What The Secret means to me...

[Zeno Swijtink]

I watched this movie recently and thought it was infantile

Not so much since a silly metaphysical superstructure is given to the simple truth that a happy and open-minded person is more attractive and relaxed, and less likely to trip over a banana peel and make a fool of himself. (Yes, quantum theory is evoked again to make the audience swoon.)

It was infantile since in the video The Secret was used solely to satisfy infantile desires: the breathtaking necklace, the fast car, the stunning partner. All material and private desires.

Maybe those who hold The Secret can ask for World Peace next time, or some other urgent collective good?

Thanks!

[PeteS]

I have seen The Secret several times and share it with people whenever I can because I feel it is a part of the solution to creating a world of peace and plenty for everyone. If each person on this planet realized they are one with everything around them, that in absolute reality there is no real separation between individuals, whether they be people, animals, plants, rocks, stars..., then their priorities would change to caring for everyone and everything. And in this process they realize the power within them to attract to them, or create around them, a world that supports them in the ways they most desire, then there would be no war, or hunger, or coveting, or bullying; everyone would take care of their neighbor as themselves.

This is what The Secret reveals to me in the scenes where the man in the airplane accident heals himself; the woman heals her breast cancer; the part where Mother Teresa is quoted as saying, "when you hold a rally for peace I'll come" because she knew that you create what you focus on, and if you focus on what you're against, you get more of that, not less.

The flashy parts of the movie may deal with material things, but I feel the bulk of the movie is about bringing life into balance. A few quotes, well paraphrasing, from my notes:

"Money is only part of wealth; relationship, spirit, happiness are all parts";

"Basic program we are born with is Self Healing. See self in perfectly healthy body; there is big difference between being fearful and being hopeful";

"Create own world and allow others to create their world; there is more than enough for everyone... Love, joy, Peace, food...";

"What makes you feel good, brings you more; do what resonates with your heart";

"Welcome message for your first day on earth: There is nothing you cannot do; you are a powerful creator; decide and give attention to that; collect data to decide; then focus and you create it. Think properly; power within will care for you -- FOR SURE!"

As to the question of where does the shit in our lives come from; that is a complex answer that involves, culture, genes, family, history, etc. I feel The Secret addresses this question in the most direct way: start today to create something different. We can do counseling, therapy, personal growth workshops, and on and on, as we work to unravel the secret of our own, personal life, which is all good, but in the end we have to allow our good to manifest through us. This process is helped and speeded up when we realize we can heal whatever "shit" is in our life by applying the principles revealed in The Secret.

To people in New Thought spiritual centers The Secret is not new; nor is it to anyone that has studied metaphysics, western philosophy, eastern philosophy, East Indian philosophy, indigenous people's philosophies; what is called the Law of Attraction is one principle out of many that point to us as the creators, or maybe better said, co-creators of our life experience. I love The Secret movie because it brings these principles to an audience that may not otherwise find them in the busyness of our contemporary lives.

I publish, via email, a daily poem, or mini meditation, Law of Attraction in Action. The idea behind each one is to bring the reader into the present moment, this moment where creation springs forth fresh and new. If you're interested in receiving these send me an email, [email protected], and I'll add you to the list, another email gets you off the list, if it isn't "your cup of tea".

Enjoy the beauty of the world, it is your reflection...

Peter Stickney

Only Love Prevails

https://IamBalance.com
https://SharePrayer.com
https://prayasone.powerfulintentions.com/

[Dixon]

Zeno

Thanks for your rational response to this movie. After wasting my time and $$ on the "What the Bleep..." movie, I decided not to see this "Secret" movie, and from what you say, I made the right choice.

So much of what passes for spirituality is all about $$ and other forms of power, as with the quantum superpower BS in "What the Bleep..." (and apparently in "The Secret" too).

I'm reminded of an email that showed up in my inbox about a year ago. Though it was from a woman I know to be intelligent, it was the most infantile blather imaginable, asking god for prosperity ($$) and encouraging me to forward it to 10 other people to improve my luck ($$), or some such piffle. So "spirituality" in this case--as is so often the case--consisted of begging god for money.

This kind of thing just reinforces my belief that most of what gets called "spirituality" is money-grubbing, self-serving infantile BS. The more displays of such "spirituality" I see (and they're constantly on display on Wacco), the happier I am to be a rationalistic, skeptical atheist. I may be flattering myself, but it seems that I have more real spirituality in my little atheistic finger than any ten horoscope-casting, kirtan-chanting, psychic healing west county "sacred" flimflam practitioners, LOL!

Blessings!

Dixon





I watched this movie recently and thought it was infantile

Not so much since a silly metaphysical superstructure is given to the simple truth that a happy and open-minded person is more attractive and relaxed, and less likely to trip over a banana peel and make a fool of himself. (Yes, quantum theory is evoked again to make the audience swoon.)

It was infantile since in the video The Secret was used solely to satisfy infantile desires: the breathtaking necklace, the fast car, the stunning partner. All material and private desires.

Maybe those who hold The Secret can ask for World Peace next time, or some other urgent collective good?

Thanks!

[alanora]

I watched this movie recently and thought it was infantile

Not so much since a silly metaphysical superstructure is given to the simple truth that a happy and open-minded person is more attractive and relaxed, and less likely to trip over a banana peel and make a fool of himself. (Yes, quantum theory is evoked again to make the audience swoon.)

It was infantile since in the video The Secret was used solely to satisfy infantile desires: the breathtaking necklace, the fast car, the stunning partner. All material and private desires.

Maybe those who hold The Secret can ask for World Peace next time, or some other urgent collective good?

Thanks!For those who are interested in the beliefs espoused in "the Secret" there is a center in our midst, formerly the SR church of Religious science, where people come together and reinforce these ideas through services, classes and a lovely book store. I first found it, probably a dozen years ago, and was awed by the fact that people actually dared to say these things(God is all there is) and attempt to live them. Services are celebratory in nature, there is music at the second and third service on Sunday mornings, and a wednesday evening boost as well. Very little dogma. Remember, attitude and perception are everything! Mindy

[Juggledude]

Zeno

Thanks for your rational response to this movie. After wasting my time and $$ on the "What the Bleep..." movie, I decided not to see this "Secret" movie, and from what you say, I made the right choice.

So much of what passes for spirituality is all about $$ and other forms of power, as with the quantum superpower BS in "What the Bleep..." (and apparently in "The Secret" too).

I'm reminded of an email that showed up in my inbox about a year ago. Though it was from a woman I know to be intelligent, it was the most infantile blather imaginable, asking god for prosperity ($$) and encouraging me to forward it to 10 other people to improve my luck ($$), or some such piffle. So "spirituality" in this case--as is so often the case--consisted of begging god for money.

This kind of thing just reinforces my belief that most of what gets called "spirituality" is money-grubbing, self-serving infantile BS. The more displays of such "spirituality" I see (and they're constantly on display on Wacco), the happier I am to be a rationalistic, skeptical atheist. I may be flattering myself, but it seems that I have more real spirituality in my little atheistic finger than any ten horoscope-casting, kirtan-chanting, psychic healing west county "sacred" flimflam practitioners, LOL!

Blessings!

Dixon

Hey Dixon!

Well met. I gotta stand up and disagree with you a little bit here. I haven't seen the "Secret" so will keep quiet on that point, but I got alot out of what the bleep, and have put some of what I got to good productive use in my life. I respect that your personal views and thought processes found no benefit or resonace with the ideas put forth there, though I take umbrage at your cavalier dismissal of the spiritual value others may find. Spirituality is a very personal and subjective experience. I respect your experience of your own spirituality as being genuine and abundant, and would like to imagine a world where each and every one of us could respect the spritual experience of others, especially when they differ from our own.

I too percieve much marketing and hype in the spiritual component of the mass media stream we are all subject too, here on wacco as well as in other venues. Yet, I can imagine that even the rev. billy graham and other televangelists provide a real value to those who are touched by their diatribes. Who are you or I to pass judgement upon the subjective value Joe Hick gets from sending half his paycheck to the ministry? At least here in the West County, the majority of the practitioners are sincere and believe in their dogma. This place of non judgement is a hard place to stand, but one of useful perspective, imho.

Royce

[Zeno Swijtink]

I wonder why we, in this community, are so often approached with a movie, book, or workshop that "will radically change your life"?

I mean, how often can you radically change your life?? Why do they think our life needs to be radically changed all the time?

Zeno




Hey Dixon!

Well met. I gotta stand up and disagree with you a little bit here. I haven't seen the "Secret" so will keep quiet on that point, but I got alot out of what the bleep, and have put some of what I got to good productive use in my life. I respect that your personal views and thought processes found no benefit or resonace with the ideas put forth there, though I take umbrage at your cavalier dismissal of the spiritual value others may find. Spirituality is a very personal and subjective experience. I respect your experience of your own spirituality as being genuine and abundant, and would like to imagine a world where each and every one of us could respect the spritual experience of others, especially when they differ from our own.

I too percieve much marketing and hype in the spiritual component of the mass media stream we are all subject too, here on wacco as well as in other venues. Yet, I can imagine that even the rev. billy graham and other televangelists provide a real value to those who are touched by their diatribes. Who are you or I to pass judgement upon the subjective value Joe Hick gets from sending half his paycheck to the ministry? At least here in the West County, the majority of the practitioners are sincere and believe in their dogma. This place of non judgement is a hard place to stand, but one of useful perspective, imho.

Royce

[Clancy]

Possibly perceived as gullible, but it's not just this community. Millions of people live 'lives of quiet desperation' as Thoreau said, and are sincerely hoping to improve it. Lots of people are cashing in on this human truth.





I wonder why we, in this community, are so often approached with a movie, book, or workshop that "will radically change your life"?

[Zeno Swijtink]

Beautiful quotation! "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

I wonder what makes a person break out of that live of quiet desperation, and sing one's song, rather that go to the grave with the song still in them, as Thoreau says.

I tend to think that there is an element of luck involved: meeting with the right crisis that takes courage to confront, and that sets one on a path of singing since there is no alternative anymore.



Possibly perceived as gullible, but it's not just this community. Millions of people live 'lives of quiet desperation' as Thoreau said, and are sincerely hoping to improve it. Lots of people are cashing in on this human truth.

[Clancy]

Your thoughful comments remind me of that old gospel tune;

How Can I Keep From Singing

My life goes on in endless song
above earth's lamentations,
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
that hails a new creation.

Above the tumult and the strife
I hear it's music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
While though the darkness 'round me close,
songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,
while to that rock I'm clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth
how can I keep from singing?

Eva Cassidy did a stunning version, it's in the Sonoma County library system if you're interested, a CD called Eva By Heart.



Beautiful quotation! "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

I wonder what makes a person break out of that live of quiet desperation, and sing one's song, rather that go to the grave with the song still in them, as Thoreau says.

I tend to think that there is an element of luck involved: meeting with the right crisis that takes courage to confront, and that sets one on a path of singing since there is no alternative anymore.

[Barry]

I tend to think that there is an element of luck involved: meeting with the right crisis that takes courage to confront, and that sets one on a path of singing since there is no alternative anymore.That's just what happened to me! I met the "right" crisis that took courage to confront (though that's not what it felt like at the time, I just hung in there for dear life, through many a dark night of the soul) and that set me on this path (WaccoBB.net) of "singing" my song, since there is no alternative!

I have found the process both challenging and exhilarating. It's been a wonderful mirror to confront my fears, sing my song and practice manifestation! One thing that surely got left behind was the prison of comfort and security!

[alanora]

Your thoughful comments remind me of that old gospel tune;

How Can I Keep From Singing

My life goes on in endless song
above earth's lamentations,
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
that hails a new creation.

Above the tumult and the strife
I hear it's music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
While though the darkness 'round me close,
songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,
while to that rock I'm clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth
how can I keep from singing?

Eva Cassidy did a stunning version, it's in the Sonoma County library system if you're interested, a CD called Eva By Heart.Was also done beautifully on an enya album, or was it susan osborn......or both.....

[alanora]

That's just what happened to me! I met the "right" crisis that took courage to confront (though that's not what it felt like at the time, I just hung in there for dear life, through many a dark night of the soul) and that set me on this path (WaccoBB.net) of "singing" my song, since there is no alternative!

I have found the process both challenging and exhilarating. It's been a wonderful mirror to confront my fears, sing my song and practice manifestation! One thing that surely got left behind was the prison of comfort and security!:hello: Mindy here. Thank you for stepping out of your comfort zone and providing me with my morning pulse of the neighborhood read. It looks so natural and seamless, like you had forever been doing this with never a doubt or a fear. I think hitting fifty has something to do with the attitude that lessens impact of others thoughts and opinions. You have allowed me space to practice stepping out and seeing what happens as well. Very surprising to me what gathers steam and what just fizzles. Being who you are seems like the safest route after all... lest being gone and having the pain of being hidden the whole time. Our souls clamor for complete expression, and you have provided an earthly arena for us all. Thanks again. Mindy

[Zeno Swijtink]

I also met the right crisis, way back when I was eleven years old. And somehow over the next few years I was able to see my personal pain in a bigger, almost cosmic context.
<p>Looking back at it there seems to have been no rational ground for this, almost like being touched by grace.
<p>Today I was listening to a podcast from &quot;A World of Possibilities&quot; about the AIDS/HIV pandemic ravishing Africa, which now in particularly affects women.
<p><a href="https://www.aworldofpossibilities.com/details.cfm?id=279">https://www.aworldofpossibilities.com/details.cfm?id=279</a>
<p><a href="https://www.aworldofpossibilities.com/action/info193.html">https://www.aworldofpossibilities.com/action/info193.html</a>
<p>The story told by Annie Kaseketi, a minister from Lusaka, Zambia, whose husband and children were cut down by AIDS, is a moving tale of a woman who transformed deep despair into a clear and steady vision of what is real, and what needs to be done.
<p>

That's just what happened to me! I met the "right" crisis that took courage to confront (though that's not what it felt like at the time, I just hung in there for dear life, through many a dark night of the soul) and that set me on this path (WaccoBB.net) of "singing" my song, since there is no alternative!

I have found the process both challenging and exhilarating. It's been a wonderful mirror to confront my fears, sing my song and practice manifestation! One thing that surely got left behind was the prison of comfort and security!

[Jupiter13]

Loreena McKennitt sang it on one of her albums.


Was also done beautifully on an enya album, or was it susan osborn......or both.....

[Clancy]

Nicely done too, so was Enya's version. But Eva Cassidy's version is absolutely amazing. It's like the best rocking gospel song you've ever heard.


Loreena McKennitt sang it on one of her albums.

[tomh]

I watched this movie recently and thought it was infantile

Not so much since a silly metaphysical superstructure is given to the simple truth that a happy and open-minded person is more attractive and relaxed, and less likely to trip over a banana peel and make a fool of himself. (Yes, quantum theory is evoked again to make the audience swoon.)

It was infantile since in the video The Secret was used solely to satisfy infantile desires: the breathtaking necklace, the fast car, the stunning partner. All material and private desires.

Maybe those who hold The Secret can ask for World Peace next time, or some other urgent collective good?

Thanks!

I couldn't agree with you more, Zeno. It's appetitive religion, dressed up for the New Age. And, yes, I too had to hang on tight when quantum theory was invoked -- they almost got me there, but I kept my balance. God really is a cuddly Santa Claus in the sky, isn't HE? There, just to grant our wishes for luxurious mansions and better looking girl friends? And, yes!! Damnit!! Why don't those who have the capacity to manifest anything they desire, MANIFEST WORLD PEACE????? It either tells you a lot about them, or, a lot about this anything-is-possible business, doesn't it?
-- Tom

[Zeno Swijtink]

The Secret is why i decided to "totally commit to the transformation of the world" you may find it interesting to do a search of my postings and be amused by the method behind my madness (crazy like a fox).
Reverend Nan Sea Love
https://www.YourKindnessMatters.org

Anyone remembers the movie Themrock? I saw it when I was in my early twenties, in 1972, when it came out. In Amsterdam.

I got this synopsis somewhere from the web: "Michel Piccoli plays Themroc, whose boring life and depressing job finally causes him to crack up. Themroc causes mayhem at work, seduces his sister, eats a policeman for dinner and turns his flat into a cave. The neighbors pretend there is nothing wrong and media coverage causes more and more of Paris to follow his example."

This was a "liberating" movie of the 70s. We felt great walking out the cinema. And the film probably had some impacts on how we then lead our lives, on the things we did, on our social and sexual relations.

But, as I remember it, Themrock did not pretend to present The Theory of Everything, The Final Insight of What It Is All About. What's going on in this new millennium?

[Sonomamark]

Zeno, Dixon et al: I'm a bit late to this party, but I find this discusson interesting. To me, the question at the heart of this is: what is it that repeatedly draws so many--especially of the "spiritually seeking" type, whether they end up Oming over crystals or waving their hands in the air for Jesus--to a single-answer "magic bullet" that will supposedly solve all their problems?

I mean, it's a nice dream. It's the dream of a child: Big Mommy or Daddy (read, God, Goddess, Jesus, Buddha, the Great Spirit, the Creator, the Cosmic Energy) is going to solve all my problems now. It's attractive to believe that simply adopting a lens of perspective, a belief system, a practice, an herbal supplement, or a series of rituals can suddenly make life a perfect dream.

But here on Planet Earth, that's not the life we primates get to live. Life, for all its many joys, discoveries and beauties, also involves struggle, disappointment, changes of plans, unexpected loss, and opportunities squandered. Roads not taken. Mistakes made. That's just how it is. The world doesn't owe us anything: we're born, we live, we die. Those are the only guarantees. Ask a Somali refugee, or someone from the 9th Ward in New Orleans.

I find that that Americans--particularly those raised in an affluent context--are especially prone to this kind of delusional seeking. Mostly because they have the luxury of putting time and money into "developing themselves" rather than simple survival, but also because they carry such a presumption of entitlement. Much of what can be characterized as "California New Agism" is self-worship based in the core beliefs of an 8-year-old: "I deserve to have everything I want, and if I don't get it, there must be something wrong." This is sometimes framed as some kind of "enlightenment" which contributes to "healing the world" or other grandiosity, but it comes down to narcissism, as I've seen it.

In my experience, most people from other societies have a far less "epic" sense of themselves and their lives, and are therefore less resentful and disappointed, and less prone to chase castles in the air which they believe will make their lives a perfect dream.

["Mad" Miles]

Dear Waccies,

Read this in today's PD. Thought it might appeal to my fellow skeptics.

"Mad" Miles


********************************************************
Self-help gone nutty

A craze called 'The Secret' blends Tony Robbins with 'The Da Vinci Code,' telling people to have it all without trying.

By Karin Klein, KARIN KLEIN is a Times editorial writer.
February 13, 2007


WHEN MY SISTER arrived from New York over the holidays, she plopped a hand-tooled leather satchel on my piano bench and said, "See the beautiful bag I manifested for myself?" Gorgeous, indeed. But manifested?

Well, I suppose that's easier than dealing in cash.

"Manifesting," for those outside the self-help loop, is the big buzzword from "The Secret," a new DVD with a tie-in book featuring the ancient idea of having it all without trying very hard. If "The Secret" had a plot, it might go something like "Tony Robbins uncovers the Judas Gospel and learns to use the Force."

The DVD is screened regularly at gatherings of the energy-healer crowd. The video opens with a "Da Vinci Code"-style shot: A man in a ragged tunic makes off with a hot papyrus. A voice-over assures us that an ancient secret, hidden from most of mankind, is about to be revealed. (Insert little conspiracy montage: A medieval priestly type privately unrolls the secret scroll; men in suits scheme in a smoke-filled boardroom.) Then motivational speakers take turns elaborating on this idea: If you want something, think of it with loving and positive feelings and it will "manifest." The concept apparently stems from the work of Esther Hicks, a famous channeler.

I never would have heard of "The Secret" if it weren't for my sister, the sort of person who has a spirit guide and professes to "massage energy." (Friends say the wrong sister moved to California.) But apparently it has found major cultural traction. It was featured on "Oprah" last week. The book is No. 4 on The Times' nonfiction bestseller list and No. 2 on Amazon (with the audio CD set No. 3). At my local Barnes & Noble, it was sold out.

Americans are never too jaded for another get-rich-quick chimera. In "The Secret," real and sustained effort is unnecessary, even frowned on. The scheme lays out a "law of attraction" — a strange misreading of quantum physics — that asserts that the universe grants your wishes because you are the "most powerful transmission tower on in the world." Send out "wealth frequencies" with your thoughts and the universe's wealth frequencies will be pulled to you.

Here was my favorite bit: "Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight." It's a position that seems to have a lot in common with President Bush's ideas about global warming. Carbon emissions warm the Earth only if you worry that they will.

On the flip side, nothing — nothing — happens to people that isn't brought to them by their own persistent thoughts, and the book strongly implies that this includes those killed in the Holocaust and the World Trade Center. Under this philosophy, why bother contributing to Oxfam or worrying about Darfur? What a guilt-reliever.

Near as I can tell, the whole idea is just a new spin on the very old (and decidedly not secret) "The Power of Positive Thinking" wedded to "ask and you shall receive." So it's not surprising that its author, Australian TV producer Rhonda Byrne, is best known for a show called "The World's Greatest Commercials." Warming over others' old work appears to be her area of expertise. She took the well-worn ideas of some self-help gurus, customized them for the profoundly lazy, gave them a veneer of mysticism — and she tapped right into that wealth frequency. What a pro.

Strange to say, people are buying it. Not just the book and DVD. The message. Therapists tell me they're starting to see clients who are headed for real trouble, immersing themselves in a dream world in which good things just come. The therapists obviously ought to visualize smarter clients.

My sister says I'm over-intellectualizing. She, after all, had manifested a fine leather satchel. And I have to admit, if there were designer leather goods to be had out of this, I was interested.

The reality was — drat it all — far more prosaic. Watching the DVD gave her the idea that she could afford this bag if she really wanted it, and so she went ahead and charged it. I say, if you need an Amex card to make a handbag appear, you're an amateur.

[Clancy]

While I'm all for healthy skepticism, I think we may be throwing the baby out with the bath water. From what I gather, the 'secret' isn't that you just believe and whatever you want is automatically gifted to you, it's that you affirm and allow for the possibility of what you want and thus it's far more likely to happen than otherwise, but you still have to try.



Dear Waccies,

Read this in today's PD. Thought it might appeal to my fellow skeptics.

"Mad" Miles


********************************************************
Self-help gone nutty

A craze called 'The Secret' blends Tony Robbins with 'The Da Vinci Code,' telling people to have it all without trying.

[tomcat]

True, no matter how hard you try, if you don't have a ticket with the winning numbers, you can't win the lottery.
Tom


While I'm all for healthy skepticism, I think we may be throwing the baby out with the bath water. From what I gather, the 'secret' isn't that you just believe and whatever you want is automatically gifted to you, it's that you affirm and allow for the possibility of what you want and thus it's far more likely to happen than otherwise, but you still have to try.

