Book Review : The Secret!

Background

The Secret began as a DVD. Rhonda Byrne had faced a tumultuous time in life and came out of it only after she learned The Secret, from a hundred year old book gifted to her by her daughter. In gratitude she created a film to share this knowledge and after its remarkable success she created a book by the same name.

What is The Secret?

The Secret, written by Rhonda Byrne, is a book which shows you ways of bringing, rather attracting whatever you want into your life. It unveils the power of your true self and tells you what you are capable of, gives practical examples of using The Secret, and then lets you explore your own ways of implementing it in your life.

The book preaches the law of attraction, and quite opposite to our normal understanding and belief that “opposites attract”, this law of attraction claims that like attracts like. The law states that people experience logical manifestations of their predominant thoughts, feelings and words. Your thoughts have all the power to turn you to riches from rags or vice-versa. Negative thoughts will bring about negative manifestations and positive thoughts will lead to positive manifestations. The theory is very simple and absolute, with no exceptions. Your thoughts turn in things or situations. You are the most powerful being, the most potent person to bring to your life things you want by just thinking about them. You make your own life, your own destiny.

The law of attraction works on three steps:
1. Know what you want and ask the universe for it.
2. Feel and behave as if the object you asked for is on its way
3. Be open to receiving it.

All of us have heard from Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist that “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true”. The Secret moves one step further to explain you how to get the whole universe conspire to get your wishes. It says that you create your universe with your thoughts, so know what you want; ask the universe for it without even one speck of pessimism. The universe is abundant, an unlimited supply and you can tap into it through your thoughts, your feelings.

Through the book, the author presents different ways of applying The Secret for getting what you want, be it money, a healthy body, a fulfilling relationship or a perfect partner. It talks about becoming the master of your thought process, of guiding your mind to think about what you want. You might wish to stick a check worth a million on your cupboard if you want money or you might create space in your lifestyle for the special someone you wish to have in your life.

The author leaves you with yourself to decide what you wish to do with the knowledge of the Secret because its your destiny that you are making and You are right in what you decide.

My thoughts on the book:

The Secret lets you know that you are the creator and makes you believe that you can achieve what you wish by being happy and full of gratitude. But there are various weak points of the strategy:

1)Author warns about negative thoughts, so to be healthy you shouldn’t hear the pains of any other person who is unhealthy, as that your thoughts might digress. This is quite a selfish act.

2)The book says that whatever happens to you is what you brought to your life through conscious or unconscious thoughts. But this cannot explain an event of mass killing, riots or massacre. How can so many people have similar thoughts to attract the incident into their lives?

3)The Secret doesn’t say anything about a situation where multiple people ask for the same thing or more strikingly, if two people desire opposite things.

The Secret is definitely a good read for whoever has lost confidence in himself and is feeling grossly dejected but it cannot be applied to all phases of your life.

Reviewed by Charanjeet Singh