The Secret: Epilogue

 

You got to rock the boat sometimes. :-P

 

Oh, wow.
Just watched the 20 mins worth…
I wasn't expecting to be so repulsed.
It's like a really expensive infomercial.

I will not completely rule out the translative
aspect - though I'm hard-pressed to come up with
a scenario where narcissistic delusion
would be a step up even horizontally.

It's frightening to picture a world where,
with 70% of the population at an ethnocentric
center of gravity, The Secret started working
en masse!

Imagine the implications.

Or, imagine the implications if it started working
in large numbers even for the middle class boomers
for whom the picture was made.

Can the environment sustain everyone living
in $4MILLION mansions in Malibu and driving
stretch Hummers to 7-11 to stock up on Hostess
snacks?

I know not everyone is ready to be undone by non-dual
trans-formative practices. I do agree.
And yr spot on about the genie being out of the bottle.
There's no turning back now.

“Remember you must go “three for three.” Your thoughts, feelings, and actions must all be firing simultaneously for you to create and attract the results you deserve.”

This just smacks of spiritual immaturity so much for me.
The idea that the human ego is in charge of the freaking universe
and that individuals deserve everything they attract..
Come on!
This is full on pluralism infected with narcissism and sitting in
front of the tv watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Which is fine.

But it's not spiritual anything.

And translation?
I was gonna ask if narcissistic delusion
is really the highest we're aiming for,
but then, having just watched the American Idol
auditions, I think I know the answer. ;D

Anyway, great post ~C.
Thanks for the link.
You rock.

xo
cree

 

it's all good. dude.

 

Seeing that a wickedly long reply was in order, I posted as, ”the world ceases to make sense”

It starts by quoting that snippet from Wilber on averting disaster and psychosis because people are too fragile and their world may cease to make sense…:

“The world has ceased to make sense.

Today, heck maybe it's an everyday occurence now, I'm not in a mood to be pandered to, or to pander. Maybe it's just me and maybe it's just the people that come into my sphere, but they are quite intelligent.

Almost too intelligent. They've seen the world's paradoxes. I think of Enid in Ghost World. You aren't pulling the wool over her eyes. She'd puke on The Secret.”

There's a lot in my post about disaster specificially - tsunamis, Katrina, and then the everyday full catastrophe living of life. I guess one of my tenets is:  What most people need is not a false reframing, but a deframing.

Fair question: instead, why don't you give us your own healthy translation? I'll see if anything arises while staying open-minded, yet my first (oh, and perhaps snarky) temptation is to say that “healthy translation” is an oxymoron.

 

evelyn rockin it out.

klare short and sweet.

cree bringing it home down to earth stylee….

c4- dude: i ain't buying this spin.

mo' later….

 

I just read the whole transcript to both Oprah shows. That last Oprah show is way better than the actual movie. It still has its deliriously questionable moments, but it's really uncanny how much better it is than the movie. Perhaps people will just stop at watching Oprah and skip the DVD altogether ;-)

On page 2, second show: James [Ray] says that when bad things happen people might ask, “Oh, God, why me?” ”Because it is you,” he says.

Whoa, he's getting awfully close there, eh?

Lovely story at the end (below). Reminds me so much of Krishnamurti's 'secret' of 'I don't mind what happens' and Byron Katie's 'secret' of things don't happen to you, but for you.

“On the day that Oprah introduced the world to The Secret, Clarissa thought she was in for an ordinary day—which usually includes missing The Oprah Winfrey Show because she's at work. But just 20 minutes into her workday, her boss called her into his office to tell her she was being fired.

On her way home, Clarissa called a friend who was fired by the same boss weeks before. “She and I were talking and we were just saying such bad things about him, just [the most] horrible things that we could think of. There was a lot of anger in both of our hearts for him because we were upset,” she says.

After she arrived home, Clarissa and her mom watched the show about The Secret. “It just made me seriously think back and think, 'God, it wasn't him. It was me. He was right. I was negative. I didn't want this job. I didn't need the job. It was just a stepping stone.'”

She immediately typed up words and phrases—gratitude, true happiness, gratefulness—and hung them on the walls of her bedroom so that she'd remember them daily. Clarissa even wrote her old boss a letter. “I was upset at your reasoning for letting me go. Then I watched The Oprah Winfrey Show and the topic mesmerized me,” she wrote. “For the things you said to me, I forgive you. And in the same sentence, I hope you forgive me. … Thank you for hiring and firing me.”

“Now I'm so much more positive on everything that has happened,” she says.

“You're open to the possibility of whatever is supposed to come into your life,” Oprah says.”