[Mita Moni]

A friend invited me over to watch a spiritual movie saying that if I liked I could join her and another woman in their subscription to this spiritual movies series. What I saw was a hokie short then a longer one, "The Secret" in which various people talk about how they made more money and moved into a huge mansion in So. Cal. by focusing on what they wanted. This is not my idea of spirituality, infact it is almost the opposite. Greed is not spiritual. One of the most spiritual activities is to live in a way that leaves plently left over for other people, animals, and plants. Barrie






True, no matter how hard you try, if you don't have a ticket with the winning numbers, you can't win the lottery.
Tom

["Mad" Miles]

"Greed is not spiritual. One of the most spiritual activities is to live in a way that leaves plently left over for other people, animals, and plants."

Well and nicely put! Thank you.

I've avoided weighing in recently on this "with enough attention/intention one can achieve whatever one wants" debate because others in the "skeptics" camp, of which I count myself a member, have ably defended the cause. But I do see a neutral ground. I learned thirty years ago that I was more likely to find what I was looking for, than what I'm not looking for. If that is all the "Secret" means, then cool. A banal patently obvious cool but still, cool.

I would like to comment on another thread, with a similar theme, in which Reason has been upheld as the final arbiter in disputes about scientific claims, etc. I think this was last upheld by Mark Green / sonomamarc (Please don't go! I, for one, always enjoy your contributions, even when we disagree about Nader, the Dems and the Greens) and seconded by Clancy in the SODS treatment / professional qualifications discussion.

Reason: OK, which kind? Western Positivistic either/or logic? Advanced Post-Structuralist / Deconstructivist Post-Heideggarian descended from Hegel Dialectical reason? Buddhist / Zen koan mystical reason? Some other mode of organized, self-consistent intelligent thinking? All of the above? (Sorry, can't do that, they are different systems, sometimes antithetical.)

Much of the Social Theory / Political Philosophy that I devoted my twenties and early thirties to were schools of thought that primarily engaged in the critique of what was often called "Western Reason". So Reason as the be all and end all of "proper" thinking is a highly contested ground.

Especially when we're dealing with the social and psychological. What people do is rarely determined by what is "reasonable". Self-interest, habit, preconceived modes of thinking and acting handed down from previous generations, in short the irrational, have as much, if not more, to do with human behaviour as any semblance of rational thought. That understanding is the beginning of rational discourse about the social and personal.

And don't forget Goya quoting Goethe, "The Dream of Reason leads to" (or produces) "Monsters." A Truth which "Pan's Labyrinth" ably demonstrates.

(Hah! Who among you doubted I'd end up referring to the movies!)

Cheers Folks. Todd Snider at the Mystic was phenomonal last night. I've got my Robert Earl Keen ticket for next Wednesday and Greg Browne is coming at the end of March. Whoo Doggie!

"Mad" Miles

[Nirmala]

A friend invited me over to watch a spiritual movie saying that if I liked I could join her and another woman in their subscription to this spiritual movies series. What I saw was a hokie short then a longer one, "The Secret" in which various people talk about how they made more money and moved into a huge mansion in So. Cal. by focusing on what they wanted. This is not my idea of spirituality, infact it is almost the opposite. Greed is not spiritual. One of the most spiritual activities is to live in a way that leaves plently left over for other people, animals, and plants. Barrie

No true spiritual teaching tells us to go after material wealth. The Secret isn't spiritual, it's new age greed. Spiritual teachings are about letting go/surrender/renouncing greed and hatred. This twisted metaphysical teaching doesn't recognize that happiness does not come from getting everything we want. It comes from a balanced acceptance of all life's ups and downs, not allowing difficulties to totally overwhelm us or joys to make us arrogant and overly exhuberant. It doesn't recognize that the nature of life is gain and loss, pain and pleasure, praise and blame, recognition and dishonor, always changing. We have the opportunity to learn some of our deepest lessons from our failures and losses. The hardwon qualities of humility, courage, and true self acceptance come from living an ethical life and realizing there is more to happiness than what the modern world presents. Nirmala

[Barry]

The Secret isn't spiritual, it's new age greed. There are two issues here that are being collapsed:
- The "technology" of manifestation.
- What you choose to do with it.
Regarding the technology of manifestation, I think it's on the money, as it were. Sure, it's not precise, "do exactly this and exactly that happens, every time" or maybe it is... The do "exactly this" is the tricky part. Since it's not only concerned with physical action but also the energy of the soul. And I believe it shares some thing with, dare I say, quantum mechanics, which speaks of matter having a "tendency to exist". The Secret stacks the deck for something to manifest.

And as the movie points out, what your request/expectation of the universe that gets registered is what is really expected by your soul, not just a particular thought. So again, it's a bit tricky to measure the results. But my sense is that it is really how the universe works. In this sense, I'd call it spiritual, in that it is tied to the movement of your spirit/soul.

You can use it (or should I say: you do use it - since its not something that you can turn on and off) for what you want: abundance/greed/poverty, love/hate, peace/war, health/illness, whatever... just like other technologies. It's just the way it works.

:heart:

[Clancy]

No true spiritual teaching tells us to go after material wealth.

Any spiritual teaching can be misused, all the myriad wars resulting from all the myriad religions prove that.

I'm thinking the 'secret' would be useful for people who have suffered from believing parents, teachers or society who told them they're not smart enough, good enough, motivated enough or spiritual enough to flourish in this life, and that there's something spiritual about suffering.

We sorely lack exuberant, ecstatic and expressive people in our neurotic and fearful society, and could use a good dose of believing that we can be much more than we are at present, and that's what the secret sounds like to me.

[Nirmala]

There are two issues here that are being collapsed:
- The "technology" of manifestation.

- What you choose to do with it.

Regarding the technology of manifestation, I think it's on the money, as it were. Sure, it's not precise, "do exactly this and exactly that happens, every time" or maybe it is... The do "exactly this" is the tricky part. Since it's not only concerned with physical action but also the energy of the soul. And I believe it shares some thing with, dare I say, quantum mechanics, which speaks of matter having a "tendency to exist". The Secret stacks the deck for something to manifest.


And as the movie points out, what your request/expectation of the universe that gets registered is what is really expected by your soul, not just a particular thought. So again, it's a bit tricky to measure the results. But my sense is that it is really how the universe works. In this sense, I'd call it spiritual, in that it is tied to the movement of your spirit/soul.

You can use it (or should I say: you do use it - since its not something that you can turn on and off) for what you want: abundance/greed/poverty, love/hate, peace/war, health/illness, whatever... just like other technologies. It's just the way it works.

:heart:
While I agree the energy of our thoughts with enough intensity and continuity will eventually manifest, we probably hold different worldviews. I don't see the universe giving or taking anything from us. To use Biblical language, everyone "reaps what they sow." Our thoughts become words and our words become deeds. We can learn to become more skillful with out thoughts, seeing them without substance and ever changing rather than concrete. We can stop/let go of negative self talk that often comes from deeply held unconscious habits and beliefs whether these are conscious, unconscious or semi-conscious. We can choose words that are truthful, timely and kind. We can make a choice to live ethically without harming ourselves or others. Whatever energy we give out to the world via thought, word and actio comes back to us when the conditions are right for that cause of ripen. This is the old cause and effect or actions have consequences. Mind is the cause. Others can support, guide or correct us, but nothing external to us, be it an indiviual, group, or an abstract philosophical idea like universal energy can do it for us. It is up to each individual.
Thanks for reading.
Nirmala

[tomcat]

I saw this movie (The Secret) with no preconceived ideas of what it was about and the hit I got from it (in brief) was that a person can accomplish almost anything if they put their mind to work on it.
First, you have to know what it is you really want. Then you put your attention to it and figure out the steps to take to manifest it, focus your thoughts in a positive manner on it, and work toward your goal.
It's the law of attraction... Whatever we think about is what we bring about. Many people will want 'things', others will want 'right livelihood', 'relationship', 'spiritual enlightenment', etc.
It's all out there... if we want it.
Tom



A friend invited me over to watch a spiritual movie saying that if I liked I could join her and another woman in their subscription to this spiritual movies series. What I saw was a hokie short then a longer one, "The Secret" in which various people talk about how they made more money and moved into a huge mansion in So. Cal. by focusing on what they wanted. This is not my idea of spirituality, infact it is almost the opposite. Greed is not spiritual. One of the most spiritual activities is to live in a way that leaves plently left over for other people, animals, and plants. Barrie

[donallan]

Mita Moni (member.php?u=657)[/b]]Greed is not spiritual. One of the most spiritual activities is to live in a way that leaves plenty left over for other people, animals, and plants.Hello!

I wonder where we learned that money, and even greed, are not "spiritual?" Isn't "Greedy" just a word that was used to shame us into being "nice" and not taking more than "they" thought was appropriate...in denial of what we wanted? Who made those rules, anyway? Like "a good boy shares his toys" ... even when he doesn't want to, even when he goes against himself when he does it, he has to do it to be a "good boy." If he doesn't want to, or makes a fuss about being made to, he is called "selfish."

Now we add those rules to our spiritual principles. Very dangerous, I believe. The universe knows nothing about greedy and selfish. It does not care. The abundance is TOTAL. It is the nature of the universe.

By the way, I don't think that the universe cares at all about The Secret, either. It already knows its own Secret, which has little to do with "Think proper spiritual thoughts and get rich-- or a soul mate, or whatever."

Who invented "Live simply so that others may simply live?" Is it true? Is that part of The Secret? Or antithetical to The Secret? Is this a universe of unlimited abundance, or is there a limited supply that we have to protect by denying ourselves our "greed?" Are WE in charge of the universe?

Bill Gates has made many billions of dollars. Is he greedy, selfish, non-spiritual? He is using the money, and attracting other money like his, to change the face of disease and death among children in Africa and other places. Is he bad? Good? Right? Wrong? Does the universe judge or congratulate him? Does God approve? Does The Secret approve?

I would suggest that his ability to amass fortunes has contributed to the abundance of others in incalculable ways. Not only the recipients of his life-saving programs, but all the people with jobs in all the businesses and technologies created or supported by what Bill Gates has created. They support their families, their grocers, and their barbers because of what Mr. Gates has created. [I am a Mac user].

For me, living a "spiritual" life means keeping my heart and mind open to the perfection of every aspect of this universe we are dreaming. It means seeing and experiencing the perfect unfolding and interconnectedness of each and every person, event, thought, emotion, tree, and tradition. It means letting go of the mind's strategy of separating, labeling, and categorizing the parts of the One Whole-- and making them good and bad, right and wrong.

Then, we ultimately let go of the idea of "spiritual," and we are free.

The universe's Secret is that there is only One Thing here.

It doesn't need a movie. Or us.

IN love,

Allan Hardman
www.joydancer.com (https://www.joydancer.com)

[Clancy]

Who invented "Live simply so that others may simply live?" Is it true?

Since the USA, with 5% of the world's population consumes 50% of the world's resources, and accomplishes this extrodinary feat of consumption via the direct aid of the largest military machine on the planet, I'd have to say, yes, it's true.

[PeteS]

Since the USA, with 5% of the world's population consumes 50% of the world's resources, and accomplishes this extrodinary feat of consumption via the direct aid of the largest military machine on the planet, I'd have to say, yes, it's true.

So many wonderful, insightful comments here. This is a great conversation.

I was thinking about the discussion about Reason and Descartes' "I think therefore I am" came to mind. In the context of The Secret, I now say, "I think therefore I am what I think."

I see this demonstrated in the stories Oprah chose to showcase on her show about The Secret. If you missed that show here is a link to it.
https://whatanicewebsite.com/oprah.wmv

I find the best answer to those that see the show as having something to do with greed, or being simplistic or infantile is to see the results this movie has in real people's lives; the way it gives some people a big "aha" about their lives therefore a new perspective and ability to make new choices and move forward from where they were stuck.

I saw the movie again last night with a group and one person I talked to said she saw the movie last year and took the advice she heard from Bob Proctor; she consolidated her debt into a loan that is automatically paid each month so she no longer thinks about the debt, and focuses on her freedom to create not only a debt-free life, but life with the freedom she desires (she is retired).

Also at the showing last night, Gratitude Rocks were passed out. I do not find anything negative or greedy about remembering to be grateful for what we have in our lives right now; or, for that matter, to sell rocks to raise money for a medical center. I am grateful for this community that allows each of us to be who we are, even as we learn from each other to move and grow and evolve together into our personal power, our potential to bring peace, harmony, justice, beauty, abundance and so much more into everyday experience in this world for ourselves and all apparent others, because the true "Secret" is we are One.

Peter Stickney
https://SharePrayer.com

["Mad" Miles]

https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17314883/site/newsweek/

:thumbsup: (https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17314883/site/newsweek/)

[Juggledude]

I learned thirty years ago that I was more likely to find what I was looking for, than what I'm not looking for.
:thumbsup: (https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17314883/site/newsweek/)

Listening to the newsweek bit, I find myself noticing that they are commenting mostly on the marketing and presentation aspects of the film/book, noting how and why it has been such a success. I'm very interested in that aspect, as it would seem to be a clue as to a very real "secret", one hidden in plain view, of how to make a buck or twenty or twenty million in this society, and if it can be done with people feeling good, all the better!

The ethics of the marketing aside, the "technology" of manifestation is not at all discussed in this report, aside from a couple brief references that seem to uphold more than debunk the concept. One can hardly refute the banal yet somehow relevant remark of Miles as quoted above, why then not take another step? And another? Each journey starts with a single step, and each great discovery came either from a question or an accident, who is to say we won't end up with either or both here?

Royce

[pzZAZzy]

I wrote this on New Year's Day, 2007:
Last night I saw THE SECRET, again. I awoke this morning, wishing that there was a film that contained only the positives; i.e., leaving out the elephant guano, the repeating bills, the poor besot upon gay guy, etc. --granted, all important lessons --in the beginning. But, now that those messages have already made their point, I was wishing for a SECRET to watch that is 100% positive only... And here it is! --just four hours later, in my email: "The Secret 100% Positive Version". Wowie Kazowie! That's pretty fast *manifestation*, I'd say. Good thing I wasn't thinking of the elephant!

Now, I'm heading out to Test Drive a XanGo Red, Prius. ;-) ~gayla~

The Secret 100% Positive Version (3 min.)
https://video.thesecret.tv/quicktime/secrettoyou.mov
________________________________________________________________

100 quotes from "The Secret"
1. We all work with one infinite power
2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA)
3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting
4. We are like magnets - like attract like. You become AND attract what you think
5. Every thought has a frequency. Thoughts send out a magnetic energy
6. People think about what they don't want and attract more of the same
7. Thought = creation. If these thoughts are attached to powerful emotions (good or bad) that speeds the creation
8. You attract your dominant thoughts
9. Those who speak most of illness have illness, those who speak most of prosperity have it..etc..
10. It's not "wishful" thinking.
11. You can't have a universe without the mind entering into it
12. Choose your thoughts carefully .. you are a masterpiece of your life
13. It's OK that thoughts don't manifest into reality immediately (if we saw a picture of an elephant and it instantly appeared, that would be too soon)
14. EVERYTHING in your life you have attracted .. accept that fact .. it's true.
15. Your thoughts cause your feelings
16. We don't need to complicate all the "reasons" behind our emotions. It's much simpler than that. Two categories .. good feelings, bad feelings.
17. Thoughts that bring about good feelings mean you are on the right track. Thoughts that bring about bad feelings means you are not on the right track.
18. Whatever it is you are feeling is a perfect reflection of what is in the process of becoming
19. You get exactly what you are FEELING
20. Happy feelings will attract more happy circumstances
21. You can begin feeling whatever you want (even if it's not there).. the universe will correspond to the nature of your song
22. What you focus on with your thought and feeling is what you attract into your experience
23. What you think and what you feel and what actually manifests is ALWAYS a match - no exception
24. Shift your awareness
25. "You create your own universe as you go along" Winston Churchill
26. It's important to feel good ( ( ( (((good))) ) ) )
27. You can change your emotion immediately .. by thinking of something joyful, or singing a song, or remembering a happy experience
28. When you get the hang of this, before you know it you will KNOW you are the creator
29. Life can and should be phenomenal .. and it will be when you consciously apply the Law of Attraction
30. Universe will re-arrange itself accordingly
31. Start by using this sentence for all of your wants: "I'm so happy and grateful now that.... "
32. You don't need to know HOW the universe is going to rearrange itself
33. LOA is simply figuring out for yourself what will generate the positive feelings of having it NOW
34. You might get an inspired thought or idea to help you move towards what you want faster
35. The universe likes SPEED. Don't delay, don't second-guess, don't doubt..
36. When the opportunity or impulse is there .. ACT
37. You will attract everything you require - money, people, connections.. PAY ATTENTION to what's being set in front of you
38. You can start with nothing .. and out of nothing or no way - a WAY will be provided.
39. HOW LONG??? No rules on time .. the more aligned you are with positive feelings the quicker things happen
40. Size is nothing to the universe (unlimited abundance if that's what you wish) We make the rules on size and time
41. No rules according to the universe .. you provide the feelings of having it now and the universe will respond
42. Most people offer the majority of their thought in response to what they are observing (bills in the mail, being late, having bad luck...etc..)
43. You have to find a different approach to what is through a different vantage point
44. "All that we are is a result of what we have thought" - Buddha
45. What can you do right now to turn your life around?? Gratitude
46. Gratitude will bring more into our lives immediately
47. What we think about and THANK about is what we bring about
48. What are the things you are grateful for?? Feel the gratitude.. focus on what you have right now that you are grateful for
49. Play the picture in your mind - focus on the end result
50. VISUALIZE!!! Rehearse your future
51. VISUALIZE!!! See it, feel it! This is where action begins
52. Feel the joy .. feel the happiness :o)
53. An affirmative thought is 100 times more powerful than a negative one
54. "What this power is, I cannot say. All I know is that it exists." Alexander Graham Bell
55. Our job is not to worry about the "How". The "How" will show up out of the commitment and belief in the "what"
56. The Hows are the domain of the universe. It always knows the quickest, fastest, most harmonious way between you and your dream
57. If you turn it over to the universe, you will be surprised and dazzled by what is delivered .. this is where magic and miracles happen
58. Turn it over to the universe daily.. but it should never be a chore.
59. Feel exhilarated by the whole process .. high, happy, in tune
60. The only difference between people who are really living this way is they have habituated ways of being.
61. They remember to do it all the time
62. Create a Vision Board .. pictures of what you want to attract .. every day look at it and get into the feeling state of already having acquired these wants
63. "Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions." Albert Einstein
64. Decide what you want .. believe you can have it, believe you deserve it, believe it's possible for you
65. Close your eyes and visualize having what you already want - and the feeling of having it already.
66. Focus on being grateful for what you have already .. enjoy it!! Then release into the universe. The universe will manifest it.
67. "Whatever the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve" W. Clement Stone
68. Set a goal so big that if you achieved it, it would blow your mind.
69. When you have an inspired thought, you must trust it and act on it.
70. How can you become more prosperous?? INTEND IT!!
71. 'Checks are coming in the mail regularly'... or change your bank statement to whatever balance you want in there... and get behind the feeling of having it.
72. Life is meant to be abundant in ALL areas...
73. Go for the sense of inner joy and peace then all outside things appear
74. We are the creators of our universe
75. Relationships: Treat yourself the way you want to be treated by others .. love yourself and you will be loved
76. Healthy respect for yourself
77. For those you work with or interact with regularly .. get a notebook and write down positive aspects of each of those people.
78. Write down the things you like most about them (don't expect change from them). Law of attraction will not put you in the same space together if you frequencies don't match
79. When you realize your potential to feel good, you will ask no one to be different in order for you to feel good.
80. You will free yourself from the cumbersome impossibilities of needing to control the world, your friends, your mate, your children....
81. You are the only one that creates your reality
82. No one else can think or feel for you .. its YOU .. ONLY YOU.
83. Health: thank the universe for your own healing. Laugh, stress free happiness will keep you healthy.
84. Immune system will heal itself
85. Parts of our bodies are replace every day, every week..etc... Within a few years we have a brand new body
86. See yourself living in a new body. Hopeful = recovery. Happy = happier biochemistry. Stress degrades the bod.
87. Remove stress from the body and the body regenerates itself. You can heal yourself
88. Learn to become still .. and take your attention away from what you don't want, and place your attention on what you wish to experience
89. When the voice and vision on the inside become more profound and clear than the opinions on the outside, then you have mastered your life
90. You are not here to try to get the world to be just as you want it. You are here to create the world around you that you choose.
91. And allow the world as others choose to see it, exist as well
92. People think that if everyone knows the power of the LOA there won't be enough to go around .. This is a lie that's been ingrained in us and makes so many greedy.
93. The truth is there is more than enough love, creative ideas, power, joy, happiness to go around.
94. All of this abundance begins to shine through a mind that is aware of it's own infinite nature. There's enough for everyone. See it. Believe it. it will show up for you.
95. So let the variety of your reality thrill you as you choose all the things you want.. get behind the good feelings of all your wants.
96. Write your script. When you see things you don't want, don't think about them, write about them, talk about them, push against them, or join groups that focus on the don't wants... remove your attention from don't wants.. and place them on do wants
97. We are mass energy. Everything is energy. EVERYTHING.
98. Don't define yourself by your body .. it's the infinite being that's connected to everything in the universe.
99. One energy field. Our bodies have distracted us from our energy. We are the infinite field of unfolding possibilities. The creative force.
100. Are your thoughts worthy of you? If not - NOW is the time to change them. You can begin right were you are right now. Nothing matters but this moment and what you are focusing your attention on.
________________________________________________________________

From Jack Canfield's website:
"It's THE SECRET every tycoon, champion and achiever has used to become the legends they are, whether or not they even knew they were using it. If you are not absolutely WOW'd by this DVD, just send us an email and you'll be entirely refunded, even your shipping and handling. You won't even have to send it back."
The Secret (89 minutes) https://www.jackcanfield.com/page/?PageID=63

["Mad" Miles]

"Listening to the newsweek bit, I find myself noticing that they are commenting mostly on the marketing and presentation aspects of the film/book....the "technology" of manifestation is not at all discussed in this report.... Royce"

Royce,

Your characterization of the Newsweek article (excerpted above) leaves out the criticisms of LOA/The Secret contained in the article.

The article refers to:

Negative and debilitating emotional states that psychologists warn may occur if a belief in LOA does not result in the desired goals.

Debunking of the quantum physics claims of LOA adherents. (Also ably stated previously here by others in the "skeptics" camp. Dixon? Sonomamarc? In the house!!! Whoohooo!)

