Saturday 2 June 2007

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

The Secret
Rhonda Byrne
(Atria)


I'VE always had a secret belief that if I wanted something, I just had to order it up from the universe and voila! - in a week or a month, it'd turn up.

Seems I'm not alone. And if only I'd thought of making a book out of it, I could have made millions, like Rhonda Byrne.

Stop! Stop! Negative thoughts, Byrne warns (namechecking Leonardo, Shakespeare and the New Testament), are only going to bring bad things. It's a [itals]good[/itals] life.

As well as the dead heavy hitters, Byrne brings in living advisors - a 'philosopher, chiropractor, healer, and personal transformation specialist', an (ooh!) 'entrepreneur and moneymaking expert', et al.

The Secret has lots of reference to quantum physics - maybe quantum physicists will be an important tranche of readers.

Seriously, it's absolutely true that if you clear the way by working out what you actually want, and go for it, things happen to help you along.

But The Secret has an unhappy sense of the all-powerful, suggesting that you can cure illnesses, wish wealth, become beautiful and strong and fine and rich by 'the law of attraction'. If only.

It's all very well, but it has an ugly corollary, the suggestion that all the autistics and cystic fibrotics are causing their own problems by their bad thoughts.

And if the longing and love and hope and wishing of millions of people could bring us what we want, Madeleine McCann would have been home with her parents long ago.

None of us, I sadly suspect, is so powerful.

But don't pay any attention. I'm just jealous.

1 comment:

SandyCarlson said...

Interesting. Thank you. I have just finished the book. In a general way, I can take some good ideas from it. I am somewhat bothered, though, that so many of her sources are rich people. Thoughts become things, we shape the universe by our thoughts....Seems to me spiritual people shouldn't be so self-serving and self-centered. But who knows. I'm poor.