The Secret - an Integral Glance
by Steve Self, Durango, CO 2006

The 90 minute movie-infomercial, The Secret, resonates with the earlier film, What The Bleep, and further abandons any pretense of respect for critical thinking, philosophical fit and transpersonal development. Contradictions, confusions and indulgences are rampant throughout the film. It plays more like a fevered revival, encouraging us all to abandon ourselves to pre-rational magical thinking as a miraculous prescription for easing our materialistic suffering.

The film presents the Universal Law of Attraction as its central secret: imagine what you want to be, be positive in your thinking about what you want, and engage your mind and emotions when envisioning it, and the universe will manifest it for you.

First, the benign interpretation...

On the surface, this is sensible and useful, it is basic healthy orange-achiever level behavior. Just clarifying your wants, setting specific goals, and keeping it all vividly in mind is quite useful. One sees opportunities and makes connections that would never have occurred without the presence of the envisioned goals. Extraneous busy work begins to fall away and one attends more directly to fulfilling one’s desires. Peripheral friends and contacts begin to get involved and naturally make further connections toward completion. Staying aware of what you want is an effective step toward getting it.

For those stuck in a negative attitude, this advice could begin to shake them free and encourage healthy optimism. If one can involve others -- family, friends and those also inspired by The Secret -- in supporting this new outlook, it is more likely to become a lasting change. Again, on the surface, being optimistic is more effective than being pessimistic.

When the movie begins to insist, “you create your reality,” it in part presents a possibility for a broader and deeper sense of responsibility. We can begin to own that our choices and attitudes have something to do with the circumstances we find ourselves embedded in. A number of the teachers stress how our health is deeply affected by our views and thoughts. All familiar and straightforward guidance, straddling the orange-achiever to green-pluralistic structure-stages of adult development, and preferencing the individual’s interior experience, the upper left quadrant.

So far, this is a generous view of the movie, for in its extremely partial and naive presentation there lurk many misunderstandings, manipulations and outright pathological indulgences. Let’s wade in...

Pre-Rational Magical Thinking

Probably the strongest message in the movie is the pre-rational notion that the universe is like a cosmic Santa or a personal and infinite catalog and we merely need to place our order –by thinking positively about what we want– and all our desires will manifest. This idea is pounded into us with insistent repetition and manic sincerity. This is classic magical thinking, where one believes that the external world will physically change to match our internal mental thoughts. Such magical thinking is usually outgrown around age three. In the film, however, this is presented as an advanced understanding of how the universe actually works at a quantum level (more on this later) and in a clever manipulation, any dissent or contradictory evidence is cast in a light of “negative thinking.” It’s this negative thinking that manifests scarcity, suffering, and all the ills on the planet. These claims are so audacious, so outrageous, so completely implausible, that even a brief moment of rigorous thought completely dispels them. But in the postmodern world, where truth is revealed as context dependent, and naive dreamers think this means that the pre-rational is just as valid as the rational and trans-rational, that in fact one must not rank or preference any view over any other, this creates a listening in which completely idiotic notions seem valid and plausible.

No where in the movie is the mind or the self addressed. Anyone who has paused and sat in meditation very soon observes that thinking is running on and on and on by itself. There is a cacophony of chaotic thoughts that continuously wander through the mind. Yet the makers of The Secret directly imply that this out-of-control thought stream is what can manifest wants. Furthermore, they never consider who the “you” is that they are empowering with this magic genie. Is it the you that wants the Big Mac and fries for lunch? Or the you that knows the chopped salad is better? Is it the you that constantly desires more and more clothes, shoes, handbags, books, cd’s, and is never satiated? Is it the you that wants to sleep with every cute coed that walks by, or the you that nurtures the marriage? If manifestation is driven by mentally visualizing whatever is desired or wanted, this looks like an episode of the Twilight Zone. For sure, it is a terribly naive and shallow understanding of people.

Let’s get even darker. The presenters believe, and insist that you should believe, in this magic cosmic-genie granting all your wishes. What about the pedophile who really wants the young boys or girls to abuse? What about the terrorist leader who is very clear on his desire for a nuclear weapon? What about the depressed teenager who really wants his annoying parents to disappear? The makers of The Secret unconsciously assume that everyone will have the same generous and sensitive values as they have, or at least that the Universe has the same values, a typical 1st tier myopia. Or they naively expect that once people begin to get what they want, their true nature and good hearts will arise and they will only want “good” things. Apparently the authors don’t get out much, and when they do, they’re wearing rose colored glasses, as they have no regard for sociopaths, sexual predators, xenophobic red-driven fundamentalists, amoral criminals and voracious robber-baron greed.

Another fundamental error the teachers of the Secret make, that so many New Age inspirational presenters make, is the fallacious use of trans-rational insights to justify pre-rational behavior. They reframe wisdom from 3rd tier, clear-light sages or enlightened masters, describing the soul’s arc, karma, oneness and the great perfection of the manifest world, into 1st tier platitudes and narcissistic puffery. When a 1st tier perspective misappropriates 3rd tier truths, almost nothing of the original meaning remains. The wisdom of the sages becomes manipulative spin in the hands of flatland relativists. Once you deny higher levels of adult development, you lose all the beauty and nuance of these highly sophisticated perspectives. And you end up valuing pre-rational impulses as equal to supremely evolved and refined perception. In one stroke, the presenters in the film elevate pre-rational magical fantasies and degrade visionary insights, simultaneously eliminating all authenticity in both.

The authors and presenters largely ignore perspectives from the right-hand quadrants, only addressing empirical science (the upper right quadrant) at the level of quantum physics, and completely misusing it to justify their brain-wave manifestation magic. Using a simplistic graphic of mind-waves broadcasting into the ethers, they demonstrate rearranging the underlying energy of the universe to fulfill an individual’s want. I guess the idea that physical objects are really made up of space, energy and probability clouds seems so counter-intuitive that one might as was well believe in unicorns and fairies as well. This is certainly easier than actually doing the work of physics to understand its truths.

If probability clouds are easy to misinterpret, systems theory must seem insane and opaque to those wanting a miraculous short-cut to wealth and love. The Secret ignores the pesky details of socioeconomic networks and ecological-systems perspectives, all in the lower right quadrant, at one point simply insisting that there is plenty to fulfill everyone’s desires for luxury and indulgence. This is like whistling by the toxic dump... They insist that all suffering and starvation is due to negative thinking, denying any effect of the complex mix of economic, ecological, and cultural interdependencies. The utter ignorance and egocentric hubris of their enthusiastic testimonials is an insult to marginalized people everywhere. By disregarding the influences of external systems, the presenters raise “ignorance is bliss” to new heights.

So, from an integral perspective, The Secret flatlands developmental structures, preferences only one quadrant’s perspective, ignores learning styles and lines of development, disregards the complexity of the self, glosses over the nature of mind, and badly misuses postmodern perspectives. Additionally, within the partial view it advocates, there are so many errors, misunderstandings and exaggerations that any valid truth-claims in the movie are buried under the mess. However, I do recommend it as an integral exercise; use it to sharpen your wit, polish your cognitive awareness and stretch your compassion.