Pointing out that "The Secret" is a repeat of a long tradition of feel-good, mind-over-matter claims and self enrichment in the history of Western Culture dating back to at least the mid-nineteenth century. Many of those claiments turned out to be hucksters shilling for themselves and others and shucking the marks for an easy buck.

Etc.

It's one thing to say that mood and attitude effect how one perceives and responds to external (and internal) reality. It is another to say that what one thinks has a direct and controlling effect, independent of any physical behavioral actions in the world, on the material/spiritual/body worlds.

"Reality", "Reason", are all debatable concepts (and things.) What is not debated by most educated people is that they exist, although what we make of them is highly contested.

My big problem with LOA and similar belief systems is that the reasonable conclusion, based on the claims of these systems, is that anyone who is suffering in any way, is poor, is oppressed, basically anyone whose life is fucked, has simply not thought long and hard enough to escape their suffering, and "manifest" a better life for themselves.

(Isn't it interesting that the word manifest means to make by hand. Not think up, imagine and "Poof" it's real!)

I find this idea to be unmitigated bullshit. People suffer in large part because of a world arranged economically and socially to exclude large numbers of them from the good things in life. A world based on socioeconomic class in which the few get away with insufficiently compensating the many for their time and effort in creating the goodies that the few are in the position to hoard and control for themselves.

Do the few choose that arrangement? Yes and no, This social system is the result of inherited behaviors and institutions. Those behaviors and institutions are self-regulating and self-perpetuating.

We're born into this world and no one asked us if it was what we wanted beforehand. Or if I was asked I have no clear and distinct memory of making this choice! (Sic.)

I'm not a reductionistic basic fundamentalist orthodox Marxist. The Social is much more complex and interesting than simple economic exploitation. I spent twelve years studying ideas about all of this. There's no way I can communicate the results in an online discussion thread. But here's a tidbit.

Jean Paul Sartre, who I admired in my twenties until I was clued in to his support of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist regimes in China and elsewhere in the 60's, and who basically was ripping off Heidegger without acknowledgement and oversimplifying H's ideas (and yeah, Heidegger was a Nazi, so what does that say about the quality of his ideas?) had a concept called the Practico-Inert.

This was Sartre's attempt to reconcile Existentialist Freedom (You always have a choice, because even in the most abysmal and horrific circumstances, you could kill yourself to escape. You're free Pilgrim! Do whatever you want as long as you're authentic in doing it!!! Yay!) with Marxist Economic Determinism (The work you do determines who you are and what choices you can make.)

Essentially the Practico-Inert is everything around you that you cannot control, by your thinking, your perception, your actions. You can't turn a rock into a loaf of bread, no matter how hard you concentrate. (Unless you're Jesus or ? Some supernatural Being with extra-human powers. Hey didja see they dug up Jesus's bones? Or so some fringe archeologists claim.)

And please don't tell me that if you break that rock up, fertilize and water the resulting soil and grow some wheat in it, etc. you can turn that rock into bread. Yeah, in that way you can but it takes more than just "intention" to commit that miracle.

Other examples of the Practico-Inert are: Fixed social roles that stubbornly refuse to change, even with generations of effort to transform them. Social roles such as: Master/Slave, Male/Female, Insider/Outsider, Self/Other. We seem to be able to reinterpret them, mess with them, and rail against them, but so far they haven't gone away.

So how does LOA/The Secret handle the Practico-Inert? Simply deny its existence?

Just thought I'd ask.

"Mad" Miles

:frustration:

[Juggledude]

Your characterization of the Newsweek article (excerpted above) leaves out the criticisms of LOA/The Secret contained in the article.

The article refers to:

Negative and debilitating emotional states that psychologists warn may occur if a belief in LOA does not result in the desired goals.

Debunking of the quantum physics claims of LOA adherents. (Also ably stated previously here by others in the "skeptics" camp. Dixon? Sonomamarc? In the house!!! Whoohooo!)



Lol, what fun! in the house, representin' West County, it's the Voice of Royce, comin atcha with "Mad" Miles to hash out some details, are you ready to Ruuumbbllle!

Sorry, I digress. I must admit to missing the specific criticisms you cite above, though they certainly sound reasonable. I would not doubt that an unrealistic interpretation of the oversimplification (as may be suggested by the movie, the secret) of the LoA principles may result in debilitating emotional states in those who vest emotionally in them to an unhealthy extreme. However, the same could be and has been said (Dixon, woot!) of fundamentalist Christian beliefs, and could possibly even be proven true for an unhealthy emotional vesting in the purely rational. To single out LoA as being dangerous seems overly simplistic.

As for the quantum physics claims, again, oversimplification the Secret may be guilty of, but to toss the baby out with the bathwater is pretty hard on the continued growth of the family. I specifically heard cited reference in the newsweek piece about some quantum experiments which I had not yet been aware of, showing effect of thought on some physical system over a given distance. Without the specifics of this experiment, debate on this salient point is futile (any research volunteers out there?) but it would seem to support one of the general directions which I understood quantum physics to be progressing, that awareness and conciousness plays a bigger part than was previously understood in classical physics.



Pointing out that "The Secret" is a repeat of a long tradition of feel-good, mind-over-matter claims and self enrichment in the history of Western Culture dating back to at least the mid-nineteenth century. Many of those claiments turned out to be hucksters shilling for themselves and others and shucking the marks for an easy buck.



Ya, that goes back to the marketing viewpoint. Can you argue that they did market this concept well? I'll leave the ethics of marketing for another discussion, can we agree that marketing and the self enrichment that is realized from it can be applied to just about anything, good or bad?

From the mere fact that money is being made on this concept, and has been for more years than we've been around, we can not logically conclude that the concept is bogus.



My big problem with LOA and similar belief systems is that the reasonable conclusion, based on the claims of these systems, is that anyone who is suffering in any way, is poor, is oppressed, basically anyone whose life is fucked, has simply not thought long and hard enough to escape their suffering, and "manifest" a better life for themselves.
(Isn't it interesting that the word manifest means to make by hand. Not think up, imagine and "Poof" it's real!)
I find this idea to be unmitigated bullshit. People suffer in large part because of a world arranged economically and socially to exclude large numbers of them from the good things in life. A world based on socioeconomic class in which the few get away with insufficiently compensating the many for their time and effort in creating the goodies that the few are in the position to hoard and control for themselves.

Do the few choose that arrangement? Yes and no, This social system is the result of inherited behaviors and institutions. Those behaviors and institutions are self-regulating and self-perpetuating.

We're born into this world and no one asked us if it was what we wanted beforehand. Or if I was asked I have no clear and distinct memory of making this choice! (Sic.)



I may be wrong here, but I have not heard this "reasonable conclusion" expressed by anyone touting LoA, by the Secret, or by anyone except those in opposition to this concept. I consider myself reasonable, and I do not come to that conclusion. Back to the oversimplification analogy, yes, given the brutal reduction of LoA Think=Happen, I can see where your conclusion comes from. But no "reasonable" person is going to put it that simply. That's obvious, or we all be driving BMW's or flying around in Jetson's pods, telling Mr. Spacely to go jump out a window. There's more subtlety involved, the real world is a complicated place. Just one of the many factors which would be in play in an imaginary world that worked solely on the LoA principles would be every person who imagined himself to be superior to another person would have an innate paradox if that person also imagined him/herself superior. Since nature abhors a paradox, logic and reason would dictate that there are other factors at work, some hundreds of them seen or inferred, possibly as many yet to be discovered.

I enjoy your thoughts on the social dynamics and economic realities of our political society. These very real influences combine with a possibly infinite number of variables to result in the reality we have today, which can be arguably perceived in as many ways as there are individuals. let's see, possibly infinite to the 6.5 billionth power. Pretty wide open for interpretation, if you ask me. That's what LoA is about for me, applying that interpretation, to affect (not create in an absolute sense) my interpretation, and to whatever extent that I am able, the interpretation of those around me. After all, is not wealth simply an agreement? An agreement made within society's rules, yes, but a simple agreement nonetheless.




Heidegger was a Nazi, so what does that say about the quality of his ideas?



I would have bet good money you would be the last person on the board to stoop to such a blatant ad hominem remark, unless there is an underlying level of sarcasm that I'm missing?



...had a concept called the Practico-Inert.

This was Sartre's attempt to reconcile Existentialist Freedom (You always have a choice, because even in the most abysmal and horrific circumstances, you could kill yourself to escape. You're free Pilgrim! Do whatever you want as long as you're authentic in doing it!!! Yay!) with Marxist Economic Determinism (The work you do determines who you are and what choices you can make.)

Essentially the Practico-Inert is everything around you that you cannot control, by your thinking, your perception, your actions. You can't turn a rock into a loaf of bread, no matter how hard you concentrate. (Unless you're Jesus or ? Some supernatural Being with extra-human powers. Hey didja see they dug up Jesus's bones? Or so some fringe archeologists claim.)

And please don't tell me that if you break that rock up, fertilize and water the resulting soil and grow some wheat in it, etc. you can turn that rock into bread. Yeah, in that way you can but it takes more than just "intention" to commit that miracle.

Other examples of the Practico-Inert are: Fixed social roles that stubbornly refuse to change, even with generations of effort to transform them. Social roles such as: Master/Slave, Male/Female, Insider/Outsider, Self/Other. We seem to be able to reinterpret them, mess with them, and rail against them, but so far they haven't gone away.

So how does LOA/The Secret handle the Practico-Inert? Simply deny its existence?

Just thought I'd ask.

"Mad" Miles

:frustration:

Though I must bow to your studied knowledge of Sartre and his works, from what you quote, he seems a bit hung up on the notion of control. We cannot 'control' anything outside ourselves (back to the notions brought up in Sonomamark vs Donallan) but we can 'affect' things outside ourselves.

The rock you already answered, thanks, that was good thinking. Nowhere I have experienced does LoA state that "intention" is all it will take. Intention is the starting place, the seed, the fuel and drive behind action, it is action which will create and manifest (by hand!), and inspired action will arise from clearly stated intent. This process will result in a measurable effect on the world around us, whether it be bread or wealth, it will be there.

The "other" aspects of Practico-inert seem to be more along the lines of agreements, albeit unconscious or unchosen ones. True, some slaves and those born into poor circumstance may not even be aware of the agreements they have made, or that were more likely made for them, but agreements they are nonetheless. The observed permanence of these agreements has more to do with their momentum and social inertia than with any inherent or intrinsic property they might possess. It is purely through intent and concious action that we have dented these edifices, shaking some to their very cores, and by continued intent and awareness shall we rise above the shackles of thought they embody.

Royce

["Mad" Miles]

Royce, My Man!<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

Great response. Nothing much that I wish to quibble about.<o:p></o:p>

I wrote, "Heidegger was a Nazi." <o:p></o:p>

You replied "I would have bet good money you would be the last person on the board to stoop to such a blatant ad hominem remark, unless there is an underlying level of sarcasm that I'm missing?"<o:p></o:p>

Actually no sarcasm intended, he really was a Nazi, a card carrying, dues paid up member of the Nazi Party. He stood aside when eminent Jews, some of them his colleagues that he had worked with for years without any problem, were fired for simply being Jewish. And then there's the Holocaust...

This controversy in the High Theory community (What I, with intended gentle sarcasm have often called "Trendy Theory") blew up back in the late eighties and early nineties, was all the rage, and is one of the damning criticisms trotted out to try and flush the PoMo movement. It is a criticism that I find unpersuasive, Heidegger wrote before, during and after his Nazi period. His close disciple, lover and student was Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish. Since I quit following the debates in Metatheory circa 1987 I cannot summarize the issue beyond this.<o:p></o:p>

"Though I must bow to your studied knowledge of Sartre and his works, from what you quote, he seems a bit hung up on the notion of control. We cannot 'control' anything outside ourselves (back to the notions brought up in Sonomamark vs Donallan) but we can 'affect' things outside ourselves."<o:p></o:p>

For control, read, "have instrumental influence over". Language is always an inadequate summary.<o:p></o:p>

"agreements, albeit unconscious or unchosen ones." <o:p></o:p>

Sorry, you've lost me there. What is an agreement, if it is not conscious or chosen?<o:p></o:p>

If LOA means that one must conceive of an action before it is possible to take that action, well, Duh! Or at least it applies to considered actions, there're other kinds: accidental, inadvertant, unconscious, or action as the result of inaction.

But LOA as I evidently superficially understand it seems to be more of a form of "Magical Thinking". If I think hard enough, long enough, passionately enough, that mental effort will "in and of itself" affect/effect a physical material change in the world outside (of my mental processes). Been there, done that, doesn't work. At least for me. Or am I simply not sufficiently enlightened?<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>

I gave up arguing just for the sake of argument back in my twenties. I choose to discuss/debate/argue if I feel/believe/think that something real is at stake. So at this point I wonder, where are we going with this?

Tonight I went to a reception for and presentation by Lynne Stewart and a representative of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu Jamal. There was a small crowd, granted it is a Tuesday night. But Lynne Stewart is the lawyer who has been made an example of to scare all the other defense attorneys into toeing the line in the War on Terror. i.e. to accept or at least acquiesce to the many unconstitutional violations of due process and the First Amendment in the name of National Security.

Mumia's supporter made a very convincing and detailed case for his innocence and his targeting by the Philadelphia Police to take out one of their most effective critics in the late 70's.

The stories both told were outrageous (in the bad sense) frightening and unfortunately a continuation of racist, classist oppression of the poor, working and non-white communities in our society.

These are real fights, fights that everyone is involved in whether they want to admit it to themselves or not. And to win these fights it will take many, many people in the streets demanding justice and freedom for everyone.

Thinking that it's a good idea and we really, really want it is yes, a first step, but that step was taken long ago and keeps being taken over and over. What has made positive change is a demand which cannot be ignored or detoured around and which requires physical action in the real world by tens of thousands, millions of everyday people.

Selling us books and DVD's that say we as individuals can get what we want if we have the "right intention" is not, in my mind, the best way to motivate most people. Just because something is unpleasant, doesn't mean that by ignoring it and thinking about something pleasant and fun and peaceful and soothing and pretty, will make the "bad men" (or whatever it is) go away.

Joining together in numbers too large to ignore, and facing them/it is the only thing that has ever worked to change things for the better.

Do ideas, spiritual movements, cultural tropes, ideological shifts begin the process? Certainement. But that's just the beginning, when we get bogged down in navel gazing focused solely on our individual selves, then .... nothing changes.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>

Has anyone else on this board noticed that the number of views that posts get vary by topic? I know that those numbers only indicate how many people have looked at a post on the website, not those who get emails and read or do not read an item. (Let alone which topics people are subscribed to and which ones they aren't.) But what I've noticed based on the available numbers is that interest in posts roughly follow this order:<o:p></o:p>

1. Pet Care, Animal Rescue, Animal Rights
2. Stuff for sale
3. Real Estate offers and requests
4. Workshops, classes, events of a spiritual nature
5. Miscellaneous
6. Calls for political action or interest<o:p></o:p>

1. being the most viewed, 6. being the least.<o:p></o:p>

Now I've pondered this question quite a while, why do the pressing needs of society as a whole occupy my attention (and action) when most other people seem to think politics is a waste of time? (I also think most conventional, mainstream, maintain the status quo politics are a waste of time myself but ... ya gotta do something to keep "them" from going too far, destroying life as we know it, ripping us all off, etc., etc....)<o:p></o:p>

I have lots of theories about the passivity of people, some of which I've expressed on this board in the recent past.<o:p></o:p>

One that I haven't mentioned is the 60's counterculture split between the activists who were focused on stopping the Vietnam War (and other issues of social justice) and the beginning of what came to be called "New Age" when syncretic borrowings from Hinduism and Buddhism began to attract practitioners who withdrew from the outside world. Yes, there were some who tried doing both. Reclaiming is an Anarcho/Pagan effort to combine Earth focused spirituality with political activism. But that didn't start until the eighties.<o:p></o:p>

I think that split was a huge mistake. I think it helped deflate the movement for positive social change. And I've lived, as an activist, with the frustrating consequences that followed.<o:p></o:p>

Thought without action is futile; action without thought is potentially destructive. The two working together... is the basis of hope.<o:p></o:p>

And everything I've written here and many times before is an inadequate formulation of the problem(s). Partly because I too often partake in one of the basic flaws in the way we tend to think. Binary Opposition, either/or, yes/no, good/bad, up/down, in/out, etc.

And saying it's all ONE, is even more limiting and simplistic. The greatest trite cliché of them all.

Things are complicated and intricately interrelated. The best explanatory system is the one that includes the greatest number of comprehensible and practically usable variables. But that's hard to do and apparently people prefer easy, simple answers that make them feel good about themselves, each other and don't require too much effort in the thinking department.

And that, my fellow waccobites is one of the many reasons our world is so fucked up for so many people. Not us happy quasi-rural suburbanites in the garden spot of the world, one of the most educated, enlightened, peaceful and wealthy spots on the planet. We've got it relatively good.

But this isn't all there is, there's a big wide wild world out there where no matter how hard you concentrate, no matter how hard you try to put your dreams and desires into action, you're living in a world constrained by forces completely outside your control and to the extent that those forces are conscious at all, they don't give a shit about you. Unless you can be exploited for a profit.

And even if we're not personally rich (monetarily) we benefit directly from that system, no matter whether we agree or disagree with it. The "we" being us happy Eloi here in the garden where the Morlocks permit us to gambol about.<o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>

Sweet Dreams, Mine are of Liberation for Everyone,<o:p></o:p>

"Mad" Miles<o:p></o:p>

:blahblah: :read: :frogdance:

[Juggledude]

Actually no sarcasm intended, he really was a Nazi, a card carrying, dues paid up member of the Nazi Party. He stood aside when eminent Jews, some of them his colleagues that he had worked with for years without any problem, were fired for simply being Jewish. And then there's the Holocaust...

This controversy in the High Theory community (What I, with intended gentle sarcasm have often called "Trendy Theory") blew up back in the late eighties and early nineties, was all the rage, and is one of the damning criticisms trotted out to try and flush the PoMo movement. It is a criticism that I find unpersuasive, Heidegger wrote before, during and after his Nazi period. His close disciple, lover and student was Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish. Since I quit following the debates in Metatheory circa 1987 I cannot summarize the issue beyond this.

Your summary of Hidegger's character may well be on point, I certainly wouldn't hire him based on that resume. The ad hominem nature of your point is still blatant. Simple association with a group, or, for that matter, being a heinous evildoer himself does not rob any particular theory he may have created of merit.

I must confess to being at a bit of a loss with your next paragraph, as the referents to the High Theory Community, Metatheory and Heidegger's association with them are beyond the scope of my current reading. I had some fun with the Wiki on the PoMo movement, that'd be an enjoyable topic for another thread, I think.

Your usage of "control" may lie at the crux of our apparent disagreement re: LoA, as simply as the differentiation between "instrumental influence" and "significant influence". Instrumental in my thinking is closely related to affect, as I referenced, whereas the condemnation you propose seems to be related to an inference that LoA claims significant influence, or control. Undoubtedly we both agree there are many factors bearing on any situation, the very least of which, or most, depending on your viewpoint, being the myriad of influential thought processes being generated by the effected players in any given situation.

As for the concept of unconscious or unchosen agreements, my reference is to those indoctrinations of our particular society, those 'agreements' foist upon us by our parents, our teachers, the media, and reinforced by our peers throughout our developmental process. Many of these agreements in how to behave, how to act, how to relate to others are instilled at a pre-verbal age, let alone an age capable of entering into an agreement with the logical and rational reasoning we as adults would bring to the process. These mores are instilled so deeply that we oft times refer to them as core values, and treat them as absolutes, as I feel you have done by referencing them in your description of the Practico-inert. I'd like to propose a redefinition of them as "Impractico-momenti", ingrained, often outmoded agreements ingrained by the social momentum of our particular society.

The efforts you make on behalf of your beliefs, the lengths you move against the tide of passivity are laudable. I thank you for your work, and recognize it's value. I also am a bit confused with the relation your activism has to the LoA, the Secret, and the like. Pondering this thought, I can only conclude that in your mind, you hold an idea, an idea(L) of a better world, one where equality and justice hold greater sway in the day to day machinations of us naked apes. By holding this idea, and concentrating on it's ramifications, it's potential, and even more viscerally it's feel, you seem to be moved to inspired action, that of attending Lynne's presentation, posting your conclusions, affecting (significantly and instrumentally) the thoughts of and therefore the nature of the community around you. In short, you are using "the Secret", you are manifesting that which you desire through diligent application of the Laws of Attraction, you are potent!

Namaste,

Royce
<o:p></o:p>

["Mad" Miles]

Dear Juggledude/Royce,

You wrote:

"Your usage of "control" may lie at the crux of our apparent disagreement re: LoA, as simply as the differentiation between "instrumental influence" and "significant influence". Instrumental in my thinking is closely related to affect, as I referenced, whereas the condemnation you propose seems to be related to an inference that LoA claims significant influence, or control."

Hmmmm..... I'm afraid I've lost interest in this discussion and won't pursue clarifying this distinction between instrumental and significant. It's getting too fuzzy for me.

"The efforts you make on behalf of your beliefs, the lengths you move against the tide of passivity are laudable. I thank you for your work, and recognize it's value. .... you are manifesting that which you desire through diligent application of the Laws of Attraction, you are potent!"

You flatter me Sir!

Onward,

"Mad" Miles

P.S. Barry, I'm getting used to the new look and functions. So, you'd like some compensation for your time and effort? My check for $24 in annual membership will anon. Thank you for your work!

"Reno 911: Miami" mini-review (Miles On Movies!) is percolating in my synapses, tomorrow I'll go to see "The Lives of Others", today I ate at a new Soul Food place in SR that I want to add to the Favorite Restaurants list, I'm invited to review Nirvana for this board in exchange for a free meal (thanks Jane!) and I have to schedule a medical exam for the proffered teaching job at San Quentin. (The forms auspiciously arrived via snailmail this afternoon. I've been waiting since the interview on Jan. 24 to find out if they would hire me.) So many things to do, think and write about...what to prioritize?

I hope and "expect" to see everyone at David Rovics on April 17th. I'm picking up leaflets tomorrow. If you ever want to organize anything in this county, get Susan Lamont to help you. She's the most efficient and productive companera that I've ever worked with in my thirty years of grass-roots activism. She Rocks! And if you ever need a landscape designer, check her out at www.lamontscapes.com (https://www.lamontscapes.com)

"M"M

[Sonomamark]

Hello...Without going back into great detail, again: quantum mechanics do not apply beyond the quantum scale. The experiments described in Newsweek (abstracted in places like ScienceDaily.com long since) do not in any way indicate that thought or consciousness have any impact on physical reality at our scale--merely in OUR ABILITY TO PERCEIVE physical reality AT THE QUANTUM SCALE, which is quite a different thing. At the quantum scale, "what is real" may be generally said to be far less definitive. Things have a certain probability of being one way or another, and which way they are can be crystallized by the act of trying to look at them.

