Summoning good things into your life—a new job, a five-bedroom house with garden or even a parking place—is, according to Byrne, simple. All you have to do is visualize what you want, focus on it and it will come—“exactly like placing an order from a catalogue.”
There are some refinements to the process. The innermost secret of The Secret is that you have to phrase your requests in the right way. This is apparently where many people go wrong. It is essential to be detailed in every particular. Byrne writes of a woman desperate for a boyfriend. She had visualized him—but he still failed to materialize. Byrne explains that he did not turn up because she had not made sufficient physical space for a man in her life. So she went to the garage and moved the car from the middle so as to leave room for her imaginary partner’s, then cleared out half her wardrobe and began sleeping on one side of her double bed. And, hey presto, the right man soon came along.
The other mistake people apparently make when ordering from the catalogue of life is not thinking positively enough … When you hit the shops with an up-to-the-limit credit card and a bank balance deep into overdraft territory, instead of saying you can’t afford something, you must tell yourself: “I can afford that! I can buy that.” I fear this may be how shopaholism begins, but Byrne insists that not only does such thinking make you feel better, it also creates material wealth …
It seems unusual that a self-help book should take such an extreme hedonistic and self-centered view, but, according to Byrne, true happiness comes from putting yourself before others. She also assuages any concerns you might have about overt materialism with an unusual interpretation of the Bible—saying that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and Jesus were all millionaires, “with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.” …
We are all, she states, “human transmission towers,” emitting thoughts on a particular frequency and attracting “all like things that are on the same frequency.” This is why, she says, if you think negative thoughts, then bad things will happen. The trouble is that if you extend this to its logical conclusion, then you not only have to believe that good things come to positive thinkers, but also that anyone who suffers only has themselves to blame. So, if someone is fat, is that their fault for thinking fat thoughts? Surely Byrne cannot believe so. Yes, she does. “A person cannot think thin thoughts and be fat.”
Byrne believes that if someone has cancer, they can cure themselves by laughing—which implies that the converse is also true; that their cancer has been caused by negative thinking. Astonishingly, she even says this outright: “Illness cannot exist in a body that has harmonious thoughts.” So what about those caught up in wars, acts of terrorism and natural disasters? The hundreds of thousands killed in the Asian tsunami, the thousands who died on 9/11, the millions put to death in the Holocaust? Are we simply to assume it was all their own fault? Byrne sounds rather weary as she skirts round this subject in her book but, basically, her answer is an extraordinary yes. “By the law of attraction, they had to be on the same frequency as the event,” she says, allowing only a small concession: “It doesn’t necessarily mean they thought of that event.”28
When we believe that people suffer a personal tragedy because they thought on a negative frequency, were evil in a past life, or are being punished by the gods, it can silence our empathy. However, in the fifth century BC, a Greek named Hippocrates had a more empathetic view of human tragedies such as illness. Hippocrates is widely regarded as the father of modern medicine. The Hippocratic oath, which requires doctors to compassionately serve their patients, still guides the actions of many medical practitioners today.
Instead of viewing plague, epilepsy, and other illnesses as punishments from the gods, Hippocrates had a more compassionate view of those who suffered from sickness. Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, he wrote the following about epilepsy: “I am about to discuss the disease called ‘sacred.’ It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men’s inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character.”29
Because the world has changed since ancient Greece, modern versions of the Hippocratic oath keep the spirit of compassion alive while adjusting the oath to deal with modern issues. The original Hippocratic oath explains how doctors should protect their patients from harm and injustice, not take sexual advantage of vulnerable people, and respect patient privacy by not gossiping or spreading rumors. Hippocrates had the revolutionary idea that illnesses are not punishments from the Greek gods but instead have natural causes,* and the following excerpt from the original Hippocratic oath shows how a more accurate understanding of the causes of illness can summon rather than silence our empathy:
I will keep them [the sick] from harm and injustice … Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves. What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.30
Gandhi said people can have a piece of the truth,31 and Rhonda Byrne expresses a piece of the truth about the value of having a positive outlook. My other books discuss how a positive attitude based on hope, empathy, and appreciation can improve our quality of life and strengthen our ability to wage peace. Also, science shows that harboring negative feelings such as anger over a long period of time can weaken our immune system, and positive feelings such as hope, empathy, and appreciation can boost our immune system.
But does thinking negative thoughts cause all cancer, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, HIV, Alzheimer’s disease, malaria, polio, food poisoning, staph infection, glaucoma, cataracts, hearing loss, hepatitis, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease? Overwhelming evidence shows that Rhonda Byrne’s approach to positive thinking cannot prevent or cure all of these illnesses.
Byrne expresses a half-truth, because our attitude can in fact influence our physical health and the conditions of our surroundings, but not to the extent she claims. In my book Peaceful Revolution, I explain how a half-truth can be more dangerous than an outright lie.
I have met many compassionate people who believe in a more humane version of reincarnation and karma that does not blame rape victims for being raped, and I have also spoken with kind people who believe in parts of Byrne’s teachings while rejecting the view that victims of natural disasters caused the disaster by thinking on a negative frequency. Nevertheless, activist Barbara Ehrenreich describes how these views, if we are not careful, can silence our empathy and cause harm:
The other thing I find very, very disturbing about [the beliefs of Rhonda Byrne and others] is I just think it’s cruel. It’s cruel to take people who are having great difficulties in their lives and tell them it’s all in their head, and they only have to change their attitude. My favorite example of this moral callousness is from [Rhonda Byrne] the author of The Secret, that was a bestseller … the book on how you can have anything you want, attract anything to yourself by thinking. And she was asked about the [Asian] tsunami of ’06 and how could this happen, and she said, paraphrasing it, those people, the victims of it, must have been sending out tsunami-like vibrations into the universe to attract that to themselves, because nothing happens to us that we don’t attract. And I think that’s beyond amorality. I don’t even know where to locate that.
I’m not advocating gloom and pessimism or negativity or depression. Those can also be delusional. You can go around making up a story to yourself that everything you undertake is going to fail, and there’s no reason to think that. My very radical suggestion is realism, just trying to figure out what is actually happening in the world, and seeing what we can do about those parts of it that are threatening or hurtful …
What could be cleverer as a way of quelling dissent