Mhlongo, South Africa's chief family practitioner who famously said that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, read about Oprah's connection to "The Secret" and found support there for his claim. I wondered if the students of the academy would read "The Secret" and start to believe that their parents deserved to be poor, or that the people of Darfur summoned the Janjaweed with "bad thoughts." Will the heavier girls be told, as readers of "The Secret" are, that food doesn't cause weight gain -- thinking about weight gain does? Will they be told to not even look at fat people, as "The Secret" advises? Oprah is already promoting these ideas to her television audience. Why wouldn't she espouse them to her students?

In many ways the Leadership Academy is a wonderful project, a school that will provide impoverished girls an education they otherwise might not have gotten. But it also seems to be the product, unavoidably, of the faux-spiritual, anti-intellectual, hyper-materialistic worldview expressed in "The Secret," the book that the school's founder has called "life changing."

There's more to the article, you can read the rest at that link.

posted March 07, 2007 12:39 AM         

quote:

---

The main idea of "The Secret" is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it

---

Isn't that something of a misinterpretation, though? Note that I've never read the official book, and I've only seen the opening couple of minutes from the movie, but, from my research on this concept, it's less about just 'visualizing' what you want and more about doing away with destructive thought patterns and replacing them with more helpful ones.

Linda quotes this at the end of Gooberz:

"...for whatsoever things ye should desire, pray as if ye had already received these and ye shall surely have them..."

Likewise, Annalee Skarin wrote a good deal about the most basic principle in the Universe being that "everything produces after it's own kind."

I think the author of that article is building something of a strawman with all the baloney about holocaust survivors and AIDS victims. He's missing the point, imo.

Regardless, I've had success by taking this "like attracts like" philosopy into consideration. All the skeptical bloggers in the world mean little.

posted March 07, 2007 12:42 AM         

is pray as if you have already received,like,

thank you God, for keeping my family safe...

posted March 07, 2007 12:46 AM         

My question To the people that say it works:

How do you really KNOW for sure? I do believe in the power of thought and that thought is energy and the the most powerful things are those that are unseen but I just would like to know how you are so certain that it was the principles applied from the Secret and not that these things may have just naturally occured.

posted March 07, 2007 12:47 AM         

Writing in pseudo-poetic style ala Gooberz doesn't add weight to your words.

posted March 07, 2007 12:50 AM         

Really, I must've missed the part about using it to make money, etc.; I honestly don't seem to remember that much about it, except for the main points, but then again, I'm terribly forgetful. I'm also fairly sure most of our knowflakes here, including sinderlou (who asked about it), are looking at the higher good, so no worries there.

posted March 07, 2007 12:54 AM         

quote:

---

How do you really KNOW for sure? I do believe in the power of thought and that thought is energy and the the most powerful things are those that are unseen but I just would like to know how you are so certain that it was the principles applied from the Secret and not that these things may have just naturally occured.

---

Not to pretend to be an expert or anything (cuz I'm not), but I don't think anyone can prove it to you one way or another. You'll always be able to find natural reasons for the events in your life; it's when you look deeper that you see signs that there's more going on then blind chance.

You just have to try it and see.

posted March 07, 2007 12:55 AM         

thus have no right to manipulate the
Universal Laws