That's true of a quark--it is not true of a toaster oven. We may be able to create technology which uses the nature of quantum-scale phenomena to transfer information at great distance, but that in no way means that such a process can occur naturally through the physical activity of our brains, the experiential perception of which is commonly referred to as our "minds", "souls", and/or "consciousnesses".

There is no credible, repeatable experimental data extant, to my knowledge, which in any way implies that "awareness and consciousness play a bigger part than was previously understood in classical (by which I presume you mean "relativistic" and not, say, Newtonian) physics."

As to the rest of it, the psychosocial part, I wish I could understand why it seems people must be so extreme about all this. Isn't it enough to know that with confidence, positive attitude, and freedom from the inhibiting factors of self-abusing messages we accumulate as we grow up, a person has a better chance than not to be happy and succeed in one's goals--so long as they are within the realm of the possible--without having to go as far as to believe that if they just achieve "the right state of consciousness", they can walk through walls and fly?

Of course, those greater odds of success and happiness presume that one isn't hit by a drunk driver (or a meteor) and killed. Maybe that's why New Age magical thinkers need so strongly to believe that their minds can be all-powerful: because being realistic and recognizing that there are things we cannot control means being open to the idea that however "evolved" and "powerful" a person is, s/he can still be snuffed out in an instant of bad luck. A terrifying powerlessness. We are all at the mercy of the Dark Hand, and sometimes, it just takes us, or those near to us. A very hard thing to look squarely at and accept.

When you get right down to it, finding a Get Out of Death Free card is still what most religiosity is about.

Be it Yahwists and heaven (harps, virgins, whatever, take your pick), Buddhists and getting off the Wheel of Suffering, Pagans and reincarnation, it seems that for whatever reason, religious traditions just don't seem to teach here's how to be happy, here's how to be a good person, do it now, it's over really fast and this is all you get. You'd think there would be a few that do, but I'm not aware of any.



SonomaMark


I specifically heard cited reference in the newsweek piece about some quantum experiments which I had not yet been aware of, showing effect of thought on some physical system over a given distance. Without the specifics of this experiment, debate on this salient point is futile (any research volunteers out there?) but it would seem to support one of the general directions which I understood quantum physics to be progressing, that awareness and conciousness plays a bigger part than was previously understood in classical physics.
Royce

[Nemea Laessig]

There is a new article in Salon this week about the pitfalls and dangers of "The Secret", now being promoted by Oprah, that I find very in-depth and to-the-point.

https://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/03/05/the_secret/print.html

What do y'all think?

[Nemea Laessig]

Once it happened that Bankei, a Zen Master, was working in his garden. A seeker came and he asked Banki,
"Gardener, where is the Master?"

Banki laughed and said, "By that door - inside you will find the Master."

So the man went round and inside he saw Banki sitting in an armchair, the same man who had been the gardener outside. The seeker said, "Are you kidding? Get down from this chair! This is sacrilegious! You aren't paying respect to the Master!"

Banki got down, sat on the floor and said "Now you will not find the Master in the chair, because I am the Master."

It was difficult, it was impossible for the man to see that a great master could be so ordinary. He left... and he missed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bankei was preaching quietly to his followers one day when his talk was interrupted by a priest from another sect. This sect believed in the power of miracles.

The priest boasted that the founder of his religion could stand on the bank of the river with a brush in his hand and write a holy name on a piece of paper held by an assistant on the opposite bank of the river.
Then he asked, "What miracles can you do?"

Bankei replied: "Only one. When I am hungry I eat and when I am thirsty I drink."

The only miracle, the impossible miracle (or secret) is to be just ordinary. The longing of the mind is to be extraordinary. The minds ego thirsts for recognition. And THIS is the miracle - when you accept your nobodyness, when you can be just as ordinary as anybody else, when you don't ask for recognition, when you can exist as if you are not existing.
Power is never spiritual. People who do 'special' miracles are not spiritual in any way, just spreading magic in the name of religion, which is dangerous.

Your mind may say "What type of miracle is this? - when hungry I eat, when sleepy I sleep. But what Bankai is saying is when you feel hungry hungry your mind says "No, I should fast." When you don't feel hungry, when the stomach is filled, the mind says, "Go on eating, the food is delicious." Always your mind interferes.
Bankei is saying, "I flow with nature. Whatsoever my whole being feels, I do it. There is no fragmentary mind manipulating my flowing with nature."

Osho
Roots and Wings
pg.212-221

[PeteS]

Thank you Namea for this post, Bankei is wonderful, I am very pleased to meet him.

In terms of this discussion about The Secret, I especially like the quote:

Bankei is saying, "I flow with nature. Whatsoever my whole being feels, I do it. There is no fragmentary mind manipulating my flowing with nature."

This, in my mind, is exactly what The Secret is saying/advising/outlining/exampling: Get rid of the fragmentary mind manipulating my flowing with nature. When this is accomplished one is happy because one is one's self, truly one's self whatever that may be for the individual expression of the wholeness.

Bankei may be the source of the Zen saying: Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. We are all enlightened; when we finally see/experience/know/believe this truth that is the only change that occurs; we are still human beings having a spiritual experience... or is that spiritual beings having a human experience... or is there a difference?

Which brings me to another point I'd like to share: In my experience, study and learning, there is nothing outside the spiritual realm; all that exists is within the wholeness of existence and is therefore spiritual. It is like enlightenment, always here, it is our choice whether we see it, experience it, proceed in our daily lives from it consciously; regardless we are always immersed in the spiritual and are proceeding from it.

Enjoy yourselves, and be happy,

Peter
<a href="https://SharePrayer.com">SharePrayer</a>

[Sonomamark]

Not to be (too) contrarian, Peter, but what if, as the evidence appears to suggest, nothing is "spiritual", and what some call the experience of "spirit" is just their perception of physical electrochemical reactions cascading through their nervous systems?

If you go with the preponderance of evidence, "the whole of existence" is just physics. A feeling of "flowing with nature"? Just a feeling: neurochemistry in action. Love? Likewise. Whatever Bankei is "feeling with his whole body"? Just neurological perception of physical events: sensory input, processed by a neural net which is to a significant degree self-programming. Doesn't mean the feeling isn't real, or worth acting on--just that it isn't magical, isn't supernatural, isn't ordained by some Big Face in the Sky, or some Cosmic Plan. Just neurons firing, glands squirting.

I posit this: that a human being needs not subscribe to superstition (belief in anything supernatural, like gods, magic, or an afterlife) to live a full, complete, fulfilled life. I propose that we need not chase castles in the air to be happy and complete.

The challenge in this is that we must then contend with all the complexity, paradox, and fundamental cosmic apathy as to our welfare which our lives display. Would that it were so easy as to "simply be our whole selves". I suggest that Charles Manson did that, and it didn't work out so well.

The fundamental error in "spiritual" infomercials like "The Secret" and "What the Bleep" is that they 1) radically twist science to make it sound as though it agrees with the religious proselytizers who made the movies; and 2) repeats the tired drumbeat that the world as it is is not enough. That we have to believe in some esoteric nonsense in order to be fulfilled.

We don't. It's a beautiful, dangerous, tragic, gorgeous, unfair, exciting, paradoxical, frustrating, random, delightful, horrifying world. Life is all of these, and too, too brief. All that is true. Looking clearly at that is the work before us, I suggest: we either do it, or drug ourselves with fantasies.

We don't have to be deluded to be complete, fulfilled, or happy. So I believe.


Sonomamark



Thank you Namea for this post, Bankei is wonderful, I am very pleased to meet him.

In terms of this discussion about The Secret, I especially like the quote:

Bankei is saying, "I flow with nature. Whatsoever my whole being feels, I do it. There is no fragmentary mind manipulating my flowing with nature."

This, in my mind, is exactly what The Secret is saying/advising/outlining/exampling: Get rid of the fragmentary mind manipulating my flowing with nature. When this is accomplished one is happy because one is one's self, truly one's self whatever that may be for the individual expression of the wholeness.

Bankei may be the source of the Zen saying: Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. We are all enlightened; when we finally see/experience/know/believe this truth that is the only change that occurs; we are still human beings having a spiritual experience... or is that spiritual beings having a human experience... or is there a difference?

Which brings me to another point I'd like to share: In my experience, study and learning, there is nothing outside the spiritual realm; all that exists is within the wholeness of existence and is therefore spiritual. It is like enlightenment, always here, it is our choice whether we see it, experience it, proceed in our daily lives from it consciously; regardless we are always immersed in the spiritual and are proceeding from it.

Enjoy yourselves, and be happy,

Peter
SharePrayer (https://SharePrayer.com)

["Mad" Miles]

Mark,

Dude! You Rock!!

"M"M

:yinyang:

[Tristique]

I would like to know how the numbers rank for and against the Secret.

I've noticed personally that my male friends oppose it strongly, while my women friends most unanimously support it.

Can we have a poll?

How many men support/agree with the Secret concepts....
How many men disagree/oppose....

How many women support/agree....
How many women disagree....

Trish

[Clancy]

I don't see it as either/or. There's some sound psychological and spiritual truths in the concept, but no matter how hard I visualize it, I will never become president of Greenland or a sumi wrestler.

I'd say on a scale of 1-10 of agreement with the Secret's principles, I'm about a 5.



I would like to know how the numbers rank for and against the Secret.

[Barry]

Not to be (too) contrarian, Peter, but what if, as the evidence appears to suggest, nothing is "spiritual", and what some call the experience of "spirit" is just their perception of physical electrochemical reactions cascading through their nervous systems?There's still the mystery... What about our soul? What is really going on here? What about this thing called life? All the electrochemical reactions are still possible after the moment of death as before it. Whatever "life" really is, it has many dimensions that we have not begun to understand scientifically, and we may never fully understand, including the mysterious :fairy:spark behind it all that I'll call divinity.


Can we have a poll?Manifested! :vote:

[Jill]

What I'd like to know is how to apply all that stuff to my life. For the past few months I've been using affirmations as well as the law of attraction and I'm still single, I have no job and I have several bills to pay.

So what am I missing??!?!?:hmmm:

[Zeno Swijtink]

Hi Jill,

Maybe you should use the law of unattraction! Look at me: I've been getting to know new friends for some months, constantly telling them I wasn't looking for anything committed. And now: bingo!! Splendid T.D. and I fell in love!

Tell us something more about how you have been using affirmations and the law of attraction if you like. Maybe you have been trying too hard and need to throw in some off-key dissonants.

Zeno



What I'd like to know is how to apply all that stuff to my life. For the past few months I've been using affirmations as well as the law of attraction and I'm still single, I have no job and I have several bills to pay.

So what am I missing??!?!?:hmmm:

[nicofrog]

HEY GUYS!
And Girls(although I think its us axe wielding ,water hauling guys that are more stirred up by this juicy topic) hey babe ,you can sit there and visualize all day, but thats not gonna get a bucket made and the water up from the river.Then again, if she falls asleep while she's meditating I'll just bet You end up getting the water AND the firewood gathered! Bingo secret solved!
Is the secret to get someone else to do the work!?? I remember a day when I was young and in "College" and I got a ride with an old lady in a ratted out pickup headed from Marin back to Sonoma,full of wonder bread.
I said "whats all the bread for?" ."pigs" she said"where ya ' headed?";
"School" said I..she said "Hey ,maybe you can answer a question for me,When everybody gets an education,who's gonna do all the work?"
I was stumped,but at least we don't have to worry about that..in 99 1%
of the people on earth had a degree, I'll bet now it's.08% with population going up as fast as it is! at least in Ca. we've built most of one college in the last 10 years,(lack of funding,busy building 51 prisons).
Hey Dixon try going to a kirtan and thinking of your self as the deity!
suddenly its a birthday party and lots of fun. You see folks here it is .
There is Spirit,whether it exists only within human vibe,or as an outside entity is very debatable , I have been lucky enough to experience
It directly with native Americans ,using dream- meditation -and medicine work, correlations of informative symbolism with actual psychic phenomena and the works.Animals Plants and er well stones and everything else are part of it . And I would have to agree with the Fem. maj. that this stuff does work, as an addendum to your tool belt, don't throw away the axe
or your cynicism about the work shop woo woo's.Try telling a gazelle in a lions jaws about Manifestation.
Mark ,I found this paragraph a little rabble rousing,one sided and unfair
spirituality,or disagreement with the current Science is not necessarily
Religion. and where did you get infomercials? oh maybe the people will sell a book related to the topic? well yeah but thats true of any movie,and "What the bleep "was not selling anything that I know of!
""
The fundamental error in "spiritual" infomercials like "The Secret" and "What the Bleep" is that they 1) radically twist science to make it sound as though it agrees with the religious proselytizers who made the movies; and 2) repeats the tired drumbeat that the world as it is is not enough. That we have to believe in some esoteric nonsense in order to be fulfilled""

I would offer that the concept(Poorly named secret) is not about
fulfillment,but simply an attitude adjustment toward a better world.
spirituality is a way to get more in touch with our nature and nature in general ,. Religion is crowd control . My dad was an atheist,I agreed with him whole heartedly till I got down with my indigenous friends, now I believe in everything,but watch out cause that includes Donald duck ,the tooth fairy Santa Claus and the great pumpkin.
You see, I'm NOT an intellectual a I have not read Neitche or Lau Tse
and I can't discust there.no typo .
SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE
Is the new God fellas, science that gave us gasoline,atomic energy
life extension global warming,and a world where as we dwindlke on confusors while children are being trained to harden their hearts to killing children DAILY in a "Raghead"country in the name of god and country.
I can tell you that there is IMMENSE benefit in Ancient traditions,Art and
Music and celebrations of our inherent spiritual RIGHT all come from the same root. Railings against the Church atrocity accidentally attempt to throw the baby out with the bath water. :heart:The beautiful quality of LOVE not just oo ee you me love but a grander love that pervades all unconditionally,omnipotently in the infinite mystery is a sweet
and amazing quality to have in your life:heart:.You have to experience it to get it . And once you do you will be ROCKING in a new dimension where it barely makes a difference whether you are well or not, or even dead.
And YES this can help you Manifest or die knowing you tried with a smile.:wink: I have been"poor" all my life(financialy disadvantaged) I have numerous
problems that I won't go into..and this MANIFESTATION has saved my life almost accidentally numerous times. And look at this ,it brought me here to
talk with you folks! Thanks, more later gotta go WORK for a livin':hmmm:

:Yinyangv:
Nico

[Sonomamark]

Barry, I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. There is no compelling evidence for the existence of a soul. The electrochemical reactions are NOT still possible after death, because oxygen deprivation to the brain kills the neurons that compose the neural net which holds the information pattern that is the entire sum total of our personalities. At that moment, the "soul" extinguishes, radiates away from the body as information-free heat, and everything that person has ever been is forever gone.

The only "mystery" left is in details. The general framework is known. What is left, if you really need it, is wishful thinking.

Life is just metabolism: energy consumption, energy use. It isn't a mysterious ephemeral force. It's just the operation of an organism until that organism stops functioning. No "other dimensions". No cosmic mysteries. No hokey get-out-of-Death-free mechanisms. We live--lucky to be accidental die-rolls of DNA created through a million accidents of history that brought our parents together--and then we die. That's all.

Why (oh, why!) must humans have such grandiose ideas about themselves? Why must they think that they live forever, that their existence has importance, that we somehow matter in any sense other than to one another in the narrow time in which we live? It's not hard, if you're willing not to get freaked out by the fact that you're going to die and disappear, to see the world and know what is and isn't.

Heaven, hell, reincarnation, astral projection, magic, gods, "esoteric mysteries"...these are the artifacts of times when we were ignorant. They were the best answers the people at those times could come up with. But they're not the best answers any more. They're rank superstitious nonsense. Choosing to cling to them in the face of what we now know to be true about ourselves and the Universe is, in essence, to spit on the only thing humans evolved to be any good at: intelligence.



There's still the mystery... What about our soul? What is really going on here? What about this thing called life? All the electrochemical reactions are still possible after the moment of death as before it. Whatever "life" really is, it has many dimensions that we have not begun to understand scientifically, and we may never fully understand, including the mysterious :fairy:spark behind it all that I'll call divinity.

Manifested! :vote:

["Mad" Miles]

And never the twain shall meet.

"M"M

:lightening:

:raindrops:

[Clancy]

Why (oh, why!) must humans have such grandiose ideas about themselves?


Because, we live in a mysterious, grand, colossal universe that mysteriously burst into being a finite time ago and assembled itself into myriad stars in myriad galaxies, then went on to evolve this mysterious thing called life out of the ashes of supernova...

Like Carl Sagan said, we are literally made of star stuff.

How life came to be and what it, and the universe, is evolving into is an extrodinary mystery, whether there's an afterlife or not.

That we're here at all seems to me a beautiful miracle.

[Sonomamark]

Clancy, I completely agree with all of this, and that's why I don't think we need to believe the claptrap fairy tales offered by religion to be filled with wonder and joy. All we have to do is look up, look down, look around.

What are the odds that things should have been as they are? How beautiful it is! How rich and diverse and strange and exciting, a Universe filled with black holes and nebulae and dark energy and seahorses and slime molds and beehives and oaks shaking their leaves in the spring. Comets, auroras, bioluminescent jellyfish, waterfalls, painted deserts. Chocolate and wine. Sex and sunsets and sarsaparilla. Art. Armadillos. Asparagus. Tarantulas. Snow. Coral. Flamingos.

We don't need to play let's-pretend-we're-immortal to know the wonder of All This. We don't need to put our heads in the sand and spin lies in the face of the oncoming train of Death. We're here, in this extraordinary place, and maybe tomorrow we'll die. Look up to the Moon, down to the blade of grass. Catch a rainbow in a handful of beveled-glass light. Breathe the night filled with spring flowers. Dance. Cry a little. Run your life-roughened hands all over your body.

You're alive. No lies, now.

Live!



Because, we live in a mysterious, grand, colossal universe that mysteriously burst into being a finite time ago and assembled itself into myriad stars in myriad galaxies, then went on to evolve this mysterious thing called life out of the ashes of supernova...

Like Carl Sagan said, we are literally made of star stuff.

How life came to be and what it, and the universe, is evolving into is an extrodinary mystery, whether there's an afterlife or not.

That we're here at all seems to me a beautiful miracle.

[Clancy]

Well said, but it's obvious that many people DO need to believe in all manner of things. It gives comfort. Awareness of our own mortality is an awful burden. We're basically talking apes, just beginning to grasp the nature of the universe and our place in it. It's beautiful, but, as you've said elsewhere, it's also horrible, and we are so very vulnerable.

We've had several major paradigm shifts in our understanding of the nature of reality lately, first Newtonian physics, which was heretical and very threatening to your average talking ape, then relativity, which is so bizarre most people shrink from trying to understand, and before even a tiny percent of humanity can begin to grasp it's significance along comes quantum physics to turn the apple cart over yet again.

It's very possible there are more, maybe many more paradigm shifts in our understanding of the universe ahead of us. There may be realms of existance or being that we can't even begin to comprehend. The true nature of reality may be far different than our present understanding. That's sometimes scary and sometimes delightful to this talking ape.

Cheers


Clancy, I completely agree with all of this, and that's why I don't think we need to believe the claptrap fairy tales offered by religion to be filled with wonder and joy. All we have to do is look up, look down, look around.

What are the odds that things should have been as they are? How beautiful it is! How rich and diverse and strange and exciting, a Universe filled with black holes and nebulae and dark energy and seahorses and slime molds and beehives and oaks shaking their leaves in the spring. Comets, auroras, bioluminescent jellyfish, waterfalls, painted deserts. Chocolate and wine. Sex and sunsets and sarsaparilla. Art. Armadillos. Asparagus. Tarantulas. Snow. Coral. Flamingos.

We don't need to play let's-pretend-we're-immortal to know the wonder of All This. We don't need to put our heads in the sand and spin lies in the face of the oncoming train of Death. We're here, in this extraordinary place, and maybe tomorrow we'll die. Look up to the Moon, down to the blade of grass. Catch a rainbow in a handful of beveled-glass light. Breathe the night filled with spring flowers. Dance. Cry a little. Run your life-roughened hands all over your body.

You're alive. No lies, now.

Live!

[Juggledude]

Clancy, I completely agree with all of this, and that's why I don't think we need to believe the claptrap fairy tales offered by religion to be filled with wonder and joy. All we have to do is look up, look down, look around.

What are the odds that things should have been as they are? How beautiful it is! How rich and diverse and strange and exciting, a Universe filled with black holes and nebulae and dark energy and seahorses and slime molds and beehives and oaks shaking their leaves in the spring. Comets, auroras, bioluminescent jellyfish, waterfalls, painted deserts. Chocolate and wine. Sex and sunsets and sarsaparilla. Art. Armadillos. Asparagus. Tarantulas. Snow. Coral. Flamingos.

We don't need to play let's-pretend-we're-immortal to know the wonder of All This. We don't need to put our heads in the sand and spin lies in the face of the oncoming train of Death. We're here, in this extraordinary place, and maybe tomorrow we'll die. Look up to the Moon, down to the blade of grass. Catch a rainbow in a handful of beveled-glass light. Breathe the night filled with spring flowers. Dance. Cry a little. Run your life-roughened hands all over your body.

You're alive. No lies, now.

Live!

Mark,

Your posts are so alive, so passionate, I respect and enjoy the energy you are putting forth, and it seems to represent both edges of a sword, cutting down the "claptrap" as you call it, while also cutting through anything in the way of truly appreciating the verve and wondrous vitality we call life.

Your path to this space of high energy truth really seems to be working for you, kudos! That others take a different path seems to inspire some passion in you as well. The proselytizing on behalf of your truth could be painful to some. Can you imagine setting up a resonant neurochemical state internally which would allow you to experience an epiphany, as Nico speaks of, as well as so many others? Having only gradual and suggestive evidence and personal experience of a depth to reality beyond what is currently explained by science and reason alone, I can only wonder at the certainty and faith expressed by those of deep conviction. Yet, wonder I do. Wonder if there is something to this, something which science as we know it today does not have a grasp upon. For you to stand so sure in your conviction, and I quote:


Life is just metabolism: energy consumption, energy use. It isn't a mysterious ephemeral force. It's just the operation of an organism until that organism stops functioning. No "other dimensions". No cosmic mysteries. No hokey get-out-of-Death-free mechanisms. We live--lucky to be accidental die-rolls of DNA created through a million accidents of history that brought our parents together--and then we die. That's all.

sounds a bit closed minded, a bit cocksure, and a bit naive, if you'll pardon the perspective. Remember the certainty which which the church expressed the absolute truth that the Earth was at the center of the universe, when Galileo first suggested an alternate model? Remember the certainty with which there were those who told Columbus he would sail off the edge of the flat earth?

