The Dark Side of 'The Secret'

[Bo]

It's a Tickle me forum, so there is no need to be too harsh, right? ;)

Adam, please answer the question. In your first post on this forum you asked about additional Cass transcripts. So I gather you are somehow familiar with C's ideas and Laura's Cass site. So how come you assume we don't know anything about spirituality?
Really, if you want to convey the message, please be more creative.

ye sorry gues there was some kind of misunderstanding i never said you dont know nothing about spirituality i just wanted to inspire people a little bit more


me is a sad panda now :[

 

[Keit]

No, this is a sad panda ;)

 

[Bo]

<3

 

[Peam]

Hi Adam,
maybe this link might help.

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/topperycyor.htm

 

[mudrabbit]

Hi Adam,

I see people around me practicing this positive thinking process on a daily basis. Yes, it does seem to work for them, yes, they seem to have everything they want, but it's ALL the wrong influences and the majority of them remain or become blind to the world around us.

When it comes down to it and the grits hit the fan, IMO they are the least able to deal with an emergency situation. Seems their bubbles have a thicker skin and they struggle to escape them. Then there's that time in between incident and action where they wonder, "How did I bring this on myself?" So that the precious time needed to deal with any given situation is taken up by their struggle to come to the realization. Deer in the headlights anyone?

 

[Joe]

Hey Adam, you're young and you are looking for something, but you need to understand that the link to the movie you sent deals with a subject that has already been dealt with in depth by the owners of this forum and associated web sites. The subject is known as "you create your own reality". Our investigations have led us to conclude that it is a deception. If you want to know more, you might want to read this article:

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/topperycyor.htm

Regards

Joe

p.s. You just posted a picture of a "bear hug". Please do not think that the sympathetic tone of my message has anything to do with you "attracting" a sympathetic message into your life by way of your bear hug picture. In fact, if you have the courage to read the above article, you will see that it demolishes the entire premise of "the secret".

 

[Pierre]

Forgive my grammer , english is not my first language :]

Why don't you use the power of positive thinking in order to get a correct english ?

English is not my first language either and since I don't manage the power of positive thinking (yet), I followed the hard way : learning it.

and what makes you think i'm not learning english at the moment? , maybe you are 30 years old and got more experience in the english language then me,
because i'm still just 19( and in the netherlands english is not a big deal, so you have to spend a lot of money in a if you want to know it perfectly) , and I think around the age of 23/25 my english will be 100 times better.

Adam,

My answer was obviously harsh and not much constructive. I am sorry.

I watched the movie you recommended and I just finished today translating my part of the "Controversy of Sion" (lets' call it : three thousands years of manhood's suffering).

I really felt revolted when I saw those smart people preaching "just wish and it will appear" while I was thinking about all those people praying, hoping and despite all that suffering and dying.

I didn't know there were pandas in Netherlands ;)

 

[Bo]

Wow thanks a lot for the help and the article , it really opened my eyes about that matter... and it also makes me very angry that they spread such lies

and joe that bearhug was in reply to that cute panda , it had no other meaning :)

and Axel , it's fine , I just want to learn and have my eyes opened , and i know that this is the perfect place for that



i did read a lot about the C's which laura posted and it's really amazing all the things they tell, and there is so much , that it will take me some months to read almost everything.


i really love you laura for what you are doing, and im sorry about the misunderstanding, i was being fooled, and didnt knew that, but now i know better :)

and I hope I can become a very active member some day soon, like you guys :)

 

[Joe]

and I hope I can become a very active member some day soon, like you guys :)

You will be very welcome Adam, but in the mean time, there is lots of reading and most importantly, critical thinking, to be done.

Joe

 

[Azur]

Hey Adam, you're young and you are looking for something, but you need to understand that the link to the movie you sent deals with a subject that has already been dealt with in depth by the owners of this forum and associated web sites. The subject is known as "you create your own reality". Our investigations have led us to conclude that it is a deception. If you want to know more, you might want to read this article:

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/topperycyor.htm

Regards

Joe

p.s. You just posted a picture of a "bear hug". Please do not think that the sympathetic tone of my message has anything to do with you "attracting" a sympathetic message into your life by way of your bear hug picture. In fact, if you have the courage to read the above article, you will see that it demolishes the entire premise of "the secret".