 

spoken like a true integral theorist :) but i think you're misinterpreting James Ray. again, they are talking to people who have yet to encounter those uber-cool integral jargons ;)

I know.
I hear what yr saying. Really I do.
This is not a case of anyone being fluffier than anyone else
(to borrow your trans-integral(?) jargon;)

As I said:
I will not completely rule out the translative
aspect - though I'm hard-pressed to come up with
a scenario where narcissistic delusion
would be an improvement, even horizontally.


here's my challenge to you (and all others who think that the Law of Attraction is bunk). forget about how others would interpret the Law of Attraction. instead, why don't you give us your own healthy translation? based on your understanding of where you're at in your spiritual path right now, how would you interpret the Law of Attraction?

I don't think the law of attraction is bunk. Geez, ya Projector! :D

And, others are free to interpret it (and everything else) however they wish.
I've already conceded that it may have some translative value.

However, elevating it as they do in what I saw of the movie, to be The Secret of the Universe - that's where it slides into the realm of delusion for me.

i'd prefer to hear your translation rather than your assumptions on how others would do the translation.

Come on. I have offered no assumptions on how others would do the translation.

I am definately on board with the need for healthy translation!
It's absolutely crucial.
And I am not at all compelled to tell anyone how they should translate.

That doesn't mean I'm going to agree when someone, attempting to elevate the law of something, to spiritual status, goes around telling cancer patients, or starving children, or the populations in war-torn countries that they created their reality by thinking negative thoughts, and that if only they hadn't let the fact that they were out of toothpaste bum them out and send them into a negative skid - that they might be able to create the reality they deserve.


I think that when any form of translation masquerades as transformation it impedes the transformative process. 



forget about how others would interpret the Law of Attraction. instead, why don't you give us your own healthy translation? based on your understanding of where you're at in your spiritual path right now, how would you interpret the Law of Attraction?

When I examine my own interpretaion of the law of attraction I find that it is has changed over time like everything else.

There was a time when I experienced it as magical - closely aligned with my period of petitionary prayer.  All powerful other would grant my wishes if my conformity was sufficient.

Then came all powerful self. Ego in the lotus seat  attracting greatness or misfortune depending on my skill at emoting correctly.
In a way, you could say this was a step towards taking responsibility for my thoughts, intentions, and actions.
However, to stop there, by elevating this stage to some type of spiritual glory is such an obvious retardent of the whole growth process.

It's not the law of attraction that's in question for me.
It's the inflation of it. It's the masquerading as transformation
what is really just the ego in drag.
I'm sorry, but I can't buy it as healthy translation.

To me, healthy translation has to lead (or at least point) beyond the separate self as center.

I'm currently in the 'throttling to death' phase that you quoted above.  I can't say I reccommend it - it sucks my butt most days.
 I don't know where to internally situate something like the law of attraction anymore.
I no longer have the luxury of indulging in the fantasy that my separate self is charge of squat.

Words fail. Sorry.

cree

 

Wow.I love this one,a lot,on many levels…Thanks!

 

It is definitely “Mean Green Meme” pluralism at it's finest hour.  But if it get's alot of the “My God is better than your God”  Amber mentality lifted up another stage, then the Third Tiers have alot less work to do, don't you think?  Spiritual Greed is still greed, but I think once the initial Honey Moon with the mindfulness wears off, It might just transform it's potentially ugly head into another step into the Turquoise by way of mindfully manifesting for others to the point where the term “others” can be defined as “all things”.  If this occurs it could, albeit loosely, be a shaky step into Third Tier Kosmocentric consciousness.  Cross your fingers.

Buzz

 

Cree: ”I no longer have the luxury of indulging in the fantasy that my separate self is charge of squat.” Amen.

I'm curious since the Larry King Live segment is titled, Beyond Positive Thinking, if we can maybe offer resources in some tagged, maybe organized way, here at Zaadz or wherever since as ~C4 says, the genie is out of the bottle that really is Beyond Positive Thinking.

Positive thinking using the so-called law of attraction through a 'me' eventually fails as a skillful means. Maybe I'm simply speaking for myself, but I've never ever been able to sustain positive thinking even in my glory days of righteous sovereignty over my fiercely independent self. Stuff would happen that despite my best efforts of sheer will and brute force sent me into grief, or guilt, or shame, or whatever.

I couldn't seem to positive think my way out quite a few baffling situations in last six years.  For instance, in a ten day period,  I injured my knee, first-hand witnessed devastation on a global scale the likes this earth hadn't seen in a century, went through a breakup with the boyfriend I went to Thailand with, and learned that a dear friend - my ex-husband - had just suffered a serious head injury in an accident and was on the brink of not making it.

This is known as a wake-up call, or what my teacher calls fierce grace. It's probably not because I wasn't thinking positively enough.