Sure, maybe it is all electrochemical reactions and such, but the same science and rationality has to admit that maybe it's simply an as yet undiscovered aspect of the universe or universes that we are currently blind to, just as pre-renaissance man was unaware of the concepts of aerodynamic lift, and would certainly have stood as firm in stating the absolute truth that no man made machine could ever fly.

An open mind is terrible thing to waste, especially one as sharp as yours obviously is.

Royce

[PeteS]

What I'd like to know is how to apply all that stuff to my life. For the past few months I've been using affirmations as well as the law of attraction and I'm still single, I have no job and I have several bills to pay.

So what am I missing??!?!?:hmmm:

Hi Jill,
Question is; "What am I learning?" The Secret is a scientific method of theory and experiment, also known as trial and error or cause and effect. Using affirmations and setting intentions are good, but there are other practices that help set the ground to receive our heart's desire and to participate fully in the law of circulation.
These practices include meditating, that is taking time each day to be still and go within and observe; just watch your thoughts, your feelings, your ideas, your body; just sit and watch your self without judgment or agenda; let things arise and fall away, clearing your consciousness and awareness so you can be in the present moment.
Another is related to this, but in the physical world, to make room for new, or more even, there needs to be space for it; as we clear the clutter of our mind by meditating, we clear the clutter of our physical world, letting go of that which no longer serves us, establishing order and tidiness in our home, garden and financial affairs.
This same principle applied to our emotional affairs includes forgiveness and gratitude. To clear your emotional body and really be ready for a new relationship, I invite you to sit and journal about your past relationships, finding what worked, that which you are really grateful for and what didn't work and don't want to repeat. I invite you to consider any anger and resentment you find and let it go by saying to your self, "I forgive, I forgive ..." until you feel it, really feel it. Yes, it is possible to clear the situation emotionally this way and help clear the way to accept a new love into your life.
Another aspect of the law of circulation is availability, you have to be available for the good you seek; this means being out in the world with friends and in other social situations and activities, just being yourself, with your dreams and desires in the background. As you let go of focusing on your desires and wants and plunge into life as it appears before you, that is when what appears to be magic happens, and suddenly you find what you set in motion as a desire is in your life is suddenly part of your life. Do what you love to do and your love will find you.
Your dreams and desires manifest in your life as a result of the choices you have made up to that point, and the choices are helped by the ground you have set through meditating, clearing away clutter of all kinds, being grateful for who you are and your experience of life, forgiving and releasing that which clutters your emotional life and being active in the world, sharing the gift you are with those around you by doing what you love to do. This is The Secret applied to your life.

Peter
Only Love Prevails
https://SharePrayer.com

On Mar 12, 2007, at 8:02 PM, Jill @ WaccoBB wrote:

Category: WaccoTalk
Thread: What The Secret means to me...

What I'd like to know is how to apply all that stuff to my life. For the past few months I've been using affirmations as well as the law of attraction and I'm still single, I have no job and I have several bills to pay.

So what am I missing??!?!?<hmmm.gif>


Quote:
Zeno Swijtink wrote: <viewpost.gif>
I watched this movie recently and thought it was infantile

Not so much since a silly metaphysical superstructure is given to the simple truth that a happy and open-minded person is more attractive and relaxed, and less likely to trip over a banana peel and make a fool of himself. (Yes, quantum theory is evoked again to make the audience swoon.)

It was infantile since in the video The Secret was used solely to satisfy infantile desires: the breathtaking necklace, the fast car, the stunning partner. All material and private desires.

Maybe those who hold The Secret can ask for World Peace next time, or some other urgent collective good?

Thanks!


<Website-Reply.jpg>
You can reply privately by just clicking "Reply" to this email.
Waccobb.net - Connecting Conscious Community in the North Bay!

[Clancy]

The Secret is a scientific method of theory and experiment, also known as trial and error or cause and effect.

No, it is NOT a scientific method. You shoot yourself in the foot making such a claim.

If you want to help people understand the value of 'the secret' you need to get clear on what it isn't first. Any explanation here of what the scientific method is would bore many wacco readers to tears, so I won't bother, but I suggest you look it up.

Can you use science to evaluate the effectiveness of meditation, prayer and affirmations? Yes.

For instance, studies have shown people who meditate regularly are generally healthier than those who don't, and meditation can lower blood pressure etc.

But meditation in and of itself isn't scientific at all. See the difference?

[PeteS]

To me science is asking questions and looking for the answers. I live a scientific life, because I am always asking questions and looking for answers. Science is inquiry leading to knowledge.

The law of attraction is likened to the law of gravity, teachers of The Secret say LOA just is, use it or go on in ignorance, it still works in your life. We use the law of gravity whether or not we inquire into what it is; science inquires into what it is. You know, it is like we can live our whole lives knowing the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that is a fact; when we ask why does that sun rise in the east and set in the west, and start looking for answers to the question, that is science.

The approach to The Secret and LOA I am proposing here is the scientific approach of trying something and paying attention to the results; this is scientific. I don't have time to go on and on here; but refer to Merriam-Webster for an explanation of Science:
https://209.161.33.50/dictionary/science

Oh, to reply to the bit about meditating not being science, it depends on whether one just does it in ignorance or does it in pursuit of knowledge. When I began meditating 39 years ago, it was out of curiosity and part of my pursuit of knowledge as a philosopher; I find it is "science" in that it reveals knowledge.

Nothing is scientific in and of itself until we ask a question and look for the answer, then we are participating in the scientific method.

Have a wonderful day,

Peter




No, it is NOT a scientific method. You shoot yourself in the foot making such a claim.

If you want to help people understand the value of 'the secret' you need to get clear on what it isn't first. Any explanation here of what the scientific method is would bore many wacco readers to tears, so I won't bother, but I suggest you look it up.

Can you use science to evaluate the effectiveness of meditation, prayer and affirmations? Yes.

For instance, studies have shown people who meditate regularly are generally healthier than those who don't, and meditation can lower blood pressure etc.

But meditation in and of itself isn't scientific at all. See the difference?

[Clancy]

To me science is asking questions and looking for the answers. I live a scientific life, because I am always asking questions and looking for answers. Science is inquiry leading to knowledge.

I'm sorry, that's simply not true. I refuse to explain the scientific method here, it will just irritate some people. If you want to understand what it is, and why it's not simply 'asking questions and looking for answers', peruse some of the links here
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=scientific+method&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

[PeteS]

Hey Clancy, Thanks for the cool Google link. Here is one thing I found there:

REASONING IN SCIENCE

Learning about the scientific method is almost like saying that you are learning how to learn. You see, the scientific method is the way scientists learn and study the world around them. It can be used to study anything from a leaf to a dog to the entire Universe.

The basis of the scientific method is asking questions and then trying to come up with the answers. You could ask, "Why do dogs and cats have hair?" One answer might be that it keeps them warm. BOOM! It's the scientific method in action. (OK, settle down.)

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Just about everything starts with a question. Usually, scientists come up with questions by looking at the world around them. "Hey look! What's that?" See that squiggly thing at the end of the sentence? A question has been born.

So you've got a scientist. When scientists see something they don't understand they have some huge urge to answer questions and discover new things. It's just one of those scientist personality traits. The trick is that you have to be able to offer some evidence that confirms every answer you give. If you can't test your answer, other scientists can't test it to see if you were right or not. ...

Yes, it goes on but I feel my point that asking questions is scientific is made. I do see that your point may be that I didn't say anything about what is learned being verifiable by others is part of science. Yes, that is science and begins when one says: "Look at what I discovered," to their friends and family. I am saying we are all practicing the scientific method as we learn and grow, we are not necessarily all professional Scientists. I am saying that the scientific method has grown out of our natural curiosity about the world.

Link to the whole article:
https://www.biology4kids.com/files/studies_scimethod.html

Enjoy yourself,

Peter
https://SharePrayer.com

[Clancy]

Hey Clancy, Thanks for the cool Google link. Here is one thing I found there:

Odd that you omit the part of the article that defines the scientific method, which is clearly not simply asking questions, or Ophrah Winfrey would be considered a scientist (trust me, she isn't).

I'm sorry I brought it up. Science and wacco simply don't mix.

[poetrygeek]

Barry, I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. There is no compelling evidence for the existence of a soul. The electrochemical reactions are NOT still possible after death, because oxygen deprivation to the brain kills the neurons that compose the neural net which holds the information pattern that is the entire sum total of our personalities. At that moment, the "soul" extinguishes, radiates away from the body as information-free heat, and everything that person has ever been is forever gone.

The only "mystery" left is in details. The general framework is known. What is left, if you really need it, is wishful thinking.

Life is just metabolism: energy consumption, energy use. It isn't a mysterious ephemeral force. It's just the operation of an organism until that organism stops functioning. No "other dimensions". No cosmic mysteries. No hokey get-out-of-Death-free mechanisms. We live--lucky to be accidental die-rolls of DNA created through a million accidents of history that brought our parents together--and then we die. That's all.

Why (oh, why!) must humans have such grandiose ideas about themselves? Why must they think that they live forever, that their existence has importance, that we somehow matter in any sense other than to one another in the narrow time in which we live? It's not hard, if you're willing not to get freaked out by the fact that you're going to die and disappear, to see the world and know what is and isn't.

Heaven, hell, reincarnation, astral projection, magic, gods, "esoteric mysteries"...these are the artifacts of times when we were ignorant. They were the best answers the people at those times could come up with. But they're not the best answers any more. They're rank superstitious nonsense. Choosing to cling to them in the face of what we now know to be true about ourselves and the Universe is, in essence, to spit on the only thing humans evolved to be any good at: intelligence.

What's beatiful about this world is our differences in thought, physical appearance, beliefs, etc......but what we do all share is faith. Faith in something.....name it whatever you may choose, but it's there. Whether it's something so small as faith that your lavender will grow in your garden, or faith that you will one day hug your parents again.....it's still all faith. Some of us base more of our lives on it than others, which is fine. I personally believe in many aspects of 'The Secret' and some aspects of it, I don't. But I do believe it's scary when one doesn't see that they are a pebble that creates a ripple that has unknown boundaries. We are not only connected to one another, everywhere.....but (what 'The Secret' lacks) we are also connected to this beautiful earth, who so lovingly has housed us, until we started abusing it in such a way that it is slowly attempting to rid itself of us, as we try to rid our bodies of the flu. Everything, if you stop and really attempt to narrow it down, comes down to either Love or Fear. So religion, The Secret, etc. etc.......most could just be summed up as 'live in a state of Love'.........and with that, harmony will surround you.

[Dixon]

...An open mind is terrible thing to waste, especially one as sharp as yours obviously is. Royce

Hello again, Royce;

I, too, have sometimes been accused of being close-minded because, like Mark, I express myself passionately and don't always include qualifiers such as "It seems to me that..." or "the weight of the evidence indicates that...", so I sound like I'm absolutely certain (thus close-minded).

But neither of those factors is a good indicator of close-mindedness. Passionate self-expression is only SOMETIMES associated with emotionally held, rather than rationally held, beliefs, and therefore close-mindedness. Similarly, leaving out qualifiers SOMETIMES means that the person is inappropriately certain (thus close-minded).

I find that when I speak loosely, not bothering to include qualifiers in every sentence, someone will complain, but when I get really precise and put all the qualifiers in, people complain about how dry or tight-assed that sounds, so it's a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situation. Occasionally I make blanket statements such as "I could be wrong about anything at any time" or "I don't know anything for sure", hoping that I then won't have to include such qualifiers in every sentence, but soon someone is complaining again.

I can only think of 4 good reasons for suspecting someone of close-mindedness:

1) They admit it ("I'm close-minded for Jesus", "I know I'm right and no one can convince me otherwise", "Forget about evidence; this is about faith", etc.).

2) Consistent retreat into transparently fallacious reasoning by someone who is smart enough to know better.

3) Refusal to engage in a critique of their belief COULD indicate close-mindedness (though it could just mean they don't have the time right now).

4) Refusal to change their mind even in the face of an apparently valid argument which they can't refute is good evidence of close-mindedness.

Note that mere disagreement with us does not indicate close-mindedness. Many tend to assume that anyone who disagrees with them is close-minded. The reasoning seems to be something like "I know I'm right, so anyone who can't see that must be close-minded". Thus the attribution of close-mindedness to another is, ironically, often a close-minded defense mechanism!

If you want to really test Mark's open-mindedness, give him compelling, irrefutable arguments supporting something he doesn't believe in or opposing something he does believe in, and then see if he changes. Of course, the "danger" is that he'll show you that your arguments are full of holes, in which case it will be incumbent upon YOU to change. The process of dialogical critical thinking is a great test of open-mindedness.

I for one am REALLY sick of being seen as close-minded by people who haven't given me anything remotely approaching good evidence for the belief they want me to accept. Folks, people who accept your claims in the absence of compelling evidence aren't demonstrating open-mindedness; they're demonstrating stupidity!

Apparently;

Dixon

[Dixon]

...The Secret is a scientific method of theory and experiment...

PeteS

While I agree with some of the advice you gave in your post, I must take exception to your characterization of the grandiloquently-named "the Secret" as a scientific method. The kind of "try it and see if it works for you" approach which characterizes "the Secret" (an approach which some scientists refer to as "unsystematic judgment"), is a million miles from being scientific, because it doesn't screen out common sources of distortion, bias and fallacy.

For instance, can you state your falsifiable hypothesis which, when tested, will show you whether "the Secret" is false, not just verify it as true?

How have you specified and quantified the results which you would interpret as good evidence for your hypothesis? In other words, how are you identifying and measuring the outcome of your "test" of "the Secret"?

Where are your properly chosen experimental and control groups, and are they big enough to give valid results?

By what procedures do you screen out confounding factors which will make you think "the Secret" works even if it doesn't, such as the confirmation bias, the effort justification effect, wishful thinking, and many more?

The extremely detailed and precise procedures of science aren't just some kind of arcane game; they're necessary to correct for our usual fallacies. Even if we're honest, intelligent and sane, our unsystematic judgment is nowhere near as valid as we'd like to think; that's why science had to be invented in the first place. Attempting to confer unearned authority on our beliefs by inaccurately describing them as scientific is naive at best, fraudulent at worst.

Blessings;

Dixon

[Juggledude]

Hello again, Royce;

I, too, have sometimes been accused of being close-minded because, like Mark, I express myself passionately and don't always include qualifiers such as "It seems to me that..." or "the weight of the evidence indicates that...", so I sound like I'm absolutely certain (thus close-minded).

But neither of those factors is a good indicator of close-mindedness. Passionate self-expression is only SOMETIMES associated with emotionally held, rather than rationally held, beliefs, and therefore close-mindedness. Similarly, leaving out qualifiers SOMETIMES means that the person is inappropriately certain (thus close-minded).

I find that when I speak loosely, not bothering to include qualifiers in every sentence, someone will complain, but when I get really precise and put all the qualifiers in, people complain about how dry or tight-assed that sounds, so it's a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situation. Occasionally I make blanket statements such as "I could be wrong about anything at any time" or "I don't know anything for sure", hoping that I then won't have to include such qualifiers in every sentence, but soon someone is complaining again.

I can only think of 4 good reasons for suspecting someone of close-mindedness:

1) They admit it ("I'm close-minded for Jesus", "I know I'm right and no one can convince me otherwise", "Forget about evidence; this is about faith", etc.).

2) Consistent retreat into transparently fallacious reasoning by someone who is smart enough to know better.

3) Refusal to engage in a critique of their belief COULD indicate close-mindedness (though it could just mean they don't have the time right now).

4) Refusal to change their mind even in the face of an apparently valid argument which they can't refute is good evidence of close-mindedness.

Note that mere disagreement with us does not indicate close-mindedness. Many tend to assume that anyone who disagrees with them is close-minded. The reasoning seems to be something like "I know I'm right, so anyone who can't see that must be close-minded". Thus the attribution of close-mindedness to another is, ironically, often a close-minded defense mechanism!

If you want to really test Mark's open-mindedness, give him compelling, irrefutable arguments supporting something he doesn't believe in or opposing something he does believe in, and then see if he changes. Of course, the "danger" is that he'll show you that your arguments are full of holes, in which case it will be incumbent upon YOU to change. The process of dialogical critical thinking is a great test of open-mindedness.

I for one am REALLY sick of being seen as close-minded by people who haven't given me anything remotely approaching good evidence for the belief they want me to accept. Folks, people who accept your claims in the absence of compelling evidence aren't demonstrating open-mindedness; they're demonstrating stupidity!

Apparently;

Dixon


Dixon,

I agree wholeheartedly with your observations regarding closed mindedness. I admit that I may have been a tad presumptious in flinging that poo at Mark, and only offer by means of excuse my emotional reaction to his certitude. Possibly the omission of qualifiers in his statements does reflect a certain laziness, though from my readings of his post I suspect him to be fairly punctilious, thus my opinion.

I guess we'll just need to wait for him to chime back in, ya?

For what it's worth, I have not experienced a whit of close mindedness from you, Dixon, on the contrary, anyone who has overcome the fundamentalist Christian indoctrination as you purport to have done appears exceptionally open minded, imho.

ciao,

Royce

[Nemea Laessig]

Dear Friends,

So here is the article from Salon. I am interested in what people think of it.

Cheers,
~Nemea

www.salon.com/mwt/feature...t/print.html (https://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/03/05/the_secret/print.html)

By continuing to hawk "The Secret," a mishmash of offensive self-help cliches, Oprah Winfrey is squandering her goodwill and influence, and preaching to the world that mammon is queen.

By Peter Birkenhead

Mar. 05, 2007 | Steve Martin used to do a routine that went like this: "You too can be a millionaire! It's easy: First, get a million dollars. Now..."

If you put that routine between hard covers, you'd have "The Secret," the self-help manifesto and bottle of minty-fresh snake oil currently topping the bestseller lists. "The Secret" espouses a "philosophy" patched together by an Australian talk-show producer named Rhonda Byrne. Though "The Secret" unabashedly appropriates and mishmashes familiar self-help clichés, it was still the subject of two recent episodes of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" featuring a dream team of self-help gurus, all of whom contributed to the project.

The main idea of "The Secret" is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it -- and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it -- the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme -- is brilliant. But what really makes "The Secret" more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn't just endorsed "The Secret"; she's championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

Why "venality"? Because, with survivors of Auschwitz still alive, Oprah writes this about "The Secret" on her Web site, "the energy you put into the world -- both good and bad -- is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." "Venality," because Oprah, in the age of AIDS, is advertising a book that says, "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought." "Venality," because Oprah, from a studio within walking distance of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green Projects, pitches a book that says, "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts."

Worse than "The Secret's" blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular "secret" of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that "like attracts like" and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite -- positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles -- and the rest of "The Secret" has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: "Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of." And worse than the idiocy and the bullshitting is its anti-intellectualism, because that's at the root of the other two. Here's "The Secret" on reading and, um, electricity: "When I discovered 'The Secret' I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good," and, "How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don't, do you?" And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of "The Secret," because it's why the book exists: "[The Secret] is like having the Universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, 'I'd like to have this experience and I'd like to have that product and I'd like to have a person like that.' It is you placing your order with the Universe. It's really that easy." That's from Dr. Joe Vitale, former Amway executive and contributor to "The Secret," on Oprah.com.

Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest women in the world, and one of the most influential. Her imprimatur has helped the authors of "The Secret" sell 2 million books (and 1 million DVDs), putting it ahead of the new Harry Potter book on the Amazon bestseller list. In the time Oprah spent advertising the lies in "The Secret," she could have been exposing them to an audience that otherwise might have believed them. So why didn't she? If James Frey deserved to be raked over the coals for lying about how drunk he was, doesn't Oprah deserve some scrutiny for pitching the meretricious nonsense in "The Secret"?

Oprah has a reputation for doing good -- she probably has more perceived moral authority than anyone in this country -- and she has done a lot of good. But in light of her zealous support of a book that says, in this time of entrenched, systemic, institutionalized poverty, this time of no-bid contracts for war profiteers and heckuva-job governance, that "you can have, be, or do anything," isn't it reasonable to ask about why she does what she does, and the way she does it?

Oprah recently opened, with much fanfare, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa, and as I watched the network news stories about it, I couldn't get "The Secret" out of my mind. I kept wondering what would happen if professor Sam Mhlongo, South Africa's chief family practitioner who famously said that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, read about Oprah's connection to "The Secret" and found support there for his claim. I wondered if the students of the academy would read "The Secret" and start to believe that their parents deserved to be poor, or that the people of Darfur summoned the Janjaweed with "bad thoughts." Will the heavier girls be told, as readers of "The Secret" are, that food doesn't cause weight gain -- thinking about weight gain does? Will they be told to not even look at fat people, as "The Secret" advises? Oprah is already promoting these ideas to her television audience. Why wouldn't she espouse them to her students?

In many ways the Leadership Academy is a wonderful project, a school that will provide impoverished girls an education they otherwise might not have gotten. But it also seems to be the product, unavoidably, of the faux-spiritual, anti-intellectual, hyper-materialistic worldview expressed in "The Secret," the book that the school's founder has called "life changing."

The academy is a controversial enough project in South Africa that the government withdrew its support, because of the amount of money that's been spent on its well-reported, lavish design -- money that could have gone instead to creating perfectly fine schools that served many, many more students than the 350 who will be making use of spa facilities at the academy. But, when I watched Oprah's prime-time special about interviewing candidates for the school, it seemed to me that she wasn't nearly as excited about providing an education to the girls as she was about providing a "Secret"-like "transformative experience." (And not just for the girls, for herself; the first thing she said to the family members at the opening ceremony wasn't, "Welcome to a great moment in your daughters' lives," it was, "Welcome to the proudest moment of my life.")

On the special, Oprah talked far more about what the school would do for the girls' self-esteem and material lives than what it would do for their intellects -- sometimes sounding as if she was reading directly from "The Secret." And in discussing what she was looking for in prospective students, she didn't talk about finding the next Eleanor Roosevelt or Sally Ride or Jane Smiley. Instead she used "Entertainment Tonight" language like "It Girl" to describe her ideal candidate. She praised the girls for their spirit, for how much they "shined" and "glowed," but never for their ideas or insights. Oprah puts a lot of energy and money into aesthetics -- on her show, in her magazine, at her school. The publishers of "The Secret" have learned well from their sponsor and are just as visually savvy. They have created a look for their books, DVDs, CDs and marketing materials that conjures a "Da Vinci Code" aesthetic, full of pretty faux parchment, quill-and-ink fonts and wax seals.

