As long as they shut the fuck up about anyone else’s lives, including how the Holocaust and cancer and the deaths of their family members are all their faults, they can knock themselves out.
To be fair, The Secret doesn’t preach “Go buy a lottery ticket and wish really hard.”
Instead, what they do is take common sense and coat it in a shade of mysticism.
An example they gave: Johny wants a fancy new sports car. Johny couldn’t afford new sports car. So johny used the secret and thought really realy hard about that sports car. Finally, Johny had this AMAZING revealation that he could start up his own part time business on top of his regular job.
And wouldn’t ya’ know it, because of Johny’s [del] Hard work and determination[/del] Super Magical Thinking Powers, Johny was able to get that fancy sports car!
It’s a miracle folks! A freaking miracle!
No, darling, bad things won’t happen to you because you must be unblemished for the sacrifice. Oooh, oops, I let slip The Secret . . .
Thanks for being condescending while simultaneously refraining from explaining anything. The concept of dharma exists as a justification for the exploitation of the underclass by the upper class. It’s okay if those people have the job of removing our shit, working with leather, removing our trash and being so unclean they must be segregated from the rest of our society. They deserve it/are in the place where the universe has ordained them to spend their lives.
The mind is repelled by uncertainty. This is all to the good in many ways, as it forces decisions and encourages analytic thought. Of course many go too far by leaping to conclusions or by becoming too attached to their beliefs.
The inclination is very old. If you deliver constant electrical shocks to lab rats, they eventually just lie down and take it. But if you deliver random shocks, they become stressed and will desperately experiment (fruitlessly) in order to stop the pain. (Source: old psych book). By analogy, humans prefer optimism or pessimism over statements that declare that outcomes are uncertain. Either one will do. I’ve wondered whether a background in probability can take the edge off some of the cognitive dissonance. Mesuspects that “50:50 chance” sounds better than “We don’t know.”
ETA:
Do you mean karma?
:rolleyes:
Caveat: I’m explaining it, not promoting or defending it.
It’s very simplistic and silly to say that we “want” x thing or another and therefore we create it. Depending on how far one cares to go in examining it, it can go all the way back to pre-birth and decisions about who one will be in this life, and from THAT perspective what appears to be negative (disease, war, suffering of whatever kind) is just experience, no better or worse than any other experience, and all are chosen just for the purpose of having the experience.
Or we can skip that degree of spiritual belief and just look at it closer to the way it’s promoted in something like the Secret- it’s still not a matter of getting what you want; it’s a matter of* attracting what you focus on*. Focus isn’t necessarily positive, it’s just focus. The law of attraction (which is the what the secret is talking about) responds to the most intense feeling. If your fear overrides everything else in terms of intensity, then you will get what you fear.
The fundamental idea is that the law of attraction is always working, and you attract what you focus on, fear, believe, get excited about, genuinely expect. See it, feel it, believe it, and the universe will manifest it without judgment. So when people blame people who aare suffering from terrible things, it’s offbase even within the belief system that the Secret promotes. That belief system would say that people experiencing extreme negatives have done so either because of fear or because it’s an experience for the spirit. Neither of which would probably be received by the sufferer a whole lot better, but actually are not quite so flippantly dismissive of a person’s individual struggles.
So, to clarify: how did my “fear” or desire for “experience for the spirit” lead to the three miscarriages I had? And how is that not saying that my fear, belief, or genuine expectation caused the losses; in other words, that it was my fault?
“Fault” implies someone did something wrong, leading to something bad happening. That’s your assessment, but that’s not the way someone who believes in the law of attraction and the spiritual ideas I’m talking about would view it. It’s not about fault, or blame, or wrong, or bad.
Your first question I’m not sure how to answer, other than the way I did. If one believes in the view that we come into this life to experience things, then one would believe that your spirit chose the experience of loss through miscarriage. If one believes simply in the law of attraction without some larger design of the spirit at work, then it would appear to someone outside your mind, who can only guess, that you manifested what you feared, that your fear was the most powerful emotional vibration, so the universe responded to that by manifesting it.
The most fundamental idea underlying the law of attraction is the complete absence of judgment of any kind. There is no good or bad or right or wrong, especially from the perspective of the universe itself. So it’s not as though the universe delivered some horrible thing to you to punish you for your fear or whatever else might be in play that would lead to your having miscarriages. The universe doesn’t judge, it just delivers.
Again, explaining, not promoting, not selling, not defending.
Fucking Johnny, how does he work?
There are self-fulfilling prophecies. The mistake of “The Secret” is to say that, therefore, all prophecies are self-fulfilling. It’s like observing that there are female cats, therefore all cats are female.
That’s all well and good. But what happens if Johnny decides that he will, somehow, be able to afford that fancy sports car, and goes into debt to buy it, without making any other changes in his finances, just having faith that the universe will somehow provide a way for him to make the payments? That’s not so good.
And the problem with that idea as a security blanket, or one of the problems, anyway, is that, taken too far, it means you don’t have to try to help people who do fall on hard times, or even feel compassion for them. That’s a logical conclusion once you believe that everyone who falls on hard times has brought it on themselves.
Another problem is that reality is what it is, and it doesn’t really care what you want to believe. Pretending it is some other way isn’t generally too helpful in dealing with reality. It’s like going on a diet by blacking out the last digit in the calorie counts on all the foods you buy, and thinking that actually means those foods have 1/10 the calories they did before. They don’t, and if you act as if they do, you’re not going to lose weight.
Oprah’s OWN network is failing. She must have forgot what she read in The Secret.
The power of focusing on the desire, will attract whatever you want, if you want something enough?
I always picture the author of “The Secret” lecturing in a part of the world where people are starving,
and saying: “Just keep focusing on the desire for food, and you will attract it to you.
But, if you continue to send out all those negative thoughts, about vultures picking the flesh from your weak and bony bodies…”
Stoid, if The Secret really is the answer to success in life, why did you lose your court case? Did you not actually want to win? Or you just wanted the attention?
I’m sorry you’re so confused. That must be frustrating.
You’re welcome to explain it to me-- ideally with lots of text formatting so I can really get your point.
As I said, it must be terribly frustrating to be as confused as you obviously are. Best of luck with that.
Stoid: Winning since 1999.
So, you can’t explain it then? I mean, aren’t we supposed to be fighting ignorance here? Fight mine, my friend!
Stoid aside, I’m curious: what’s supposed to happen if, say, you sue me for a hundred thousand dollars – or you’re up against me for Olympic gold, or that big promotion at work, or whatever – and you’re of course wishing for victory with all your might, but I of course want to prevail and so wish for victory right back. Who wins?