I wrote of the experience: ”We're afraid that if we sit still with the emotions - the grief, the anguish, the pain, the sorrow, the emptiness - then we will be totally consumed by waves upon waves of emotion.

What we run from pursues us, what we welcome transforms us, he repeated from earlier in class.

The staying was more intense than the physical tsunami for me. I wasn't sure how far done the rabbit hole I could keep falling…and falling. Where and when would the unraveling end? He shared that what usually happens is that as we go deeper into “what is present” we eventually go through it to the other side. And this is exactly what happened.”

Even on the Oprah show I said was better than the movie (it is), I wasn't surprised that two folks had gone through a major tragedy. I'm not sure enough people recognize that times of disillusionment aren't times to buck up and get with the program. They are times for contemplation. To feel what you're feeling 100%. (I didn't know how to do this either, but the teachers appear.) To feel that “I don't know what life is about anymore” so thoroughly it catapults you into beginner's mind.

I still can't positive think my way out of things. If anything, on this path, it feels more and more that which is unmet, that which is unconscious (and it  sure ain't always pretty nor always perceived as positive) comes to the forefront in an accelerating even raucous fashion to be made conscious.

Sometimes positive thinking can be used as a means of resisting and repressing what wants to be seen and liberated. If refused, in my experience, the knocks just get louder, the wake-up calls undeniably  sobering.

I love how Adyashanti puts the acceptance and gathering of the unconscious:

“This brightness comes back for all itself, for every bit of confusion, for every bit of its suffering. Everything that the me tried to get away from, the sacred Self will come back for. This bright Self starts to discover its true nature and wants to liberate all of itself, to enjoy itself, and to truly love itself in all of its flavors. The truly sacred is the love of what is, not a love of what could be. This love liberates what is.

The true heart of all human beings is the lover of what is. That's why we cannot escape any part of ourselves. This is not because we are a disaster, but because we are conscious and we are coming back for all of ourselves in this birth. No matter how confused we are, we will come back for every part of ourselves that has been left out of the game. This is the birth of real compassion and love. For too long it has been said by spiritual traditions that you have to slay so much to get to love. But that is a myth. The truth is that it is love that really liberates.” - Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

 

follow me here:

1) people who are drawn to regressive, delusional, narcissistic ideas about themselves and their relationship to reality generally have a preponderance of trauma/psychological wounding. (this is not a stage thing it's a pathology/defense thing - and there is zero unkind judgment in this statement, seriously…)

2) it is regressive, delusional and narcissistic to believe that your thoughts can affect things like parking spaces, a man appearing to place the gold necklace around your neck, wether or not hate criminals attack you on the street, wether or not there are “unexpected checks in your mailbox”, and wether or not a child with a rare form of hepatitis dies - no-one has that power - the belief that you or anyone does comes from a naive magical thinking regression.  in the altered state of trauma the experience of cause and effect, self and other, reality and fantasy, intention and event, gets really tweaked… look at sean hornbeck as a simple example.

3) therefore this set of ideas/worldview is a defensive strategy against a healthier relationship to reality that would entail mature acceptance (certainly a difficult  but essential process for traumatized, wounded individuals) of being in a grounded relationship to reality where magic is not the answer to your problems - that would be consciousness, healing and self-inquiry. (and we aint even getting into what wilber calls transformative spirituality yet - just simple translative learning to be real about your feelings and your life.)

4) underneath the inflated all-powerful magical thinking defense is a lot of pain and despair at the true nature of life's hard realities. (the fact is, people from less traumatized/wounding backgrounds simply don't get caught up in this stuff - or if they do it's a minor passing fancy - not a supposed “life-changing” milestone…) perpetuating the defense and dignifying it with language like “philosophy,” “spirituality,” “psychology” etc does no-one any favors in terms of finding their way into healing, translative spirituality, or transformative practice.

5) now effective translation (and movement forward) would be this: learning to be more honest with ourselves and eachother about suffering, change, chaos, and how our humanity (and ultimately our spirituality) is discovered through that honesty - the defenses against that honesty can be relinquished as we find permission and support to get real and process the pain - there actually are victims and people do NOT choose, create or attract their abusive childhood experiences, oppressive societal circumstances, level of birth and priviledge in their particular “caste system” etc - translative spirituality does not perpetuate the denial and pump more air into the inflated regressive narcissistic magical thinking-based defense - it supports us in getting real.

seriously - some stats say that  1 in 3 girls are molested. so let;s just think about the real implications of the number of trauma survivors buying into the secret  and so believing that they “attracted” their abuse - or that if they continue to be abused it is their fault….

i have seen that dynamic for years.