Oprah's TV special about the Leadership Academy, essentially an hourlong infomercial, was just as well-coiffed and "visuals"-heavy. In fact, when Oprah was choosing her students, her important criteria must have included their television interview skills. On-camera interviews with the girls were the centerpiece of the special, but as one spunky, telegenic candidate after another beamed her smile at the camera, I couldn't help wondering how Joyce Carol Oates or Gertrude Stein or Madame Curie would have fared -- would they have "shined" and "glowed," or more likely talked in non-sound-bite-friendly paragraphs and maybe even, God forbid, the sometimes "dark" tones of authentic people, and been rejected. Sadly, the girls themselves (and who can blame them, desperate 12-year-olds trying to flatter their potential benefactor) parroted banal Oprah-isms, like "I want to be the best me I can be," and "Be a leader not a follower" and "Don't blend in, blend out," with smiley gusto.

When the special was over, I found myself equally impressed and queasy, one part hopeful, one part worried. I was happy the school was there, but disturbed by the way it created an instant upper class out of the students, in a country that doesn't exactly need any more segregation into haves and have-nots. I was hopeful for the students but nervous about what, exactly, they will be taught in a place called the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. Will it be more "best me I can be" bromides? Will "The Secret" be on the syllabus? Oprah herself is going to teach "leadership classes" at the school, after all.

Has Oprah ever done anything that didn't leave people with mixed feelings?

And at what point do we stop feeling like we have to take the good with the craven when it comes to Oprah, and the culture she's helped to create? I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don't have enough money because they're "blocking it with their thoughts." I'm already sickened by an American culture that teaches people, as "The Secret" does, that they "create the circumstances of their lives with the choices they make every day," a culture that elected a president who cried tears of self-congratulation at his inauguration, rejects intellectualism, and believes he can intuit the trustworthiness of world leaders by looking into their eyes. I'm sickened by a culture in which the tenets of the Oprah philosophy have become conventional wisdom, in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement, reality is whatever you want it to be, and mammon is queen.

One of Oprah's signature gimmicks has been giving stuff away to her audience ("giving" here means announcing the passing of stuff from corporate sponsors to audience members), most notably in a popular segment called "My Favorite Things." These bits have revealed an Oprah who truly revels in consumer culture, and who can seem astonishingly oblivious to the way most people live and what they can afford. She seems to celebrate every event and milestone with extravagant stuff, indeed to not know how to celebrate without it. Oprah has explained the expensive appointments of her Leadership Academy by saying, "Beauty inspires." True enough. But hasn't the lack of beauty inspired some pretty great work? And aren't there are all kinds of beauty?

You might expect a powerful person who thinks of herself as "deeply spiritual" to have a less worldly conception of it, and you might hope that she would encourage her followers to do the same, instead of urging them to buy books that call Jesus a "prosperity teacher."

But, far more than "spiritual growth" or "empowerment," Oprah and the authors of "The Secret" focus on imparting the message of getting rich. Even the biographies of the authors of "The Secret" on Oprah's Web site are revealingly fixated on their rags-to-riches stories. James Arthur Ray is described as someone who was "almost going bankrupt, [which] forced him to focus on the life he truly wanted. Now he runs a multimillion-dollar corporation dedicated to teaching people how to create wealth in all areas of their lives." The bio for Lisa Nichols says, "After hitting rock bottom at age 19, Lisa prayed for a better life. Now, she has made her fortune by motivating more than 60,000 teenagers to make better choices in their own lives." And the one for "Chicken Soup for the Soul" creator Jack Canfield reads, he "was deep in debt before he made it big. Now his best-selling books have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and Jack travels the country teaching 'The Secret' of his success."

There's no doubt that Oprah's doing a lot of good with her South African project, and with many other charitable works. And yeah, I know, her book club "gets people to read," and yadda yadda yadda. But there's also no doubt that a lot of us have been making forgiving disclaimers like that about Oprah for years. And that maybe they amount to trains-running-on-time arguments. Maybe it's time to stop. After reading "The Secret," it seemed to me that there were basically three possibilities: 1) Oprah really believes this stuff, and we should be very worried about her opening a school for anyone. 2) Oprah doesn't believe this stuff and we should be very, very worried about her opening a school for anyone. 3) Oprah doesn't know that any of this stuff is in the book or on her Web site and in a perfect world she wouldn't be allowed to open a school for anyone.

The things that Oprah does, like promoting "The Secret," can seem deceptively trivial, but it's precisely because they're silly that we should be concerned about their promotion by someone who is deadly earnest and deeply trusted by millions of people. It's important to start taking a look at Oprah because her philosophy has in many ways become the dominant one in our culture, even for people who would never consider themselves disciples. Somebody is buying enough copies of "The Secret" to make it No. 1 on the Amazon bestseller list. Those somebodies may be religious zealots or atheists, Republicans or Democrats, but they are all believers, to one degree or another, and, perhaps unwittingly, in aspects of the Oprah/"Secret" culture. And yes, sure, a lot of the believing they do is harmless fun -- everybody's got some kind of rabbit's foot in his pocket -- but we're not talking about rabbits' feet here, we're talking about whole, live rabbits pulled out of hats, and an audience that doesn't think it's being tricked.

"Secret"-style belief is a perfect product. Like Coca-Cola, it goes down easy and makes the consumer thirsty for more. It's unthreateningly simple, and a lot more facile, sentimental and, perhaps paradoxically, intractable than the old-fashioned kind of belief. Like Amway, it enlists its consumers as unofficial salespeople, and the people who constitute its market feel like they're part of a fold. It's indistinguishable from, and inextricably bound up in, the Oprah idea of self-esteem, the kind of confidence you get not from testing yourself, but from "believing" in yourself. This modern idea of faith isn't arrived at the old-fashioned way, by asking questions, but by getting answers. Instead of inquiry we have born-again epiphanies and cheesy self-help books -- we have excuses for not engaging in inquiry at all. Let other people schlep down the road to Damascus; we'll have Amazon send Damascus to us.

That "Secret"-style faith, whether it's in God, or in one's own preordained destiny to be an "American Idol," which takes all of a moment to achieve, is perhaps its most important selling point. Here's "The Secret" on arriving at faith: "Ask once, believe you have received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good." The kind of faith that couldn't be reached by shortcut, the confidence of the great doubters and worriers, of Moses and Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ, has been replaced by the insta-certainty and inflated "self-esteem" of "The Secret's" believers.

Books like "The Secret" have created, and are feeding, an enormously diverse market of disciples, and they're thriving in every corner of the culture, in megachurches and movies, politics and pop music, in sports arenas and state boards of education. Oprah has far more in common with George Bush than either would like to admit, and so do the psychics of Marin County, Calif., and the creationists of Kansas. The believers come from all walks of life, but they work the same way -- mostly by bastardizing and warping source materials, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, to make them fit their worldview. On Page 23 of "The Secret" you'll find this revealing doozy: "Meditation quiets the mind, helps you control your thoughts." Of course, the goal of meditation is precisely the opposite -- it is to be conscious, to observe your thoughts honestly and clearly. But that's the last thing the believers want to encourage. The authors of "The Secret" sell "control" in the form of "empowerment" and "quiet" in the form of belief, not consciousness.

The promises of Oprah culture can seem irresistible, and its hallmarks are becoming ubiquitous. Believers may be separated into tribes according to what they believe, but they do it in pretty much the same way, relying on a "Secret"-style conception of "intuition" --- which seems to amount to the sneaking suspicion that they're always right -- to arrive at their tenets. Instead of the world as it is, constantly changing and full of contradiction, they see a fixed and fantastical place, where good things come to those who believe, whether it's belief in a diet, a God, or a Habit of Successful People. These believers may believe in the healing power of homeopathy, or Scripture or organizational skills -- in intelligent design, astrology or privatization. They all trust that their devotion will be rewarded with money and boyfriends and job promotions, with hockey championships and apartments. And most of all they believe -- they really, really believe -- in themselves.

For these believers, self-knowledge is much less important than self-"love." But the question they never seem to ask themselves is: If you wouldn't tell another person you loved her before you got to know her, why would you do that to yourself? Skipping the getting-to-know-you part has given us what we deserve: the Oprah culture. It's a culture where superstition is "spirituality," illiteracy is "authenticity," and schoolmarm moralism is "character." It's a culture where people apologize by saying, "I'm sorry you took offense at what I said," and forgive by saying, "I'm not angry at you anymore, I'm grateful to you for teaching me not to trust shitheads like you." And that's the part that should bother us most: the diminishing, even implicit mocking, of genuine goodness, and of authentic spiritual concerns and practices. Engagement, curiosity and active awe are in short supply these days, and it's sickening to see them devalued and misrepresented.

Not that any of this is new. Aimee Semple McPherson, "The Power of Positive Thinking," Father Coughlin, est, James Van Praagh -- pick your influential snake-oil salesman or snake oil. They were all cut from the same cloth as Oprah and "The Secret." The big, big difference is, well, the bigness. The infinitely bigger reach of the Oprah empire and its emissaries. They make their predecessors look like kids with lemonade stands. It would be stupidly dangerous to dismiss Oprah and "The Secret" as silly, or ultimately meaningless. They're reaching more people than Harry Potter, for God-force's sake. That's why what Oprah does matters, and stinks. If you reach more people than Bill O'Reilly, if you have better name recognition than Nelson Mandela, if the books you endorse sell more than Stephen King's, you should take some responsibility for your effect on the culture. The most powerful woman in the world is taking advantage of people who are desperate for meaning, by passionately championing a product that mocks the very idea of a meaningful life.

That means something.

-- By Peter Birkenhead
(https://sanfrancisco.tribe.net/template/CreateMessage.vm?replyto=f2573396-01e7-431a-abd0-69bb7e208bc7&tribeid=2a015c8a-8c2f-4657-8716-9395874aa780&threadid=452801bb-48b2-4d6b-b9ae-244bdf1455a4)

[Nemea Laessig]

And in case anyone wants to see The Secret videos, they are on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2MqciSMOmk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phL0RLKL8bc

This is what they are selling. Slick and shallow.

~Nemea

["Mad" Miles]

Nemea,

Wonderful article. Nails it. If only it became as well-read as "The Secret".

Ojala

"M"M


:thanks:

[Dixon]

I think Nirmala and Mita have both hit the nail on the head, and quite eloquently.

Dixon


No true spiritual teaching tells us to go after material wealth. The Secret isn't spiritual, it's new age greed. Spiritual teachings are about letting go/surrender/renouncing greed and hatred. This twisted metaphysical teaching doesn't recognize that happiness does not come from getting everything we want. It comes from a balanced acceptance of all life's ups and downs, not allowing difficulties to totally overwhelm us or joys to make us arrogant and overly exhuberant. It doesn't recognize that the nature of life is gain and loss, pain and pleasure, praise and blame, recognition and dishonor, always changing. We have the opportunity to learn some of our deepest lessons from our failures and losses. The hardwon qualities of humility, courage, and true self acceptance come from living an ethical life and realizing there is more to happiness than what the modern world presents. Nirmala

[Sonomamark]

Yeah, what he said. In spades. Thanks, Dixon. And thanks, Clancy, for sticking up for the scientific method when it's being mischaracterized.

What Dixon is talking about here is what is termed in logic the "burden of proof". It isn't "closed minded" to expect that if someone claims something is true, s/he must, if not prove it outright, at the very minimum show that the claim is the least convoluted explanation for the evidence available. The latter standard is called "Occam's Razor"--the idea being that the simplest theory to explain something is the most likely explanation to be true.

To be convincing, the burden on someone making a claim is to prove it. "My experience is" or "I have intuited" or "my Teacher of Ancient Wisdom says" don't carry any weight in meeting that burden. What counts is evidence and a reasonable analysis showing that the claim being made is the best explanation for the evidence available about the phenomenon under discussion.

Much of what is claimed by adherents of religions and/or "spiritual philosophies" (frankly, I can't see any difference between the two) is not only unproven, but is often, flatly disproved by the current state of science. Even when this is not the case, these claims are never the simplest explanation for the phenomena being described. Disembodied intelligences that can ignore the laws of physics at will, live forever, can hear humans' thoughts and--for some unimaginable reason--actually care what humans want? That's a pretty unlikely claim. You'd have to have a lot of solid evidence before I'd believe such a thing.

That's not closed-mindedness. It's critical thinking. The burden is not on the thinker to subscribe to wild theories just because they are suggested to him/her. The burden is on the proposer of the wild theories to present concrete justifications for why someone should believe them.

There's been a bit of talk about "faith" here. "Faith", in my estimation, is a slippery way of avoiding having to say "I choose to believe something I know there is no earthly reason to believe, because I like it better that way." There's nothing wrong with that, but I think it's fair to expect people to cop to what they're really doing.


SonomaMark


Hello again, Royce;

I, too, have sometimes been accused of being close-minded because, like Mark, I express myself passionately and don't always include qualifiers such as "It seems to me that..." or "the weight of the evidence indicates that...", so I sound like I'm absolutely certain (thus close-minded).

But neither of those factors is a good indicator of close-mindedness. Passionate self-expression is only SOMETIMES associated with emotionally held, rather than rationally held, beliefs, and therefore close-mindedness. Similarly, leaving out qualifiers SOMETIMES means that the person is inappropriately certain (thus close-minded).

I find that when I speak loosely, not bothering to include qualifiers in every sentence, someone will complain, but when I get really precise and put all the qualifiers in, people complain about how dry or tight-assed that sounds, so it's a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" situation. Occasionally I make blanket statements such as "I could be wrong about anything at any time" or "I don't know anything for sure", hoping that I then won't have to include such qualifiers in every sentence, but soon someone is complaining again.

I can only think of 4 good reasons for suspecting someone of close-mindedness:

1) They admit it ("I'm close-minded for Jesus", "I know I'm right and no one can convince me otherwise", "Forget about evidence; this is about faith", etc.).

2) Consistent retreat into transparently fallacious reasoning by someone who is smart enough to know better.

3) Refusal to engage in a critique of their belief COULD indicate close-mindedness (though it could just mean they don't have the time right now).

4) Refusal to change their mind even in the face of an apparently valid argument which they can't refute is good evidence of close-mindedness.

Note that mere disagreement with us does not indicate close-mindedness. Many tend to assume that anyone who disagrees with them is close-minded. The reasoning seems to be something like "I know I'm right, so anyone who can't see that must be close-minded". Thus the attribution of close-mindedness to another is, ironically, often a close-minded defense mechanism!

If you want to really test Mark's open-mindedness, give him compelling, irrefutable arguments supporting something he doesn't believe in or opposing something he does believe in, and then see if he changes. Of course, the "danger" is that he'll show you that your arguments are full of holes, in which case it will be incumbent upon YOU to change. The process of dialogical critical thinking is a great test of open-mindedness.

I for one am REALLY sick of being seen as close-minded by people who haven't given me anything remotely approaching good evidence for the belief they want me to accept. Folks, people who accept your claims in the absence of compelling evidence aren't demonstrating open-mindedness; they're demonstrating stupidity!

Apparently;

Dixon

[Sonomamark]

I think the important part of this conversation is the sociological one.

What does it mean that the "New Age" is so dissatisfied with the here-and-now, so materialistic in its acquisitional/marketing bent, so targeted toward the idle and narcissistic rich who can best afford its workshops, retreats, "healings", diets, food supplements, appliances, &c...and also presents to those who are less fortunate a marketing message dangling easy money, health and happiness through "manifestation"? What patterns can we see in the messages and marketing of vehicles like "What the Bleep", "The Secret", and the programmatic hucksterism of Anthony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra and the endless parade of "masters of ancient wisdom" that clog WACCO's bandwidth?

What does it mean that the hotbeds of New Agism in the Bay Area happen to be Marin, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma Counties? They are all predominantly rural areas, with high polarity between rich and poor. Each is a place where the rich live extravagantly on large-parcel, remote estates, while those struggling to get by are surrounded by this excess, gnawing themselves with resentment as they confront their own inability to get ahead in our increasingly polarized economy.

I believe that at root, the "products" sold by the New Age are geared to reducing the anxieties brought on by the accelerating collapse of the middle class. For those who have moved up into the very wealthy, it tells a soothing story that that the Universe has rewarded them and they may live an extravagant, narcissistic and self-indulgent lifestyle without guilt, because this is their "Path". This can even go as far as to suggest that with enough--expensive-- "training" and "healing", a person can be immortal, either literally or through rebirth. In other words, the one downer a person of means can't avoid--death--is really only optional.

To those on the losing end of the growing social divide, the New Age dangles the prospect of leaping out of struggle and into luxury and ease without work, or luck. The New Age markets wealth, health and happiness just by scraping together the money for a workshop, a "healing", a series of classes, a "shamanic voyage" to the Yucatan, etc. It's the same old American Delusion: something for nothing.

The New Age lionizes the Self, yet specializes in avoiding self-awareness. How else to explain, say, "teachers" who fly tens of thousands of air miles annually, yet claim they are "healing the Earth"? How else to frame the NA chestnut that "we create our reality"...the implication being that if you are homeless, if you have cancer, if you are mentally ill or a victim of violence, it's your own fault?

The New Age, insofar as I can tell, is a lucrative carny game, gulling the rubes and parting them from their money in exchange for a soothing work of indulgence that gives them permission to indulge their appetites, for pretty but worthless baubles, library-paste ectoplasm and a smug, fleeting feeling of being in on a Big Secret.

And THAT, ladles and jellyspoons, is what "The Secret" means to me.


SonomaMark

[Clancy]

Write on Sonomamark, that was damn well said.



I think the important part of this conversation is the sociological one...snip

[AnneCatherine]

Well now. I've read all the very thought provoking posts in this thread and I must admit have done some very serious questioning of just what do I believe based on what I've read here. Thank you all for you time and care in posting your thoughts.

I'm not going to go into what I believe - it's very personal and I am really not a great debater - you guys would run circles around me. :)

I am curious - is there anyone out there who has had actual experiences with "The Secret" working for them? Where in every day life they can see whatever it is The Secret teaches actually being effective for them? I guess I'm asking for proof.

[Zeno Swijtink]

I thought the upshot of some of the comments in this thread was that the "Law of Attraction" cannot be proved by actual experiences since these do not provide for a control group of people who try to attract to no avail.

The mindset of people attracted to the Law of Attraction does not require a control group for proof. They find proof in the actual lived experience where They Feel the Law at Work.

See for instance this story

https://careerintensity.com/blog/2007/03/05/proof-of-the-law-of-attraction/

The world of test and control group is the world of irony and skeptosis, "shit happens," and possibly of "Blessed are those who do not hunger for justice, for they know that our fate, for better or worse, is the work of chance, which is past understanding" (Borges, Fragments from an Apocryphal Gospel).



I am curious - is there anyone out there who has had actual experiences with "The Secret" working for them? Where in every day life they can see whatever it is The Secret teaches actually being effective for them? I guess I'm asking for proof.

[Clancy]

I am curious - is there anyone out there who has had actual experiences with "The Secret" working for them? Where in every day life they can see whatever it is The Secret teaches actually being effective for them? I guess I'm asking for proof.

I think a good case could be made that the placebo effect is The Secret in action. I'm surprised that The Secret's supporters haven't done so.


Researchers have been studying the placebo effect for decades. In 1955, researcher H.K. Beecher published his groundbreaking paper "The Powerful Placebo," in which he concluded that, across the 26 studies he analyzed, an average of 32 percent of patients responded to placebo. In the 1960s, breakthrough studies showed the potential physiological effects of dummy pills--they tended to speed up pulse rate, increase blood pressure, and improve reaction speeds, for example, when participants were told they had taken a stimulant, and had the opposite physiological effects when participants were told they had taken a sleep-producing drug.

Yet, even after 40 years, big questions remain about the interplay of psychological and physiological mechanisms that contribute to the placebo effect. Today's brain imagery techniques do lend support, though, to the theory that thoughts and beliefs not only affect one's psychological state, but also cause the body to undergo actual biological changes.
https://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2000/100_heal.html

[Dixon]

Well now. I've read all the very thought provoking posts in this thread and I must admit have done some very serious questioning of just what do I believe based on what I've read here.

Great!


I am curious - is there anyone out there who has had actual experiences with "The Secret" working for them? Where in every day life they can see whatever it is The Secret teaches actually being effective for them? I guess I'm asking for proof.

If you want proof of this claim, asking people for their unsystematic judgments based on their personal experience is not a very good way to get it. You will have no trouble finding thousands of people who will tell you passionately that it works for them. The problem is that you're still left with this question: Did it really work for them or do they just think it did due to misinterpretation of their experience?

Properly designed and interpreted scientific studies are the gold standard for this kind of truth-seeking. It's also useful to know enough about critical thinking to be able to screen out bogus "evidence" that most people will find convincing because most folks, even intelligent ones, have little understanding of what good evidence is.

I won't bore you with the details unless you ask me to, but there are lots of reasons people would honestly perceive something like "the Secret" as effective even if it's not. If you hear something that sounds like good evidence for the efficacy of "the Secret" (or anything else, for that matter), you might want to run it by some skeptic like me for critique, by way of balance.

Blessings;

Dixon

[Nirmala]

Yeah, what he said. In spades. Thanks, Dixon. And thanks, Clancy, for sticking up for the scientific method when it's being mischaracterized.

What Dixon is talking about here is what is termed in logic the "burden of proof". It isn't "closed minded" to expect that if someone claims something is true, s/he must, if not prove it outright, at the very minimum show that the claim is the least convoluted explanation for the evidence available. The latter standard is called "Occam's Razor"--the idea being that the simplest theory to explain something is the most likely explanation to be true.

To be convincing, the burden on someone making a claim is to prove it. "My experience is" or "I have intuited" or "my Teacher of Ancient Wisdom says" don't carry any weight in meeting that burden. What counts is evidence and a reasonable analysis showing that the claim being made is the best explanation for the evidence available about the phenomenon under discussion.

Much of what is claimed by adherents of religions and/or "spiritual philosophies" (frankly, I can't see any difference between the two) is not only unproven, but is often, flatly disproved by the current state of science. Even when this is not the case, these claims are never the simplest explanation for the phenomena being described. Disembodied intelligences that can ignore the laws of physics at will, live forever, can hear humans' thoughts and--for some unimaginable reason--actually care what humans want? That's a pretty unlikely claim. You'd have to have a lot of solid evidence before I'd believe such a thing.

That's not closed-mindedness. It's critical thinking. The burden is not on the thinker to subscribe to wild theories just because they are suggested to him/her. The burden is on the proposer of the wild theories to present concrete justifications for why someone should believe them.

There's been a bit of talk about "faith" here. "Faith", in my estimation, is a slippery way of avoiding having to say "I choose to believe something I know there is no earthly reason to believe, because I like it better that way." There's nothing wrong with that, but I think it's fair to expect people to cop to what they're really doing.


