This is addressed those who have read the book (by Rhonda Byrne) or seen the film The Secret and failed to have its magic work for them.
The secret revealed in The Secret was the ‘law of attraction.’ In short, that which one thinks one gets. That upon which one focuses one’s attention will be attracted into that person’s life. As the book points out the secret is nothing new. More than 2500 years ago the Buddha was said to have said ‘you are what you think.’ What is new about The Secret is the marvelous job it does of communicating the simplicity of the truth from religious, spiritual, self-help, and even scientific perspectives. The crux of The Secret’s authority is that great human beings throughout history have all apparently uttered the ‘law of attraction’ in their own ways as being a ‘secret’ to their successes.
However, mastering the law of attraction is not quite as easy as the book and movie make it out to be. If the secret was so simple to realize and apply, no doubt in the seven years since the book was introduced, and remained a bestseller, the world would have by now been transformed into something resembling the garden of Eden. So, what went wrong?
Two things in my view.
First, and this is fatal to the realization of its message, The Secret omits a most important step of realizing one’s intentions. That step is doing something in furtherance of that realization. One can think all the most pleasant thoughts in the world, and absent doing anything to realize those thoughts will result in a person thinking a lot of thoughts. Every single historical figure that The Secret used for its authority for the ‘law of attraction’ was a prodigious doer. They did not merely think about what they wanted, they pursued what they envisioned with every fiber of their beings. Yes, even the Buddhist’s noble eight-fold path begins with ‘right view’ and ‘right intention’. But, it is followed by ‘right action’, ‘right livelihood’, and ‘right effort.’
Second, The Secret appeals almost exclusively to people’s material interests. While some of the historical figures used as authority for the book accumulated unimaginable riches I am pretty sure they did not do so by aiming exclusively to attain those riches. They had bigger, broader dreams and if attainment of those more worthy intentions did not involve attainment riches, they likely would not have been any more wealthy than you or me.
In keeping with the law of attraction, when a person focuses exclusively toward the attainment of matter, they will get matter. The problem is, that matter might not glitter with gold. It more than likely will be the dull, painful matter that is most closely associated with thought. That is mental mass and energy. And so many a poor soul put all their mental power into conjuring fancy cars and yachts and wound up instead with splitting headaches. Why?
The answer lies with another historical figure who understood the secret but who was not mentioned in the book. L. Ron Hubbard built an extensive philosophy, psychotherapy, and religion predicated on the magic of the law of attraction. He stated it in 1954 in this wise:
Considerations take rank over the mechanics of space, energy and time. By this is meant that an idea or opinion, fundamentally, is superior to space, energy and time or organizations of form, since it is conceived that space, energy and time are themselves broadly agreed-upon considerations. That so many minds agree brings about reality in the form of space, energy, and time. These mechanics, then, of space, energy and time, are the product of agreed-upon considerations mutually held by life…
…The freedom of an individual depends on that individual’s freedom to alter his considerations of space, energy, time and forms of life, and his roles in it. If he cannot change his mind about these, he is then fixed and enslaved by barriers of his own creation. Man thus is seen to be enslaved by barriers of his own creation. He creates these barriers himself or by agreeing with things which hold these barriers to be actual.
Hubbard realized that stating these facts – such as was so artfully done in The Secret – alone did little to liberate people from their self-imposed mental enslavement. Over the next couple decades Hubbard developed a mental and spiritual technology for relieving the mental mass and energy an individual accumulates since birth while under the mistaken idea that the mechanics of matter, energy, space and time take precedence over the considerations of the individual. He called the subject Scientology.
There are two Scientology routes to achieving a strong realization of the law of attraction and the ability to use it to one’s advantage. The first, is what Hubbard called the Training Routines. It is a two to three week course in communication toward the ability of realizing and executing intention. For some people that course alone will free them to clearly see and apply the law of attraction in their lives. For those it does not deliver that end phenomenon to, it will not have been a waste of time. At worst, one will walk away with improved communication skills and the ability to more comfortably be, do and have as one wishes.
The second route is called auditing (from the Latin root, audire which means to listen). It can be pursued if the first route gave you something desirable, but not all that you sought toward mastering the law of attraction. An auditor does one on one counseling with a person which directly addresses one’s ability to recognize his or her spiritual self, the creator of the considerations that dictate the mechanics in one’s life. There are six levels of counseling that follow one from another in a gradient approach. Any one of those levels could result in a person feeling perfectly comfortable and competent in living with and by the law of attraction. There are a number of other skills and abilities attainable with each one of them.
There is an important word of warning in choosing to apply the L. Ron Hubbard approach. As so often happens with the empowering ideas of a philosopher, institutionalization and monopolization of those ideas for power and profit can pervert them beyond recognition. By no means should a person go anywhere near a church of Scientology nor any Scientology practitioner who does not practice Hubbard’s ideas in an integral fashion. Such folk are religionists whose intention to help you is overshadowed by their intentions to convert people to become Scientologists. That encompasses a world view and philosophy that in many ways is one hundred and eighty degrees diametrically opposed to the simple methodologies of helping people master the law of attraction.
An integral practitioner understands and continues to educate himself on philosophy and science outside of Scientology so as to increase his own worth and ability to apply his skills. An integral practitioner would understand The Secret and how Scientology methods can be used to realize it and would use them in that spirit. A true believer Scientologist religionist does not understand that The Secret is simply another way of describing the very thing Scientology was created to achieve. Thus, a true-believer Scientologist can practice Scientology for a lifetime and never realize The Secret. Rather than assist you to realize it, he would attempt to discredit it and to dissuade you from even pursuing it. An integral practitioner serves with the purpose of empowering you. A true-believer Scientologist attempts to own you so as to ‘save you.’
If you wish to pursue this route, be sure you establish that you are pursuing it with an integral practitioner.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 