Just saw The Secret Saturday night, and I must say I’m feeling inspired. Of course, the next day I looked up more on the internet and found a clip of a guy debunking the movie as nonsense and “snake oil”. Well, I don’t think it’s nonsense, but I understand how the more skeptical people in the world have a problem a) with the way the movie is set up, with all the mysticism and loose ends. and b) with the lack of consistent scientific documentation to support such a “Law”. I mean, they call it a law, but it’s not documented and tested and proven like say: The First Law of Thermodynamics. I think Law is a bit misleading, it’s more like a system where various things need to be done in order to be effective. This is why you can’t test it empirically like the “effects of MTV on rats”. It’s a system based on a set of laws and the results you get from it are only a reflection of your accurate use of the system.

Let’s think about General Systems Theory for a second. What Systems Theory tries to do is to see that all systems in the world (from tiny tiny to all-encompassing) are based upon the laws of the universe. And by “laws” I mean the real laws like gravity, thermodynamics, mathematical laws, etc. These laws determine the behavior of elements within all systems. The Law of Attraction is really only stating something obvious to Systems Theory - elements of a system fit together. No kidding, right? If they didn’t fit together, they wouldn’t be in the same system. So, what The Secret puts into practice is you determining which system you want to be in and then setting yourself up to be in it. And by being in that system you want to be in, you would only experience those elements which fit in that system. Get it? It’s pretty obvious if you break it down like that. So, let’s see the first step: what do you want? What kind of system do you want to be in?

Consider yourself a bigger system than the world’s subsystems. What are the subsystems of the world? There are an infinite number of susbsystems but there is only one you - but even you can shift your system. The susbsystems of the world can be “waking up and starting the day off well” or “waking up and starting the day off in a bad mood”. These are both systems - they have a set of properties and characteristics. Some things fit into this system and some do not. Waking up and going for a nice leisurely jog and feeling great may be a “good” system. Therefore tripping and falling into a puddle of mud because your head wasn’t there would be characteristic of a “bad” system. These two are not compatible. So the good system does not let those assymetric, conflicting, “bad” elements in. They are not characteristic of the “good” system, so they do not exist within it. So, if you shift your “bigger” system to something positive, something akin to what you want, those other elements in the smaller “negative” system do not enter. Now, you may say “sometimes I’m having a great day and something bad still happens”. Possible, but that only shows that your system was not optimal. A closed system does not allow conflicting elements in, so if some negative elements are witnessed, it just means that they were part of the system, which means you weren’t really as positive as you had hoped you were. Which is no big deal. No one is perfect. And that’s why some people are better at this than others.

I would like to point out that self-help, and life itself, are skills. You need to practice them and study them. And anyway, you can’t expect to create a system with only happy, perfect elements in them. What you can expect is some bad things which enter your system which you simply use as lessons to learn from. You move towards perfection but you’ll never acheive it. That’s how it works for all skills, be it “a good golf swing” or “using the Law of Attraction to set yourself in a positive life-system”.

Let’s take an example from the movie. The woman with breast cancer who cured herself in 3 months. She decided which system she wanted to be in: a cancer-free system. Then how to do it: she acted as if it had already happened. Every day she said to herself “thank you for my healing” and really felt and acted like she was already healed. How did that work? I’m not sure. But it seems to be correlated to the idea that your brain does not distinguish between the things you experience in your mind and those which you experience in reality. This is why atheletes use visualizations as a successful training method. And I know scientists have enough evidence to show that beliefs have a serious influence on your physical body. Simply put (and feel free to look for research confirming this), if you believe you are healthy, your body has a tendency to be healthy and if you feel sick, your body has a tendency to be sick. So she put herself (a bigger system) into a subsystem - that of a healthy cancer-free person. And by doing so, the cancer no longer fit. But the real magic here is obviously how the body heals itself. Not sure how that works, but I certainly believe that systems theory can explain it. And scientists still don’t know how everything works, but if we’re willing to work with things that seem logical and are worthy of belief (like systems theory being applied to your health) then you should be able to reap the rewards.Since this example is pretty clear, despite the “perceived” difficulty of the task, she actually had simplicity on her side. I’m not saying that beating cancer through shear will-power is easy, I’m just saying it’s quite clear and “simple”. It’s easier to put yourself in a simple system than in a complex one. She was only concentrating on the cancer healing. Other people trying to apply the Law of Attraction may be dealing with many many elements and some may actually contradict each other - that is, not fit well together in a system. Therefore the clear image of what you want becomes more difficult to grasp. For instance: “want a million dollars but don’t want to work hard”. There are a lot of contradictions there. “Want to have a happy family but want to go out drinking every night with the boys.” So, I believe the first step of deciding what you want is more complicated than we think. It may be easy to just say “I want a new BMW”, and you might get it by affirming and really focusing. But it’s hardly a long-term life plan. And what’s the point of all this if you aren’t building a real happy life? And it’s hard to define a life. There are a lot of things you have to learn about yourself and become conscious of. So, if the Law of Attraction isn’t working, it may be that the system you want to be in isn’t properly defined and you don’t have sufficient self-knowledge or knowledge of the world. The Law of Attraction is a system itself and you need to make sure all cyclinders are firing in the same direction to get optimal, predicatble results.

So, how do you properly define the system you want to be in? This basically amounts to: “what do I want to do in my life?” Not a question to be underestimated. Most people never find the answer to that one. Most people never even ask it! Or even know it exists! So, you’re already ahead in the game. Trying to figure what you want in life may be better left to feeling than rationality. Your conscious mind tends to complicate things. Since it is this massive, complex nerve center, it has taken on an infinite number of expectations and teachings from others throughout the course of your life and embedded them in your head in the form of neural patterns. So, when you try to ask questions like “does this neural pattern really feel good for me”, it is the neural patterns themselves which will answer you. And we know what they think! They are in place, living well and want to stay there. But your subconscious mind doesn’t work like that. It still knows the real you - what you like and not what others have told you to like. This is what they talk about in the movie as “the better you feel, the more ‘inline’ you are”. To find out what you want in life, you need to get back to the real you. And you do that by turning the conscious mind off, by feeling, and by getting a professional to help you take some distance from those patterns your stuck in. And then you can start getting an idea of the system you want and start putting yourself in it.

The Law of Attraction isn’t snake oil. Au contraire, it’s actually highly scientific and therefore hard to explain. So, it’s possible it isn’t being defined properly by the people promoting it (myself included). And unfortunately, it may be a turn-off to the traditional scientists who could most effectively support it by the fact that it’s not a law (but a system, as we’ve discussed) and can’t be tested with the scientific method. But keep the faith, there’s a lot that can be gained by properly implementing such a system. I’d be interested to hear other people’s takes on this. For the meantime, here’s a clip from The Secret on YouTube.

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