SonomaMark

Many of the anti secret folks appear to be anti because their god is science. When I was in school science taught that matter and energy were two different things. Now science teaches this is not so. Then science taught that a proton had particles and waves. Now science teaches that a proton can act as either a particle or a wave. Science isn't an all knowing god. It is growing and learning. The problem I have with the secret is its materialistic bent and the underlying assumption that happiness comes from having only "good" things happen to you. This seems to me to be a shallow way of being in the world but it works for some. I suggest the following book: The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality by the Dalai Lama who has spent 40 yrs. in study with some of the greatest scientific minds as well as a lifetime of meditative, spiritual and philosophical study. He presents a brilliant analysis of why all avenues of inquiry--scientific and spiritual--must be pursued in order to arrive at a complete picture of truth.

There's so much confusion about how much impact an individual has on his or her circumstances. To be open to the law of cause and effect and the human ability to intentionally set something in motion does not need to go hand in hand with a belief in a creator god, a soul, a universe that answers you, or blame. In my own life I have seen my thoughts become words and my words become actions and have been able to create opportunities in my life I have chosen. I do not believe in a creator god, an eternal soul or blaming myself or others for the difficult circumstances in their lives. No one can do it alone, yet we all must wake up to our individual responsiblity to what we think, say and do. No one can wake us up. We must do it. In taking responsibility for our lives without blame or feeling unworthy, we must uncover the natural compassion that has been obscured by years of habitual negative patterns.

May you all be happy and have the greatest happiness that comes from a peaceful heart and mind.

In truth,
Nirmala

[PeteS]

Well said, Nirmala. Thank you. Peter


Many of the anti secret folks appear to be anti because their god is science. .....

[Clancy]

...all avenues of inquiry--scientific and spiritual--must be pursued in order to arrive at a complete picture of truth.



My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

-- Albert Einstein

[Clancy]

My religion consists of a humble admiration...

-- Albert Einstein

To the kind people who emailed asking for clarification of this post, I'm sorry, I have no interest in debating or discussing via email this wonderful topic. I think Einstein can better speak for himself than I ever could so I'll just add a few more cogent quotes...



The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there’s any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism....”


"I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science. [He was speaking of Quantum Mechanics and the breaking down of determinism.] My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance -- but for us, not for God."

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet"

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is dead. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely t o comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."

"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.”

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a person does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."

--Albert Einstein

[Dixon]

Many of the anti secret folks appear to be anti because their god is science.

Nirmala;

I'm not sure what you mean by saying "...their god is science." My attitude toward science is simply this: When it comes to answering questions about the structure and workings of the objective universe (questions such as "Does 'the Secret' work?), science, properly conducted, is BY FAR superior to any other system of thought, religious or secular. That's why it has been so powerful as to accelerate technological change (for better and worse) far more in the short time it has existed than in all the millennia before.


When I was in school science taught that matter and energy were two different things. Now science teaches this is not so. Then science taught that a proton had particles and waves. Now science teaches that a proton can act as either a particle or a wave .

Aaaaah, isn't correctability beautiful! But I get the impression, Nirmala, that you see the changeability you cite as evidence against the validity of science. I must insist that the opposite is true. How wonderful is a system of thought which constantly seeks out its own flaws and publicly corrects itself again and again, thus gradually accumulating better and better approximations of the truth! Which do you think is more enlightened, Nirmala, a correctable system like science which is humble enough to recognize its own imperfection and constantly strive for self-correction, or a dogmatic system such as most (maybe all) "spiritual" systems which rarely admit to being mistaken about anything? When was the last time you encountered a religious leader honest enough to publicly announce "Folks, we were wrong about this."?

Many people seem to feel that it's a choice between the uncertainty of science and the certainty of some other belief system, but that's not exactly true. It's really a choice between the REAL uncertainty of science and the PHONY certainty of religions or other dogmatic belief systems. Which do you think we should choose--real uncertainty, which may indeed provoke anxiety, or phony certainty, which allows us to feel better at the expense of truth and open-mindedness?


Science isn't an all knowing god.

I agree with you, Nirmala, that some people think of science as an "all knowing god". That twisted misunderstanding is called scientism, and is really more like a religion with its dogmatism and addiction for (phony) certainty. Let's not confuse that with real science.

No one who really understands science considers it all-knowing. Any scientist worth his/her salt knows that, as a system of inductive logic, science could not possibly give absolute certainty about anything; it can only give us tentative conclusions with varying degrees of certainty depending on how good the evidence is. Without such tentativeness, there is no correctability. Being based on a deep acknowledgement of our human fallibility, science is profoundly humble and open-minded, more so than any other system, religious or secular. That's what gives it its power.

In assessing questions like "Does 'the Secret' work?", we need to be humble enough to recognize our human fallibility and try to correct for it by various means. Those means of correction for our fallibility are known collectively as "critical thinking" and "science". Anyone who thinks that their unsystematic judgment is superior to science when it comes to answering such questions is astoundingly arrogant, or at least blissfully ignorant about our universal human capacity for fallacy.


In truth,
Nirmala

In better and better approximations of truth,
Dixon

[Dixon]

Yo, Clancy, thanks for the cool quotes. Wow--Big Al Einstein--what a guy!

Lest people get the impression that Einstein believed in a personal god, some kind of entity that could hear prayers and care about us, which is what most people seem to mean by the term "god", let's clarify that he apparently used the term god more or less metaphorically, denoting a more abstract thing like the transcendent oneness beloved of pantheist/atheists such as Spinoza and Wragg :^)

For instance, Einstein said: "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist..."

He also said: "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts."

And: "The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. … The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events. … A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him …"

And: "During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image. … The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods. … In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God …"

Here is a good brief article that clarifies Einstein's usage of terms like "god":

The following article is copyright ©1997 by the Skeptics Society, P.O. Box 338, Altadena, CA*91001, (626) 794-3119. Permission has been granted for noncommercial electronic circulation of this article in its entirety, including this notice.

Einstein's God
Just What Did Einstein Believe About God?

By Michael R. Gilmore

Just over a century ago, near the beginning of his intellectual life, the young Albert Einstein became a skeptic. He states so on the first page of his Autobiographical Notes (1949, pp. 3-5): "Thus I came--despite the fact I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents--to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived...Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude...which has never left me..."

We all know Albert Einstein as the most famous scientist of the 20th century, and many know him as a great humanist. Some have also viewed him as religious. Indeed, in Einstein's writings there is well-known reference to God and discussion of religion (1949, 1954). Although Einstein stated he was religious and that he believed in God, it was in his own specialized sense that he used these terms. Many are aware that Einstein was not religious in the conventional sense, but it will come as a surprise to some to learn that Einstein clearly identified himself as an atheist and as an agnostic. If one understands how Einstein used the terms religion, God, atheism, and agnosticism, it is clear that he was consistent in his beliefs.

Part of the popular picture of Einstein's God and religion comes from his well-known statements, such as: "God is cunning but He is not malicious."(Also: "God is subtle but he is not bloody-minded." Or: "God is slick, but he ain't mean." (1946)

"God does not play dice."(On many occasions.)

"I want to know how God created the world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details."(Unknown date.)

It is easy to see how some got the idea that Einstein was expressing a close relationship with a personal god, but it is more accurate to say he was simply expressing his ideas and beliefs about the universe.

Einstein's "belief" in Spinoza's God is one of his most widely quoted statements. But quoted out of context, like so many of these statements, it is misleading at best. It all started when Boston's Cardinal O'Connel attacked Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity and warned the youth that the theory "cloaked the ghastly apparition of atheism" and "befogged speculation, producing universal doubt about God and His creation"(Clark, 1971, 413-414). Einstein had already experienced heavier duty attacks against his theory in the form of anti-Semitic mass meetings in Germany, and he initially ignored the Cardinal's attack. Shortly thereafter though, on April 24, 1929, Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of New York cabled Einstein to ask: "Do you believe in God?"(Sommerfeld, 1949, 103). Einstein's return message is the famous statement: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings"( 103). The Rabbi, who was intent on defending Einstein against the Cardinal, interpreted Einstein's statement in his own way when writing: "Spinoza, who is called the God-intoxicated man, and who saw God manifest in all nature, certainly could not be called an atheist. Furthermore, Einstein points to a unity. Einstein's theory if carried out to its logical conclusion would bring to mankind a scientific formula for monotheism. He does away with all thought of dualism or pluralism. There can be no room for any aspect of polytheism. This latter thought may have caused the Cardinal to speak out. Let us call a spade a spade"(Clark, 1971, 414). Both the Rabbi and the Cardinal would have done well to note Einstein's remark, of 1921, to Archbishop Davidson in a similar context about science: "It makes no difference. It is purely abstract science"(413).

The American physicist Steven Weinberg (1992), in critiquing Einstein's "Spinoza's God" statement, noted: "But what possible difference does it make to anyone if we use the word 'God' in place of 'order' or 'harmony,' except perhaps to avoid the accusation of having no God?" Weinberg certainly has a valid point, but we should also forgive Einstein for being a product of his times, for his poetic sense, and for his cosmic religious view regarding such things as the order and harmony of the universe.

But what, at bottom, was Einstein's belief? The long answer exists in Einstein's essays on religion and science as given in his Ideas and Opinions (1954), his Autobiographical Notes (1949), and other works. What about a short answer?

In the Summer of 1945, just before the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein wrote a short letter stating his position as an atheist (Figure 1) [Sorry, folks, I couldn't include the illustrations here--Dixon]. Ensign Guy H. Raner had written Einstein from mid-Pacific requesting a clarification on the beliefs of the world famous scientist (Figure 2). Four years later Raner again wrote Einstein for further clarification and asked "Some people might interpret (your letter) to mean that to a Jesuit priest, anyone not a Roman Catholic is an atheist, and that you are in fact an orthodox Jew, or a Deist, or something else. Did you mean to leave room for such an interpretation, or are you from the viewpoint of the dictionary an atheist; i.e., 'one who disbelieves in the existence of a God, or a Supreme Being'?" Einstein's response is shown in Figure 3.

Combining key elements from the first and second response from Einstein there is little doubt as to his position: "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being."

I was fortunate to meet Guy Raner, by chance, at a humanist dinner in late 1994, at which time he told me of the Einstein letters. Raner lives in Chatsworth, California and has retired after a long teaching career. The Einstein letters, a treasured possession for most of his life, were sold in December, 1994, to a firm that deals in historical documents (Profiles in History, Beverly Hills, CA). Five years ago a very brief letter (Raner & Lerner, 1992) describing the correspondence was published in Nature. But the two Einstein letters have remained largely unknown.

Curiously enough, the wonderful and well-known biography Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel, by Banesh Hoffmann (1972) does quote from Einstein's 1945 letter to Raner. But maddeningly, although Hoffmann quotes most of the letter (194-195), he leaves out Einstein's statement: "From the viewpoint of a Jesuit Priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist." Hoffmann's biography was written with the collaboration of Einstein's secretary, Helen Dukas. Could she have played a part in eliminating this important sentence, or was it Hoffmann's wish? I do not know. However, Freeman Dyson (1996) notes "that Helen wanted the world to see, the Einstein of legend, the friend of school children and impoverished students, the gently ironic philosopher, the Einstein without violent feelings and tragic mistakes." Dyson also notes that he thought Dukas "profoundly wrong in trying to hide the true Einstein from the world." Perhaps her well-intentioned protectionism included the elimination of Einstein as atheist.

Although not a favorite of physicists, Einstein, The Life and Times, by the professional biographer Ronald W. Clark (1971), contains one of the best summaries on Einstein's God: "However, Einstein's God was not the God of most men. When he wrote of religion, as he often did in middle and later life, he tended to...clothe with different names what to many ordinary mortals--and to most Jews--looked like a variant of simple agnosticism...This was belief enough. It grew early and rooted deep. Only later was it dignified by the title of cosmic religion, a phrase which gave plausible respectability to the views of a man who did not believe in a life after death and who felt that if virtue paid off in the earthly one, then this was the result of cause and effect rather than celestial reward. Einstein's God thus stood for an orderly system obeying rules which could be discovered by those who had the courage, the imagination, and the persistence to go on searching for them"(19).

Einstein continued to search, even to the last days of his 76 years, but his search was not for the God of Abraham or Moses. His search was for the order and harmony of the world.

Bibliography
Dyson, F. 1996. Forward In The Quotable Einstein (Calaprice, Alice, Ed. ) Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1996. (Note: The section "On Religion, God, and Philosophy" is perhaps the best brief source to present the range and depth of Einstein's views.)
Einstein, A. 1929. quoted in Sommerfeld (see below). 1949. Also as Telegram to a Jewish Newspaper, 1929; Einstein Archive Number 33-272.
___. 1946 and of unknown date. In Einstein, A Centenary Volume. (A. P. French, Ed.) Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press. 1979. 32, 73, & 67.
___. 1959 (1949). "Autobiographical Notes." In Albert Einstein, Philosopher--Scientist. (Paul Arthur Schilpp, Ed.) New York: Harper & Bros.
___. 1950. Letter to M. Berkowitz, October 25, 1950; Einstein Archive Number 59-215.
___. 1954. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown Pub.
___. on many occasions. In Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel. (B. Hoffmann with the collaboration of Helen Dukas.) New York: The Viking Press.
Hoffmann, B. (collaboration with Helen Dukas). 1972. Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel. New York: The Viking Press.
Raner, G. H. & Lerner, L. S. "Einstein's Beliefs." Nature, 358:102.
Sommerfeld, A. 1949. "To Albert Einstein's 70th Birthday." In Albert Einstein, Philospher-Scientist. (Paul Arthur Schilpp, Ed.) New York: Harper & Bros. 1959. 99-105.
Weinberg, S. 1992. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Pantheon Books. 245.

[Clancy]

Lest people get the impression that Einstein believed in a personal god, some kind of entity that could hear prayers and care about us, which is what most people seem to mean by the term "god", let's clarify that he apparently used the term god more or less metaphorically, denoting a more abstract thing like the transcendent oneness beloved of pantheist/atheists such as Spinoza and Wragg :^)

Yep, pantheism. I can't think of a more humble, truth seeking philosophy/position/religion.

"The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image... Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find those who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, Francis of Assisi and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it."

--Albert Einstein
https://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/6072/1einstein.html

[nicofrog]

Mark; wow;
what a powerful re-statement of scientific dogma. And remember when science said words cant' go through air.(Radio,cellphone, microwave transmission) and when Bleeding was the medical technique of the day, and in the second world war we had sulfur, and Castor oil as drugs of choice, everybody knew you put borax in your eyes, And even my dad(Who should have known better) showed me how you could put mercury in your mouth roll it around and spit it back out.

Whoops you mentioned dna, did you know that a physical part of us is transfered to the fetus when we are born!aha eternal life scientifically proven!

True the brain cells rot, hell a lot of mine are gone already, and I gleefully look forward to total physical decomposition,preferably with worms on hand! hopefully someone will use my skull as a candle holder for a century or two! Fortunately some can learn to think with the heart . I'm wondering if everything Beethoven ever was has disintegrated yet!

The Mystery Details left would be rather vast when considering the whole Universe,wouldn't you think?or have the govt. appointed meteorologists who deny global warming also pegged the whole universe as well! Who cares about death, it happens, good thing to or we'd be about 8' deep in people world wide. Now is what matters and I guess I didn't make my self clear. THERE IS A Spirit world every bit as tangible and navigable as this infernal confuser I'm typing on. I've been there, the "Psychic"phenomena were REAL unfakeable concrete as the footing of the golden gate bridge and more majestic.

It is not to avoid death, it is to not be hung up in the mundane life story. Not about crystals amulets and charms..its about children,mothers, grandmothers,great grandmothers,chopping wood, hauling water, having a true loving moment..falling flat on your face in a frozen mudpuddle,then having another true moment.

You ask WHY,
I would re-ask why is it so important to know "What is and what isn't"
especially when SCIENTIFICALLY you know all that will change every 10 years or so Radically.
No ones clinging to anything here any more than we have to cling to air, other than to spit out the pollution our VAST intelligence put there.

I don't spit on intelligence, I can't even spell it, I just SERIOUSLY doubt that we are so good at it, but I guess that depends on what you think the symptoms of Intelligence are! Can you tell I had a lot of talks with my Dad about this! Funny my mom was a "believer" and my dad not, she visits frequently(In dream form she is dead ) and dad seldom, I guess it would be kind of like admitting he was wrong! He hated that. actually, mom didn't leave she just moved in, there was plenty of room in my heart she had nurtured it that way.Is that haunting? If so BRING ON THE GHOSTS and dispel Christian bs mind control mysticism.

Well this is fun, but I gotta go! N

Mark;
Barry, I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. There is no compelling evidence for the existence of a soul. ....

[Zeno Swijtink]

In Scientific American of this June Michael Shermer tells Oprah to witdraw her endorsement of this dvd. Now that I got cancer I can even get worked up a bit about the Lure of Attraction. Contact me privately if you wish to get a copy of the whole review (pdf). - ZS


"Skeptic: The (Other) Secret; June 2007; Scientific American Magazine; by Michael Shermer; 1 Page(s)

An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret--write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail.

A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey's endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts," we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren't such pessimistic sourpusses. The film's promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as "Everything I touch turns to gold," "I am a money magnet," and, my favorite, "There is more money being printed for me right now." Where? Kinko's? (...) "

cont.

[Juggledude]

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[decterlove]

That nobody has REALLY thought any of it through really carefully. We've all experienced odd events and synchronicities in our lives that seem to indicate some degree of ability to move thru life with some conscious intent and have things come our way much more quickly and easily than logic would otherwise dictate. At the same time, it's toxic and ridiculous to assume that a nation suffering violence and famine somehow brought it all on themselves via some individualistic "vibe" they were all semi-consciously embracing. Or that a child has bad vibed themselves into suffering from cancer, etc...

The "New Age" camp which I do sorta belong to, at least I think I have a card somewhere....lemmee check here, oh yeah, here it is right behind my library card.....Is all too enthusiastic and too eager to believe in anything that's simplistic and easy, all the "get anything you want" concepts and perfectly willing to throw all scepticism aside in a New York minute if it means feeling a little groovy.....

and the Scientific community, those real hard thinkers, who need to test their breakfast cereal three times in the morning to make sure it really Oatios, are too instantly willing to dismiss anything that threatens their "we now know EVERYTHING....there is NO MORE to be Known about the Universe, except we have to untangle a couple more of these String theories....

Paradoxically, the discipline needed to really assess much of the new age belief systems is available to the science orientated personality but they just have their heads too far stuck up their asses to even consider REALLY attempting to investigate matters, in a fluid, open but careful way....

I've met scientific people that were just as dogmatic as any religious zealot from the 14th century! Everything that cannot be proven in a completely controlled repeatable experiment is considered myth, folly or as one "scientist" told..."that's okay, it's just science fiction or poetry!" when referring to something that fell out of his range of acceptable reality...

Many of us have had direct experiences that simply cannot be explained by any theory currently found in the standard repertoire of modern scientific paradigm. After my grandfather died in my parents house, the front door was opened at 5 am every morning and slammed shut, just like he used to do when he lived briefly at our home. It took my father a year to accept that this was actually happening! I walked into a den that had no lights on and the push button Sharp stereo (this was the seventies...) turned on full blast. The washing machine turned on by itself on several occasions and my sister had the frightening experience of being squeezed on several occasions. This went on for a year until my father finally the "reality" of it and yelled, "Ed, get out!" And then it ceased....

Any hardcore scientist type will tell you....A. this just didn't happen, we all imagined it. or B. I'm lying to try to sell something. C. It could have happened but it can all be explained by some extremely complicated and inelegant theory about brain cells, and whatever...

Bottom line....things like this do happen and they happen all the time and you can throw a stick in any direction and hit someone with a similar unexplainable by modern scientific thinking, experience...

Modern man somehow believes that after, what, a half a million years of human evolution, that only in the last 400 years were their any human beings that had the vaguest understanding of the Universe around them...Meanwhile, that select chosen few can't even explain the pyramids, or Stonehedge or any other of dozens or hundreds of mysteries that "primitive" people understood perfectly well...

I'm not here to praise all quasi-new age belief systems....they are obviously filled with errors and potentially dangerous seductions as well....but the worship of Scientific Reductionist Materialistic thinking must also be seriously held up to the light of a New Day....

[Sara S]

Is it just a coincidence that the following was delanceyplace.com's daily quote on May14?:
In today's excerpt--chance occurrences and
probability:



"[In chance occurrences] we find the basis for
superstition. A 'chance occurrence' occurs. Not
knowing the odds behind it, we marvel. Now, really,
what are the odds? Surely too tiny for chance!



"Alan Guth, a physicist at MIT, described an example
from his own family of how easily we turn the random
into an omen. An uncle of his, who'd lived alone, had
been found dead in his home, and a policeman had
come to deliver the bad news to Guth's mother. While
the officer was there, Guth's sister, who was traveling
on business, happened to call. 'My mother and sister
were both shocked at the timing of the call, that it
coincided with the policeman's visit, and the news of
my uncle's death,' said Guth. 'They thought that there
had to be something telepathic about it.' When Guth
heard from his mother of this miraculous instance of
kin-based telecommunion, he couldn't help but do
some
quick calculations. As a rule, his sister phoned their
mother about once a week. She tended to call either
first thing in the morning or in the evening, when she
had a moment and when her mother was likeliest to
be around. The policeman had arrived at his mother's
house at about 5:00 p.m., and, because there were
several solemn orders of business to discuss, his
visit had lasted more than an hour, possibly two. All
factors considered, Guth said to me, the odds of his
sister calling while the policeman was on-site were
[not especially low mathematically].



"The more one knows about probabilities, the less
amazing ... coincidences become. ...
John Littlewood, a renowned mathematician at the
University of Cambridge, formalized the apparent
intrusion of the supernatural into ordinary life as a kind
of natural law, which he called 'Littlewood's Law of
Miracles.' He defined a miracle as many people
might: a one-in-a-million event to which we accord
real
significance when it occurs. By his law, such miracles
arise in anyone's life at an average of once a month.
Here's how Littlewood explained it: You are out and
about and barraged by the world for some eight hours
a day. You see and hear things happening at a rate of
maybe one per second, amounting to 30,000 or so
events a day, or a million a month. The vast majority of
events you barely notice, but every so often, from the
great streams of happenings, you are treated to a
marvel: the pianist at the bar starts playing a song
you'd just been thinking of, or you pass the window of
a pawnshop and see the heirloom ring that had been
stolen from your apartment eighteen months ago.
Yes, life is full of miracles, minor, major, middling C.
It's called 'not being in a persistent vegetative state'
and
'having a life span longer than a click beetles.'


Natalie Angier, The Canon, Houghton Mifflin,
2006, pp.

