Discrimination used to be taught as one of the fundamental qualities of mind needed on the spiritual path. Popular versions of spirituality seem to have dropped this inconvenient idea – witness the awful The Secret – a DVD and book that is selling in the millions.
After the disheartening experience of discovering just how truly dire The Secret is – and then finding that friends have been taken in by it – my faith has been restored! Wikipedia has a balanced piece on it, Newsweek, the NY Times, the LA Times, The Guardian all have incisive reviews. And in a blog by Julian Walker he goes into detail about the reasons why it really is so terrible.
I could rant on about it – but these guys have done it very well already! Here’s a quote from the Newsweek Review:
‘On an ethical level, “The Secret” appears deplorable. It concerns itself almost entirely with a narrow range of middle-class concerns—houses, cars and vacations, followed by health and relationships, with the rest of humanity a very distant sixth. Even some of the major figures in the film confess to uneasiness with its relentless materialism.’
Julian Walker’s blog goes into the detail of exactly how The Secret distorts spiritual teachings (and therefore isn’t even useful as an introduction for ‘beginners’) but on Youtube you can see a number of spoofs, which work best if you’ve actually seen the film. Try this!
[...] psychology and much of New Age pop-spiritual-psychology – which has reached its peak in the mind-numbing materialism of ‘The Secret’, whose popularity forces us to question whether a Great Awakening is really [...]
By: In The Eye of the Storm - How to Stay Sane in an Insane World « Philip Carr-Gomm’s Weblog on May 9, 2008
at 10:15 am
I have seen “the Secret” and read and seen The Celestine prophecy, of the two id go for the latter, full marks for blogging this Philip )0(
By: john on June 7, 2011
at 12:30 pm