The murmur fills local meet-ups and buzzes into online courses, and there’s even a new section in Borders Books proclaiming, in a little more than a whisper, “Authors featured in The Secret.”
If those three syllables mean nothing to you, then you’ve been living an Oprah-free, Internet-free, electricity-free existence lately. Just as I’m not going to delve into what The Secret is, I’ll also leave it to you to figure out the dangers of a way of thinking that essentially holds that a person who is (fill in the blank with poor, sick, afflicted, dead or any other adjective) is that way because he or she just doesn’t wish hard enough to be otherwise.
I had coffee with a friend (who also happens to be a psychic) a few weeks ago. And, as happens in approximately 73 percent of conversations with women these days, The Secret came up. “It’s the Law of Attraction,” she laughed. “I’ve been using that since I was 7 years old.” She went on to explain some of the ways she uses it: Like when she’s at the mall and wants rock-star parking. “If there’s no space up front, I don’t go shopping,” she said.
I looked at her in amazement.
“I’m serious,” she emphasized. “I tried it once. Parked far away and went inside, and there was nothing there that I wanted. Nothing.”
Another friend was required—yes, required—by her boss to watch The Secret. So she watched and listened and learned until her positive vibrations compelled her to eject it from the DVD player and put it back in its case, intending to pass it on to the next colleague.
Only, a cosmic force intervened, in the form of her boyfriend, who, thinking it was mass metaphysical marketing that came in the mail or something, threw it away.
My friend called me in a panic, knowing that I had a copy on loan, and I let her borrow it until the one she ordered off Amazon arrived.
Soon after she got her The Secret, she was cleaning out her closet and bickering with the boyfriend when she stumbled upon—you guessed it—the version her boyfriend thought he’d thrown away.
And so the mystery was born. Had he truly thrown it away and she wished so hard to have it back that it physically returned to a hidden nook in her closet, only to return to her in her time of need?
Or maybe, just maybe, this is a deeper, darker message to those of us who don’t subscribe to Oprah-ology and Secretism: The Secret isn’t going away. Wish it away, ignore it, even preach against it. It’s still in your closet. Lurking. Waiting. –Kate Silver