I recently saw the movie The Secret, a pseudo-documentary that explains The Law of Attraction. There are things in this movie that need a rebuttal and I haven’t found one elsewhere – so here’s mine.
The important thing here is that The Law of Attraction itself is real. But the arguments and explanations put forward in The Secret are alternately unscientific, mystical, nonsensical or just plain wrong.
First, what is The Law of Attraction (TLoA)? Let’s say you’re poor and really want to be rich. Instead of always complaining about being poor and always focusing on what you don’t have, TLoA says that you should visualize yourself as rich. See yourself in this situation. Feel what you would feel if you were in that situation. Then, somehow, money will come to you.
Simply stated, it is the belief that what you focus on, is what you get (or create for yourself), and in my experience this is mostly true.
The movie itself is entertaining, well-produced and it looks great. And popular as it has become it has had the positive effect of opening many people’s eyes to the existence of TLoA, which is great. But I believe it has done so on an erroneous basis.
These are my major beefs with the movie:
1: The movie claims that famous people knew “the secret”
The movie indicates that a number of famous people knew “the secret”, including Einstein, Plato, Newton and Edison. However, the movie offers no proof that any of these people knew of, agreed with or used the law of attraction.
2: The movie claims that TLoA is kept secret
The movie also claims that the people in power in society and business have long known of this law and worked to keep it from the rest of us. Scenes are shown of people being persecuted for trying to steal the secret and (I assume) bring it out to the rest of us.
No proof of this is offered and to the best of my knowledge, no conscious effort has ever been made to keep TLoA secret.