The problems with Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret"

A discussion between

Ken Wilber and Julian Walker

Full audio at Integral Naked

 Exploring “The Secret.”  Part 1.  The Tricky Business of Creating Your Own Reality.

• As with any “you create your own reality” schema, The Secret fails what can be called “the Auschwitz test.”  According to The Secret, everyone who was murdered at Auschwitz—or Rwanda, or Darfur—created that reality for themselves, and therefore they are to blame for their fate.  For obvious reasons, this position is an unconscionable as it is untenable.

• By teaching that the world quite literally revolves around you, The Secret encourages and entrenches narcissism.  In developmental psychology, narcissism doesn’t mean an unhealthy obsession with thinking only about yourself, it means you can’t think about yourself.  The capacity for self-reflexive awareness just isn’t there.  The entire world and everyone in it is simply an extension of your-self, and you are literally unable to take the perspective of another human being.  This is not mystical union; this is pre-rational fusion, and without the ability to take the perspectives of other sentient beings, the entire foundation for ethics evaporates.

• Actually, you are creating the universe moment-to-moment, but it’s not the “you” that you think.  According to the great contemplative traditions, every person has at least two “selves”: the finite, temporal, egoic self-sense, and the infinite, transcendental, unqualifiable Self, or I-AMness.  Your Self, your I-AMness, is indeed giving rise to the entire radiant Kosmos in this and every moment, but The Secret teaches that your separate self has the power to personally manifest a new car, win the lottery, or cure cancer… and this simply isn’t how things work.

• “The Law of Attraction” is true—as far as it goes.  The problem is that The Secret takes this one relatively small piece of the puzzle and makes it the entire puzzle.  A positive outlook will change your life and your intentions will co-create your reality, but so will brain chemistry, interior level of development, family relationships, natural disasters, cultural trends, language structure, environmental toxins, and, basically, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

• Developmentally, if one uses a scale ranging from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral to super-integral, The Secret teaches the magical thought structures that were humanity’s leading edge several hundred thousand years ago.  As Ken explains, The Secret encourages childlike “primary process thinking,” which can be in the form of “the law of attraction” (e.g., if one black thing is bad, then all black things are bad) and “the law of contagion” (e.g., if this particular man was powerful, then a lock of his hair must be powerful too).

• The importance of understanding how unconscious psychological shadow elements color and affect one’s experience, and how The Secret can agitate, alienate, repress, or—perhaps even more worrisome—act on these disowned elements of consciousness.

• The genesis of the pre/trans or pre/post fallacy, and how The Secret is a perfect example of elevating pre-rational childish impulses to trans-rational spiritual glory.  Simply because both categories of experience are non-rational, they can easily be confused, and often are.