That nobody has REALLY thought any of it through really carefully. We've all experienced odd events and synchronicities in our lives that seem to indicate some degree of ability to move thru life with some conscious intent and have things come our way much more quickly and easily than logic would otherwise dictate. At the same time, it's toxic and ridiculous to assume that a nation suffering violence and famine somehow brought it all on themselves via some individualistic "vibe" they were all semi-consciously embracing. Or that a child has bad vibed themselves into suffering from cancer, etc...

The "New Age" camp which I do sorta belong to, at least I think I have a card somewhere....lemmee check here, oh yeah, here it is right behind my library card.....Is all too enthusiastic and too eager to believe in anything that's simplistic and easy, all the "get anything you want" concepts and perfectly willing to throw all scepticism aside in a New York minute if it means feeling a little groovy.....

and the Scientific community, those real hard thinkers, who need to test their breakfast cereal three times in the morning to make sure it really Oatios, are too instantly willing to dismiss anything that threatens their "we now know EVERYTHING....there is NO MORE to be Known about the Universe, except we have to untangle a couple more of these String theories....

Paradoxically, the discipline needed to really assess much of the new age belief systems is available to the science orientated personality but they just have their heads too far stuck up their asses to even consider REALLY attempting to investigate matters, in a fluid, open but careful way....

I've met scientific people that were just as dogmatic as any religious zealot from the 14th century! Everything that cannot be proven in a completely controlled repeatable experiment is considered myth, folly or as one "scientist" told..."that's okay, it's just science fiction or poetry!" when referring to something that fell out of his range of acceptable reality...

Many of us have had direct experiences that simply cannot be explained by any theory currently found in the standard repertoire of modern scientific paradigm. After my grandfather died in my parents house, the front door was opened at 5 am every morning and slammed shut, just like he used to do when he lived briefly at our home. It took my father a year to accept that this was actually happening! I walked into a den that had no lights on and the push button Sharp stereo (this was the seventies...) turned on full blast. The washing machine turned on by itself on several occasions and my sister had the frightening experience of being squeezed on several occasions. This went on for a year until my father finally the "reality" of it and yelled, "Ed, get out!" And then it ceased....

Any hardcore scientist type will tell you....A. this just didn't happen, we all imagined it. or B. I'm lying to try to sell something. C. It could have happened but it can all be explained by some extremely complicated and inelegant theory about brain cells, and whatever...

Bottom line....things like this do happen and they happen all the time and you can throw a stick in any direction and hit someone with a similar unexplainable by modern scientific thinking, experience...

Modern man somehow believes that after, what, a half a million years of human evolution, that only in the last 400 years were their any human beings that had the vaguest understanding of the Universe around them...Meanwhile, that select chosen few can't even explain the pyramids, or Stonehedge or any other of dozens or hundreds of mysteries that "primitive" people understood perfectly well...

I'm not here to praise all quasi-new age belief systems....they are obviously filled with errors and potentially dangerous seductions as well....but the worship of Scientific Reductionist Materialistic thinking must also be seriously held up to the light of a New Day....

[Dixon]

Sara, this is so true!

Misunderstanding of probabilities is one of the most common sources of belief in things like omens, creationism, psychic powers, and "God's master plan".

People think that if some juxtaposition of events is extremely unlikely to be by chance, then it NEVER could happen by chance, so they posit supernatural explanations. But a one in a trillion chance is just that--a one in a trillion chance, and on a planet of six-billion-plus sentients, such rare coincidences will occur regularly without really implying some underlying significance.

(Whether people whose emotional, social and/or financial needs are met by the resulting beliefs will have any interest in correcting their misunderstandings of probability is another matter).

Another source of confusion is the common assumption that the patterns we see must imply some underlying plan, creator, purpose or force, because pattern (order) could not arise spontaneously from randomness. But randomness and order, like other yin/yang polarities, are reciprocally co-creating, arising phoenix-like from one another constantly. For instance, the outcome of a large number of dice throws, with each individual outcome random, predictably produces a lovely symmetrical curve.

As I say in my poem "Mama Chaos":

"Inhale, it’s chaos.
Exhale, it’s order.
Things fall together...
...coincidence effervesces --
randomness relaxing into order, then back again..."

etc, etc......

I guess that's enough preaching for now.

Blessings;

Dixon



Is it just a coincidence that the following was delanceyplace.com's daily quote on May14?:
In today's excerpt--chance occurrences and
probability:



"[In chance occurrences] we find the basis for
superstition. A 'chance occurrence' occurs. Not
knowing the odds behind it, we marvel. Now, really,
what are the odds? Surely too tiny for chance!



"Alan Guth, a physicist at MIT, described an example
from his own family of how easily we turn the random
into an omen. An uncle of his, who'd lived alone, had
been found dead in his home, and a policeman had
come to deliver the bad news to Guth's mother. While
the officer was there, Guth's sister, who was traveling
on business, happened to call. 'My mother and sister
were both shocked at the timing of the call, that it
coincided with the policeman's visit, and the news of
my uncle's death,' said Guth. 'They thought that there
had to be something telepathic about it.' When Guth
heard from his mother of this miraculous instance of
kin-based telecommunion, he couldn't help but do
some
quick calculations. As a rule, his sister phoned their
mother about once a week. She tended to call either
first thing in the morning or in the evening, when she
had a moment and when her mother was likeliest to
be around. The policeman had arrived at his mother's
house at about 5:00 p.m., and, because there were
several solemn orders of business to discuss, his
visit had lasted more than an hour, possibly two. All
factors considered, Guth said to me, the odds of his
sister calling while the policeman was on-site were
[not especially low mathematically].



"The more one knows about probabilities, the less
amazing ... coincidences become. ...
John Littlewood, a renowned mathematician at the
University of Cambridge, formalized the apparent
intrusion of the supernatural into ordinary life as a kind
of natural law, which he called 'Littlewood's Law of
Miracles.' He defined a miracle as many people
might: a one-in-a-million event to which we accord
real
significance when it occurs. By his law, such miracles
arise in anyone's life at an average of once a month.
Here's how Littlewood explained it: You are out and
about and barraged by the world for some eight hours
a day. You see and hear things happening at a rate of
maybe one per second, amounting to 30,000 or so
events a day, or a million a month. The vast majority of
events you barely notice, but every so often, from the
great streams of happenings, you are treated to a
marvel: the pianist at the bar starts playing a song
you'd just been thinking of, or you pass the window of
a pawnshop and see the heirloom ring that had been
stolen from your apartment eighteen months ago.
Yes, life is full of miracles, minor, major, middling C.
It's called 'not being in a persistent vegetative state'
and
'having a life span longer than a click beetles.'


Natalie Angier, The Canon, Houghton Mifflin,
2006, pp.

[decterlove]

This is truly a rather fascination thread of observations, honest revelations, and counter-arguments. What I'm most struck by is that taken as a whole one gets not only a wide spectrum of opinions, some with strong emotional content, but also a wide spectrum of ways to be in the world.

I would posit that for further investigative purposes, that we envision the scientific world viewers on the left side and the "mystical believers" on the right side. Doing so, from my vantage point, I observe several things. One, I find that on the extreme left, that the rationalist contributions tend to become very hardened, cynical and angry in regard to the subject at hand as well as often perhaps to life in general. In my opinion, this is not an optimal way to live in the world. In it's furthest extreme, well beyond the participants of this forum hopefully, we might get "scientists" who are completely able to detach and even torture animals, or humans, create and create weaponry, etc without any regard whatsoever for the experiential suffering they are helping to inflict on other forms of life...ie...an extremely rational approach to life entirely devoid of feeling, "Spirit" and compassion.

Two, I observe that on the extreme right, one finds people very willing to suspend all rationality in favor of engaging in novel or exotic thoughts, rituals, and behaviors, and that approach life in sort of a childlike fashion. Many people who fall into this camp in my observation have a hard time dealing with real world necessities and responsibilities, but do seem to enjoy life between the self-inflicted crisis. There is a kind of softness, or flimsiness in a way to their thinking and their ability to deal with life in the "real" world." In the farthest extreme though this might be linked to a complete disengagement from reality...ie...some sort of mental illness and loss of practical coping skills.

More towards the middle however, you find two much more healthy orientations. On the "healthy" left side, you find a scientific, rationalist inquiry to living that includes curiosity, discipline, wonder, maturity, practicality, skillfulness, perseverance, reserve, and healthy skepticism as well as an genuine enthusiasm for investigating life in all it's mystery. This approach, however, tends to devalue somewhat the subtlety and depth of feelings, impulses, and perhaps to some extent, intuitions, and it is certainly more interested in the practicalities of the material world than the complexities, murkiness and speculativeness of the emotional/spiritual realm. It is very much a male orientation, as well, to living.

On the "healthy" right side, you find less interest and reverence for logical thinking and rationality, and more inclination to jump to solutions or actions that feel right and are inclusive, sensitive and respectful in the immediate sense to other people's needs and "getting the job done." The degree of wonder and reverence in these individuals often invokes a search for some sort of transcendence to matter and a willingness to sacrifice pure reason and rationality in favor of what feels right and what supports the larger web of life in the most optimal manner. This, of course, does correspond to a more female way of being in the world as well, and Oprah certainly does fall into this category!

So this "conflict" to me becomes a perfect example of just one more "stuck in duality" dilemma of Post-Modern living. The list is endless.....Male/Female, East/West, Communism/Capitalism, Allopathic/Homeopathic, Spiritual/Material, Christianity/Muslim, Gay/Straight, Abortion/Pro Life, Democrat/Republican, Conservative/Radical, etc etc ad infinatum.....

Isn't it time that we begin to suspect that the Truth may not simply to be found in, but is to be VIGOROUSLY SEARCHED FOR in the MIDDLE? Isn't that what the modern existential crisis is really demanding? We can all decide some of the above conflicts, clearly in a favor of one side or the other. Some of us may insist that "Yes, definitely, a woman's choice in regard to her own body is to be much more valued than the life of a fetus." And you can take any example from the above dichotomies and come with your own similar personal preference. But with the number of conflicts now in the world involving every single facet of our personal life and our larger political life isn't it conceivable that just for a moment we might take off our caps that advertise our favorite team and ponder.....Why is there SO MUCH DISAGREEMENT AND WHERE IS THE REAL TRUTH TO BE FOUND IN SUCH A SWARM OF TURMOIL?

Science certainly hold a place of deserved reverence in modern man's quest to find meaning and make sense of the world around him. But doesn't science, itself contain and demand a component of faith? Each step quantum physics takes for example towards a Unified Field Theory, etc. seems to reveal a layer underneath that was previously UNIMAGINABLE that is even more complex and illusive that the previous one. Aren't scientists practicing Faith in believing that ultimately Science in it's current modern investigative form will provide ALL THE ANSWERS TO MAN'S DEEPEST QUESTIONS ABOUT LIFE? Even the great evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, admitted on the Charlie Rose show, "The next real frontier is the Mind and we don't yet really have a clue yet about the Mind's real nature." (not an exact quote, but the essence of it...)

[Braggi]

Science certainly hold a place of deserved reverence in modern man's quest to find meaning and make sense of the world around him. But doesn't science, itself contain and demand a component of faith?

Decterlove, I enjoy your posts and would love to spend some days talking over all these things with you. I agree with you in spirit in so many things and disagree with you in fact over many others. I'll tackle this one issue with you here.

The short answer is: no. Science is the antithesis of faith. Science, to be practical, requires many assumptions, yet, the essence of science is that those assumptions are constantly being challenged and the data constantly being updated and, hopefully, improved. Even that process involves many missteps and errors, yet understanding and knowledge are always growing. Science is like a vast jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing or obscured. Scientists are valliantly trying to make sense of the pieces we "know" and fill in the blanks with what we supppose (and assume). Perhaps the greatest challenge to science is dogma yet dogma is the very basis for so many "faiths."

[decterlove]

Decterlove, I enjoy your posts and would love to spend some days talking over all these things with you. I agree with you in spirit in so many things and disagree with you in fact over many others. I'll tackle this one issue with you here. ...
Thanks for your compliment and indeed I'd love to meet any of the interesting people who post and respond here for a cup of non-dogmatic tea outside the realm of West County cyberspace....

Let me point you back again to the main contention of my above post which is that we should begin to look in the cracks and the dmz's for the deepest truth in regard to these huge, monolithic conflicts human beings are now fully immersed in....your following sentence is a yellow flag to me that there is more to be discovered.....

"The short answer is: no. Science is the antithesis of faith."

If science is indeed the antithesis of faith....then like all opposites it very likely contains elements of the very thing it is opposed to. I don't make this statement to sound "cosmic" but instead out of sincere evaluation that stems in part from observing all the various and often highly contradictory, political platforms that have sprung up in America since the civil rights movement of the early Sixties. Quoting Buffalo Springfield, "Nobody's right if everybody's wrong!'

Many scientists, from an "outsiders" perspective, seem to embrace science as a cosmology, and as a way to manage the larger existential pressures we are all subject to as biological (and/or spiritual?) organisms. And they may very well initially choose this worldview in agreement, or in reaction to, the ideas and home environment they were brought up with, much the same as many individuals become Democrats or Republicans due to family influences they are exposed to.

From an "objective" and again outsiders point of view, there, at times, seems to be a vehemence/dogma that is generated in defending the "framework of ideas" or world view, scientists have gathered that "comfort" them in their own struggle with the deeper fears and mysteries we face as human beings. This foundation for this vehemence (or dogma) could be considered merely intellectual, or it could be considered to have a strong underlying emotional component.

Science, to be practical, requires many assumptions, yet, the essence of science is that those assumptions are constantly being challenged and the data constantly being updated and, hopefully, improved.

Scientists seem to me equally, or at least near equally, just as prone to dogma and clinging to past structures, as any religious personality. Look at the nature of the struggle many scientists (Einstein, for example) have faced when presenting new groundbreaking theories to the general scientific community. They almost always face scorn, ridicule, and condemnation until they are able to provide incontrovertible truth that indeed their fully investigated "intuitive leaps" are indeed correct. The key point here is that the resistence from other scientists is MORE EMOTIONALLY BASED ON THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO CHANGING "REALITIES" THAN SIMPLY A COOL DETACHED PURELY ACADEMIC SKEPTICISM.

The often hidden factor, the looming elephant in the living room so to speak, in any debate between the merits of science and religion is the mortality of human beings. Scientists often discount religious faith as providing a false childlike comfort to the individual in facing death. I believe that many scientists find that their world view and denial of any sort of existence after our biological form dissipates, actually provides a sort of tragic but heroic, stable framework which is equally comforting to the scientific personality. What humans truly fear the most is UNCERTAINTY oddly enough, maybe even more than concepts of eternal damnation and punishment! Science offers the scientist A KIND OF FAITH.

Scientists are valiantly trying to make sense of the pieces we "know" and fill in the blanks with what we suppose (and assume). Perhaps the greatest challenge to science is dogma yet dogma is the very basis for so many "faiths."

Let me suggest in closing that yes, scientists are valiant and heroic, deserving our respect and admiration in their search for Truth, but their greatest achievement yet may lie in overcoming their own tendency towards scientific dogma.

[Rich]

faith (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof(2) : complete trust
scientific method
Function: noun
: principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.
Science and the scientific method has nothing to do with faith. It is a process used to systematically challenge previous assumptions and theories and build upon our body of knowledge.
A scientist who defends his or her theory from competing theories is not engaging in faith or dogma but reasoned argument.A vehement argument is not a bad thing if based on solid evidence. If someone is arguing against very solid evidence he or she should be able to produce evidence equally solid to counter.
The scientific method is not for "insiders"; it is not "cosmology". It is a useful tool that we would all benefit from really using.
Assumptions are not faith, but must be tested and supported. Hypothoses are subject to double blind studies to help eliminate bias and peer reviewed further before published as Theory. This sceptisism is a good thing. It protects us from the unscrupulous and the careless.
Some scientific discoveries have been "inspired", however, before gaining credence they were tested and peer reviewed.
"Firm belief in something for which there is no proof"... Is it wrong? Not always. But there is higher probability for error than that tested with the scientific method. Is there "bad" science? Yes, but that is why the method has proven effective to correct them.Do politics play a part? In anything people do, relationships and power come into play.
I do not think that science is the ONLY legitimate way of knowing, but it is pretty darn good.
One thing I do know: science is not "sort of faith" simply because "opposites often share charactaristics". Opposites do exist. Black is not white, facism is not communism, hot is not cold...science is not faith
I forgot his name, but a Evolutionary biologist recently said, "I cannot prove God does not exist, but I can tell you that the probability is very, very, very low."
Science deals in probabilities and methods of thought striving toward truths. Faith deals in absolutes with little or no proof. Which one is more subject to abuse? Science helped free us from the Tyranny of the Church and gave birth to modern democracy. While far from perfect, it beats the hell outta Theocracy of any stripe.
Respectfully,
Rich

[Nemea Laessig]

I get the impression that many folks who talk about the "faith" and "dogma" of science haven't bothered to actually learn about science and the scientific method, so thanks for your clear explanation, Rich.

As to matters of life, death and spirituality I remain a firm agnostic pantheist, like my old granddad before me.

Cheers,
~Nemea

[decterlove]

By the way for further more in depth discussion of the Secret, mostly pro-Secret actually, check out:

https://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/intention-manifestation/

best site I've come across on the interesting, and indeed somewhat controversial subject! But perhaps this forum provides the most balanced view!

:hammer:

[Rich]

By the way for further more in depth discussion of the Secret, mostly pro-Secret actually, check out:

https://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/intention-manifestation/

best site I've come across on the interesting, and indeed somewhat controversial subject! But perhaps this forum provides the most balanced view!

Decterlove,
With all due respect I am digging in my heels and locking horns. I appreciate the link, but it is certainly not balanced. I found hardly any dissent or even rational discussion. It was rife with group think and self congratulatory drivel.
I find "The Secret" ridiculous and based in an insular reality that does not apply in most of the world (much less rational thought).
Example: Iraq, Darfur, Rwanda, Nicaragua, inner city Detroit.... There are amazing people there who put most americans and europeans to SHAME with desire and willingness to sacrifice and work hard for a mere living wage. Positive thinking? Try finding your bootstraps after the most powerful country in the world is destabilizing your political process, killing your leaders, blowing up your institutions for 20 years!
To base a belief system on one's ability to "manifest" in an extremely wealthy country and call it an "answer" is absurd. Go do that in Nicaragua with a business loan set @ 35-40%. In Iraq over 600,000 dead and untold maimed all around you and no clean water. Pick up your own body parts after losing them and rebuild your life afterwords.
"The Secret" itself is a rehashing of the "Power of Positive Thinking" from 1954. To call it new or secret is lying.
Fact: Really Bad sh** happens to really good people doing great things with good intentions and really good sh** happens to a**holes trying to f**k people over. Positive thinking is great but it won't turn a bullet or machete or stop your child from starving because you cannot find food...period. (remember the Ghost Dance and the bullet proof shirts? Good intentions...total fantasy...)
**On the other hand we can have a rational appoach to problems and even solve a few. It ain't gonna be from magic but from careful planning, meticulous execution, and you still might come up short. But we keep pressing on, because we are compelled to WORK to push back against the wrongs...
This is where we utilize the positive thinking, to get up and try again or if we got lucky, look around and see if we can't help someone else out just a little bit.
Sorry, I don't buy "the Secret". That movie is about self-serving greed, fantasy and cosmic justification thereof.

[Dixon]

Yeah, what he said.

Rich, that was entirely well-reasoned and so nicely articulated. I really appreciate that kind of thing.

Cheers!

Dixon


Decterlove,
With all due respect I am digging in my heels and locking horns. I appreciate the link, but it is certainly not balanced. I found hardly any dissent or even rational discussion. It was rife with group think and self congratulatory drivel. ...

[decterlove]

Dear Rich and other posters in agreement with,

Oddly enough, for the most part I agree with you and I posted the link really just as a further resource for people who are fully enamored, or perhaps fully deceived from your side of the argument, by the concepts presented in the Secret (to be referred to as LOA for the sake of brevity from here on...).

After I posted the link, I realized how much I appreciated the depth and discipline of the counterargument to LOA on Waccobb, and I agree in part with most of what you are saying, but I simply don't buy the Scientific Rational Reductionist Argument all the way either. I am a firm believer in a transcendent reality and this is where we do indeed lock horns. And I believe as long as we are fully committed to ignoring and dismissing this transcendent reality, we are going to be subject to the horrors of Darfur, Detroit and the many of miseries populating the world we now live in as we simply will never be fully empowered to access the real rotting roots of such human tragedies. (ie Spiritual in nature)

My own personal view of such a transcendent reality is in no way identical to the conceptual framework proposed in the Secret, however, I do believe the Secret may have some grain of validity, if only it could be challenged and articulated better and ultimately honed into a more precise and emcompassing set of tools. I believe some of the minds on Waccobb are capable of honing it in that direction if they were fully inspired and committed to doing so. And since it has been given such recent attention and play in the Media I think it makes a wonderful starting point to investigate further the abyss between Faith and Science and New Age Impulses vs Pure Scientific Rationalism.

I wrote a long response to Rich the other day regarding the nature and some of the overlapping qualities to Science and Faith but alas must as I was about to submit it some glitch occured and it was whisked away into the black hole of cyberspace forever. I do wish to respond to some of the ideas presented by the last few anti-LOA posters...but the demands of Time and Space indeed interfere with some of our higher (or lower! LOL) inclinations.

What I would like to suggest on behalf of both pro and con sides of LOA, is that a new thread be started that stays very specific to actual incidents and experiences in real time and space that individual Wb posters have experienced that might fall into the category of LOA. in this way, the scientific minds may indeed be able to offer a rational explanation for a particular incident, ie...statistical, etc. and the "mystical" minds, for lack of a truly better term at the moment, might be able to better assess and more clearly articulate all the various aspects that may have lead up to and contributed to a specific "manifestation" they were after. They (MMs vs SMs?) might also be more inclined to subtract some of their LOA explanations for any given incident as well as indeed an SM or two, might occasionally be inspired to admit that a particular incident truly stretches the ability for any rational scientific explanations to account for it. (my example of the washing machine in one of my above postings, perhaps, or was it just purely a statistical anomaly?)

I know this might just further irritate some anti LOA members and perhaps falsely encourage some pro LOA members but I think this issue like no other fully encompasses and demonstrates one of the central cultural collides we are immersed in at the moment and truly deserves a deeper observation and investigation. And indeed due to precisely your criticisms of the forum I posted a link to, that forum may be incapable of true inquiry into the subject, while the rough and tumble Wild West County Rugged Individualist Types on Wacco just might be able to tie down this Sacred Calf if they really applied their Holistic Minds to it.....

So Feedback Yes or No on the idea of a new thread would be acknowledged and appreciated. Or perhaps we're all better off just fully concentrating on the transcendent and life-affirming nature of the barbeque this weekend! (red onions, tofu, green tomatoes, and squash for those life affirmers firmly eschewing all flesh foods!)