This retreat from the real drama and tragedy of human events is suggestive of a deep helplessness at the core of positive thinking. Why not follow the news? Because, as my informant at the NSA meeting told me, “You can’t do anything about it.” Braley similarly dismisses reports of disasters: “That’s negative news that can cause you emotional sadness, but that you can’t do anything about.” The possibilities of contributing to relief funds, joining an antiwar movement, or lobbying for more humane government policies are not even considered. But at the very least there seems to be an acknowledgment here that no amount of attitude adjustment can make good news out of headlines beginning with “Civilian casualties mount . . .” or “Famine spreads . . .”
Of course, if the powers of mind were truly “infinite,” one would not have to eliminate negative people from one’s life either; one could, for example, simply choose to interpret their behavior in a positive way—maybe he’s criticizing me for my own good, maybe she’s being sullen because she likes me so much and I haven’t been attentive, and so on. The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only “positive” response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.
The Law of Attraction
If ostracism is the stick threatening the recalcitrant, there is also an infinitely compelling carrot: think positively, and positive things will come to you. You can have anything, anything at all,
by focusing your mind on it—limitless wealth and success, loving relationships, a coveted table at the restaurant of your choice. The universe exists to do your bidding, if only you can learn to harness the power of your desires. Visualize what you want and it will be “attracted” to you. “Ask, believe, and receive,” or “Name it and claim it.”
This astonishingly good news has been available in the United States for over a century, but it hit the international media with renewed force in late 2006, with the runaway success of a book and DVD entitled
The Secret.
Within a few months of publication, 3.8 million copies were in print, with the book hitting the top of both the
USA Today
and
New York Times
best seller lists. It helped that the book was itself a beautiful object, printed on glossy paper and covered in what looked like a medieval manuscript adorned with a red seal, vaguely evoking that other bestseller
The Da Vinci Code.
It helped also that the author, an Australian TV producer named Rhonda Byrne, or her surrogates won admiring interviews on
Oprah
, the
Ellen DeGeneres Show
, and
Larry King Live
. But
The Secret
relied mostly on word-of-mouth, spreading “like the Norwalk virus through Pilates classes, get-rich-quick websites and personal motivation blogs,” as the
Ottawa Citizen
reported.
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I met one fan, a young African American woman, in the bleak cafeteria of the community college she attends, where she confided that it was now
her
secret.
Despite its generally respectful media reception,
The Secret
attracted—no doubt unintentionally, in this case—both shock and ridicule from Enlightenment circles. The critics barely knew where to begin. In the DVD, a woman admires a necklace in a store window and is next shown wearing it around her neck, simply through her conscious efforts to “attract” it. In the book, Byrne, who struggled with her weight for decades, asserts that food does not make you fat—only the
thought
that food could make you fat
actually results in weight gain. She also tells the story of a woman who “attracted” her perfect partner by pretending he was already with her: she left a space for him in her garage and cleared out her closets to make room for his clothes, and, lo, he came into her life.
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Byrne herself claims to have used “the secret” to improve her eyesight and to no longer need glasses. Overwhelmed by all this magic,
Newsweek
could only marvel at the book’s “explicit claim . . . that you can manipulate objective physical reality—the numbers in a lottery drawing, the actions of other people who may not even know you exist—through your thoughts and feelings.”
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But Byrne was not saying anything new or original. In fact, she had merely packaged the insights of twenty-seven inspirational thinkers, most of them still living and many of them—like Jack Canfield, a coauthor of
Chicken Soup for the Soul
—already well known. About half the space in the book is taken up by quotes from these gurus, who are generously acknowledged as “featured co-authors” and listed with brief bios at the end. Among them are a “feng shui master,” the president of a company selling “inspirational gifts,” a share trader, and two physicists. But the great majority of her “co-authors” are people who style themselves as “coaches” and motivational speakers, including Joe Vitale, whose all-encompassing love I had experienced at the NSA meeting. The “secret” had hardly been kept under wraps; it was the collective wisdom of the coaching profession. My own first exposure to the mind-over-matter philosophy of
The Secret
had come three years before that book’s publication, from a less than successful career coach in Atlanta, who taught that one’s external conditions, such as failure and unemployment, are projections of one’s “inner sense of well-being.”
The notion that people other than athletes might need something called “coaching” arose in the 1980s when corporations
began to hire actual sports coaches as speakers at corporate gatherings. Many salesmen and managers had played sports in school and were easily roused by speakers invoking crucial moments on the gridiron. In the late 1980s, John Whitmore, a former car racer and sports coach, carried coaching off the playing fields and into the executive offices, where its goal became to enhance “performance” in the abstract, including the kind that can be achieved while sitting at a desk. People who might formerly have called themselves “consultants” began to call themselves “coaches” and to set up shop to instill ordinary people, usually white-collar corporate employees, with a “winning” or positive attitude. One of the things the new coaches brought from the old world of sports coaching was the idea of visualizing victory, or at least a credible performance, before the game, just as Byrne and her confederates urge people to visualize the outcomes they desire.
Sports was only one source of the new wisdom, which had been bubbling up for years from the world of self-help gurus and “spiritual teachers,” most of them not referenced by Byrne. For example, there was the 2004 docudrama
What the Bleep Do We Know?
, produced by a New Age sect led by a Tacoma woman named JZ Knight, who channels a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha. In the film, actor Marlee Matlin gives up Xanax for a spiritual appreciation of life’s limitless possibilities. At the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, students write down their goals, post them on a wall, and attempt to realize them through strenuous forms of “meditation” involving high-decibel rock music. On the more businesslike side, “success coach” Mike Hernacki published his book
The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want
in 1982; the genre continued with, among others, Michael J. Losier’s 2006 book,
Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t.