Joe,

Are there more articles on this subject, and/or findings above and beyond the piece by Topper?

Any info is appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[Azur]

Hey Adam, you're young and you are looking for something, but you need to understand that the link to the movie you sent deals with a subject that has already been dealt with in depth by the owners of this forum and associated web sites. The subject is known as "you create your own reality". Our investigations have led us to conclude that it is a deception. If you want to know more, you might want to read this article:

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/topperycyor.htm

Regards

Joe

p.s. You just posted a picture of a "bear hug". Please do not think that the sympathetic tone of my message has anything to do with you "attracting" a sympathetic message into your life by way of your bear hug picture. In fact, if you have the courage to read the above article, you will see that it demolishes the entire premise of "the secret".

Joe,

Are there more articles on this subject, and/or findings above and beyond the piece by Topper?

Any info is appreciated.

Cheers.

Apparently an answer arrived two days prior to my asking this.

Strange.

8|

 

[Joe]

reposting this by Bernhard here. "The Secret" is definitely Cointelpro.

I always felt that "The Secret" had a dark side to it all....its over-focus on the material plane and over-simplification always disturbed me. Yes, there is truth to it and we do create our reality, however it certainly is not as black and white and as easy as portrayed through this "in"-film. It's becoming more and more like a religion/cult where people buy into it all without questioning it. Yes, I fell for it too and I own a copy, I admit it, but the more I see it, its marketing and contemplate on it, the more I can see a very dark side to it all with people not getting the point/depth of it all. It's almost enrougaing the consumer/capatalisitc way of life which runs like a disease through this world, disconnected form nature, like a tumor it spreads.......I really hope people get the essence of it, look deeper and don't get stuck in the superficlal level the film portrays.

I found this article which also looks at Oprah, which is quite interesting, because I always felt she's the anti-christ, more evil than W. Bush (he's way too obvious), in a very twisted, dark and not-so-obvious way. I'm NOT kidding. She looks like a reptile already. See could be Condoleeza Rice's sister. There are billboards of her in LA which just give me the chills looking at them....I really don't know why...it's an instant reaction. Her eyes are empty....like no one's at home.


Oprah's ugly secret

By continuing to hawk "The Secret," a mishmash of offensive self-help cliches, Oprah Winfrey is squandering her goodwill and influence, and preaching to the world that mammon is queen.

By Peter Birkenhead

'... The main idea of "The Secret" is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it -- and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it -- the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme -- is brilliant. But what really makes "The Secret" more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn't just endorsed "The Secret"; she's championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

Why "venality"? Because, with survivors of Auschwitz still alive, Oprah writes this about "The Secret" on her Web site, "the energy you put into the world -- both good and bad -- is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." "Venality," because Oprah, in the age of AIDS, is advertising a book that says, "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought." "Venality," because Oprah, from a studio within walking distance of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green Projects, pitches a book that says, "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts."

Worse than "The Secret's" blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting.

They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that "like attracts like" and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite -- positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles -- and the rest of "The Secret" has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: "Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of." And worse than the idiocy and the bullshitting is its anti-intellectualism, because that's at the root of the other two. Here's "The Secret" on reading and, um, electricity: "When I discovered 'The Secret' I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good," and, "How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don't, do you?" And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of "The Secret,"

... Oprah has a reputation for doing good -- she probably has more perceived moral authority than anyone in this country -- and she has done a lot of good. But in light of her zealous support of a book that says, in this time of entrenched, systemic, institutionalized poverty, this time of no-bid contracts for war profiteers and heckuva-job governance, that "you can have, be, or do anything," isn't it reasonable to ask about why she does what she does, and the way she does it?