but julian, where is the partial truth?

well sure - there is a partial truth in that our unresolved traumas keep coming up for healing and that there is a victim/abuser dynamic that once imprinted in early life can keep repeating - but the solution to this problem is deep honest healing work with the reality that you were victimized - that it was not your fault, that you have a right to be angry at your abuser, that the world is unfair, that you were still good and worthy of love even though this terrible thing happened, that yes you may be perpetuating the dynamic unconsciously because of your wounding, but you can learn to take better care of yourself now (that is healthy translation and it is  a prerequisite for grounded and genuinely transformational spiritual work) 

NONE of this happens through surface level thought-change or magical thinking - in fact that 9 times out of 10 does more harm than good, perpetuates the confusion about what happened and why, and encourages further dissociation from reality and regression.

now how about all the rest of the suffering and trauma in the world - how about that kid in sub-saharan africa who things only of foood and water until he dies of starvation and dehydration?

how about the child with their arms blown off in iraq?

or your liver disease?

or ken wilber's autoimmune di=ysfucntion and ensuingg grand mal seizures….

or the reality of poor people all over the world who do not have “an avalanche of money pouring over them” - guess no-one hipped them up to the secret? puh -lease…

hmmmmm law of attraction huh? everything in your life you have attracted with your thoughts?

should we perpetuate such a superficial statement?

do your thoughts/intentions play a role in your experience and in how the world responds to you? yeah. with limitations.

but they are not the supreme genie in a lamp power - and thinking so is technically called “infantile omnipotence” - not translative spirittuality. ha!

(and c4 - have you watched the whole movie yet? don't even talk to me until you've watched the whole thing - blogger please :Op)

 

Good Morning ~C,


i agree, that is if we're talking about genuine spiritual transformation. but i'm just saying that other people has yet to develop a healthy ego in the first place. the Secret seems to be their catalyst for growth. so let's pause for a moment and try to look into the eyes of people who just discovered this “new” way of thinking.

I agree with Julian that this is not a stage thing it's a pathology/defense thing.
And interestingly, aligning thoughts/feelings/actions is a major tenant of psychological health - it's a by-product of a healthy ego, not a trick that can be put into the service of a damaged, grasping self.



“I know. Most of you who are reading this blog, especially those of you who are familiar with Integral theory, are probably rolling your eyes right now and thinking about pre/trans fallacyBoomeritis. Ok, fine. But make sure you also remember translation vs. transformation. ”

Darlin' those of us who are farmiliar w integral theory and reading your blog are not the ones who need reminding about translation vs. transformation!  We get it! We are not the ones EXPOLITING the law of attraction for fun and profit.

“Yes, people can develop the same translation mechanism by going to a shrink, but that's more pricey and time consuming. And meditation? Well, that's too much work for busy people. So there :)”

:O
Okay, well when you've managed to cobble together three for three and are a multi-bazillionairre,
at least you'll have lots of money for therapy and plenty of free time for meditation! :)

xo
cree (for cree-ate a healthier translation and REAL prosperity through better cultural models!

 

 

Interesting -cree and julian really have your number in their comments, but you soft-shoe away from what they are saying.

For what its worth, you input a lot of strawmen assertions to Cree and Julian - translation and transformation, that the objections even have to come from an “integral” place - but the same obejctions are valid for a hard-nosed rationalist.   The objections are independent of whether someone is a “integral theorist”.

Still, the magical synchronistic world often DOEs work on the principle of Law of Attraction.  You do a Magickal Spell, and the next day, what you wished for comes true, if sometimes in a “monkey's foot” type of way. 

That's the frustrating thing about this conversation - there is enough truth in synchronistic wishmaking/spellcasting, that the Law of Attraction promoters have something to hang their hats on.

But, I think we all agree, the truth is definitely partial!

:)

 

I like ~C4's suggestion of dealing with it “with Aikido moves, rather than Karate chops.”

Alas, perhaps this is yet another opportunity for both/and, eh? :)

While framing all the potential ramifications of delusional thinking and expressing outrage over the materialism, I think it's important to remember how it can catalyze positive growth. evelyn's comments about the woman's experience after being fired captures the powerful partial good that comes out of watching this movie.

any analysis/perspective that doesn't include that is (very) partial.

 

this is a huge subject people - it's what the whole tension between several different worldviews turns on…. lot's to explore and unpack here.

let's keep unwrapping the gifts and making good distinctions.

greedy orange, regressive green, and condescending yellow are all in the mix here.

and THEN there is the problem of trauma/pathology in the purely psychological sense.

once all of these areas have been clearly defined and agreed upon some sense can begin to be made of the complex issues a throw-away film like this touches on without 1% adequate depth….