T. Harv Eker’s
Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
explains that “the universe,
which is another way of saying ‘higher power,’ is akin to a big mail order department,” an image also employed by Vitale.
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If you send in your orders clearly and unambiguously, fulfillment is guaranteed in a timely fashion.
What attracts the coaching profession to these mystical powers? Well, there’s not much else for them to impart to their coachees. “Career coaches” may teach their clients how to write résumés and deliver the self-advertisements known as “elevator speeches,” but they don’t have anything else by way of concrete skills to offer. Neither they nor more generic “success coaches” will help you throw a javelin farther, upgrade your computer skills, or manage the flow of information through a large department. All they can do is work on your attitude and expectations, so it helps to start with the metaphysical premise that success is guaranteed through some kind of attitudinal intervention. And if success does not follow, if you remain strapped for funds or stuck in an unpromising job, it’s not the coach’s fault, it’s yours. You just didn’t try hard enough and obviously need more work.
The metaphysics found in the coaching industry and books like
The Secret
bears an unmistakable resemblance to traditional folk forms of magic, in particular “sympathetic magic,” which operates on the principle that like attracts like. A fetish or talisman—or, in the case of “black magic,” something like a pinpricked voodoo doll—is thought to bring about some desired outcome. In the case of positive thinking, the positive thought, or mental image of the desired outcome, serves as a kind of internal fetish to hold in your mind. As religious historian Catherine Albanese explains, “In material magic, symbolic behavior involves the use of artifacts and stylized accoutrements, in ritual, or ceremonial, magic,” while in “mental magic,” of the positive-thinking variety, “the field is internalized, and the central ritual becomes some form of meditation or guided visualization.”
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Sometimes, though, an actual physical fetish may be required. John Assaraf, an entrepreneur and coach featured in
The Secret
, explains the use of “vision boards”:
Many years ago, I looked at another way to represent some of the materialistic things I wanted to achieve in my life, whether it was a car or a house or anything. And so I started cutting out pictures of things that I wanted. And I put those vision boards up. And every day for probably about just two to three minutes, I would sit in [
sic
] my desk and I would look at my board and I’d close my eyes. And I’d see myself having the dream car and the dream home and the money in the bank that I wanted and the money that I wanted to have for charity.
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The link to older, seemingly more “primitive” forms of magic is unabashed in one Web site’s instructions for creating a kind of vision board:
Leaving the four corners of the card (posterboard) blank, decorate the rest of the face with glitter, ribbons, magical symbols, herbs, or any other items linked with the attributes of prosperity. Next, take the dollar bill and cut off the four corners. Glue the bill’s triangular corners to the four corners of your card. This is sympathetic magic—one must have money to attract money. Then either on the back of the card or on a separate piece of paper, write out these instructions for using the talisman:
This is a talisman of prosperity. Place it where you will see it every day, preferably in a bedroom.
At least once a day hold it to your heart and spend
several minutes reciting the chant: talisman of prosperity, All good things come to me.
Notice the magic begin.
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Homemade talismans aside, most coaches would be chagrined by any association with magic. What gives positive thinking some purchase on mainstream credibility is its claim to be based firmly on science. Why do positive thoughts attract positive outcomes? Because of the “law of attraction,” which operates as reliably as the law of gravity. Bob Doyle, one of the “featured co-authors” of
The Secret
and founder of the “Wealth Beyond Reason” training system, asserts on his Web site: “Contrary to mainstream thinking, the Law of Attraction is NOT a ‘new-age’ concept. It is a scientific principle that absolutely is at work in your life right now.” The claims of a scientific basis undoubtedly help account for positive thinking’s huge popularity in the business world, which might be more skittish about an ideology derived entirely from, say, spirit channeling or Rosicrucianism. And science probably helped attract major media attention to
The Secret
and its spokespeople, a panel of whom were introduced by the poker-faced Larry King with these words: “Tonight, unhappy with your love, your job, your life, not enough money? Use your head. You can think yourself into a lot better you. Positive thoughts can transform, can attract the good things you know you want. Sound far-fetched? Think again. It’s supported by science.”
Coaches and self-help gurus have struggled for years to find a force that could draw the desired results to the person who desires them or a necklace in a store window to an admirer’s neck. In his 1982 book, Hernacki settled on the familiar force of gravity, offering the equation linking the mass of two objects to their acceleration. But even those whose science educations stopped at ninth grade might notice some problems with this. One, thoughts are
not objects with mass; they are patterns of neuronal firing within the brain. Two, if they were exerting some sort of gravitational force on material objects around them, it would be difficult to take off one’s hat.
In an alternative formulation offered by Michael J. Losier, the immaterial nature of thoughts is acknowledged; they become “vibrations.” “In the vibrational world,” he writes, “there are two kinds of vibrations, positive (+) and negative (-). Every mood or feeling causes you to emit, send-out or offer a vibration, whether positive or negative.”
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But thoughts are not “vibrations,” and known vibrations, such as sound waves, are characterized by amplitude and frequency. There is no such thing as a “positive” or “negative” vibration.
Magnetism is another force that has long lured positive thinkers, going back to the 1937—and still briskly selling—
Think and Grow Rich!
, which declared that “thoughts, like magnets, attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with [them].” Hence the need to “magnetize our minds with intense DESIRE for riches.”
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Now, as patterns of neuronal firing that produce electrical activity in the brain, thoughts do indeed generate a magnetic field, but it is a pathetically weak one. As
Scientific American
columnist Michael Shermer observes, “The brain’s magnetic field of 10 [to the minus 15th power] tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth’s magnetic field of 10 [to the minus 5th power] tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!” Ten orders of magnitude—or a ratio of 10,000,000,000 to one. As everyone knows, ordinary magnets are not attracted or repelled by our heads, nor are our heads attracted to our refrigerators.
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