Oprah recently opened, with much fanfare, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa, and as I watched the network news stories about it, I couldn't get "The Secret" out of my mind. I kept wondering what would happen if professor Sam Mhlongo, South Africa's chief family practitioner who famously said that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, read about Oprah's connection to "The Secret" and found support there for his claim. I wondered if the students of the academy would read "The Secret" and start to believe that their parents deserved to be poor, or that the people of Darfur summoned the Janjaweed with "bad thoughts." Will the heavier girls be told, as readers of "The Secret" are, that food doesn't cause weight gain -- thinking about weight gain does? Will they be told to not even look at fat people, as "The Secret" advises? Oprah is already promoting these ideas to her television audience. Why wouldn't she espouse them to her students?

...And at what point do we stop feeling like we have to take the good with the craven when it comes to Oprah, and the culture she's helped to create? I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don't have enough money because they're "blocking it with their thoughts." I'm already sickened by an American culture that teaches people, as "The Secret" does, that they "create the circumstances of their lives with the choices they make every day," a culture that elected a president who cried tears of self-congratulation at his inauguration, rejects intellectualism, and believes he can intuit the trustworthiness of world leaders by looking into their eyes. I'm sickened by a culture in which the tenets of the Oprah philosophy have become conventional wisdom, in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement, reality is whatever you want it to be, and mammon is queen...

... "Secret"-style belief is a perfect product. Like Coca-Cola, it goes down easy and makes the consumer thirsty for more. It's unthreateningly simple, and a lot more facile, sentimental and, perhaps paradoxically, intractable than the old-fashioned kind of belief. Like Amway, it enlists its consumers as unofficial salespeople, and the people who constitute its market feel like they're part of a fold. It's indistinguishable from, and inextricably bound up in, the Oprah idea of self-esteem, the kind of confidence you get not from testing yourself, but from "believing" in yourself. This modern idea of faith isn't arrived at the old-fashioned way, by asking questions, but by getting answers. Instead of inquiry we have born-again epiphanies and cheesy self-help books -- we have excuses for not engaging in inquiry at all. Let other people schlep down the road to Damascus; we'll have Amazon send Damascus to us.

That "Secret"-style faith, whether it's in God, or in one's own preordained destiny to be an "American Idol," which takes all of a moment to achieve, is perhaps its most important selling point. Here's "The Secret" on arriving at faith: "Ask once, believe you have received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good." The kind of faith that couldn't be reached by shortcut, the confidence of the great doubters and worriers, of Moses and Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ, has been replaced by the insta-certainty and inflated "self-esteem" of "The Secret's" believers.

Books like "The Secret" have created, and are feeding, an enormously diverse market of disciples, and they're thriving in every corner of the culture, in megachurches and movies, politics and pop music, in sports arenas and state boards of education. Oprah has far more in common with George Bush than either would like to admit, and so do the psychics of Marin County, Calif., and the creationists of Kansas. The believers come from all walks of life, but they work the same way -- mostly by bastardizing and warping source materials, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, to make them fit their worldview.

The authors of "The Secret" sell "control" in the form of "empowerment" and "quiet" in the form of belief, not consciousness...

... Not that any of this is new. Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Power of Positive Thinking," Father Coughlin, est, James Van Praagh -- pick your influential snake-oil salesman or snake oil. They were all cut from the same cloth as Oprah and "The Secret." The big, big difference is, well, the bigness. The infinitely bigger reach of the Oprah empire and its emissaries. They make their predecessors look like kids with lemonade stands. It would be stupidly dangerous to dismiss Oprah and "The Secret" as silly, or ultimately meaningless. They're reaching more people than Harry Potter (which is no different than the Secret only evil). That's why what Oprah does matters, and stinks. If you reach more people than Bill O'Reilly, if you have better name recognition than Nelson Mandela, if the books you endorse sell more than Stephen King's, you should take some responsibility for your effect on the culture. The most powerful woman in the world is taking advantage of people who are desperate for meaning, by passionately championing a product that mocks the very idea of a meaningful life.

That means something.

 

[4_a_purpose]

Well, I have read each of the posts here and being new to the site, haven't read any of the past discussions on the 'The Secret'. I just wanted to share my story. I had always been skeptical and even outspoken against New Age religions and Eastern Mysticism since my upbringing taught me these ways of faith were opposite of what the 'Holy Bible' has taught. But, my faith only led me to a place of loss and emptiness which I have been experiencing the last five or so years. I am 44 and lived as an evangelical fundamental Christian up until that break in my faith life. I wasn't sure why I couldn't reach God anymore, but I did start searching out other faiths about a year ago including Buddhist, Taoist, New Age, etc in order to find some truth. My journey brought me to a man who is openminded and we had an opportunity to spend the month of January with his sister. (The events that brought us to that opportunity are just as amazing as anything else that has happened to me of late). It so happens that she has a strong background in New Age and Eastern religions and introduced me to meditation, explained better to me about the chakras and took me for a psychic reading of past lives and an aura reading. A few years ago I would have turned and ran screaming 'get back, Devil', but I was so ready and open for this new way of thinking that I can only express gratitude to my sister-in-law (and the universe) for guiding me. She had not yet watched 'The Secret', but a friend gave her a copy of the movie and we watched it together. It was my first exposure to the Law of Attraction as it was presented in the DVD. What made the difference for me is that we also watched 'What the Bleep Do We Know' and it all seemed to fall together for me. Now, I agree with those who say that the Law of Attraction is misused when it preaches more money, wealth, fame for the asker, but I cannot deny that this Law has been working hard to bring me into an awareness of my Spirit Being. It is nothing more than prayer and when I couldn't pray to the God out there anymore, my Spirit brought me into awareness of the Divine in me. I would not have been exposed to this truth without the Divine putting me on a path that converged with my new sister-in-law. So many other bits of new ideas have been falling into my lap since we've been home and I'm sifting through it all as I seek the truth. I'm thankful for being introduced to your site here and for Laura's willingness to share her insights and will continue to come back for more. This is my journey now and I'm loving the freedom I feel. Gratitude to all.

 

[PopHistorian]

<< I cannot deny that this Law has been working hard to bring me into an awareness of my Spirit Being. It is nothing more than prayer >>

There's lots of "help" out there for your growth if asked for sincerely. But not the same as Secret-style visualizing wealth, or believing you're the next American Idol, IMO.

Session 941020:

Q: Once again, you said that if we called on you for help, you would come if we ask. Is there any special way to call and how can we know if you answer?
A: Will feel it.

 

[PopHistorian]

The YCYOR idea that was twisted out of Seth is perhaps the most persistent and damaging thread in New Age thinking. Here are some quotes directly from Seth that give a better perspective on what was meant (or not meant). The real message is that your choices affect your experiences and that you always have this power. That's not the same thing as "creating reality."

"We have stated that a reality remains as it is, unchanged even though the perceiver, because of his sense apparatus, may perceive it in a limited or distorted fashion."
Session 157, Page 43, The Early Sessions, Book 4

"His (an individual’s) perceptions of basic reality in one way does not change the nature of that reality or of that action, as it exists independently of his field of reference. However, the very distortions that occur in his attempt to perceive this reality results in a new reality."
Session 157, Page 43, The Early Sessions, Book 4

"A cure of any kind will never depend upon any given treatment. It will in all cases depend upon the belief on the part of the sufferer that he can be cured. It will depend upon his desire to be cured. It will depend upon the strength of the purpose that an illness serves. It will depend upon, in the last analysis, the individual’s own ability to mobilize his own energies, for only these will effect a cure."
Session 159, Page 67, The Early Sessions, Book 4

This mention of the purpose that an illness serves is very important, I think, and agrees with Ra's insistence that difficulties, obstacles are presented to us in 3D as catalysts for growth.

"You can indeed suggest to the subconscious that it carry on in such a manner regardless of your conscious concern. As a result the ego can apply itself to the job at hand while the subconscious works for you and your inner purposes. This is very practical, and works without much difficulty."
Session 177, Page 190

"You may obviously also direct your subconscious to react only to constructive suggestions from any source. This is in fact an excellent habit to cultivate."
Session 177, Page 190

These last two, as you can see, speak most clearly to the idea of "The Secret," though they are not the same as the hi-jacked YCYOR that is so popular. Again, Seth is saying that you have power and you can use it. That's not the same as actually "creating reality."