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“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
— Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO)
Reading time: 20 mins
Mainstreaming Magick
It might seem a stretch to equate boiler basement magick with so much of the self-help, positive thinking cult but bear with me.
You’ve probably become accustomed to the gradual popularisation and mainstreaming of various forms of ceremonial and sympathetic magick. There is a huge market in black magick and associated celebration of the demonic and supernatural mysteries. Wherever there is a natural curiosity about such things then you can be sure it can be milked by turning it into a commodity thereby serving a tripartite purpose of 1) Feeding the economic technosphere 2) entrainment of elite ideas 3) normalisation of their memes and concepts.
Positive thinking, much of new age philosophy, self-help coaching and business is now reaping the short-term, feel-good benefits of occult principles applied to daily life. Now, mainstreaming the Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Wicca and Witchcraft can be seen in Hollywood, television, art and entertainment in general. There is a huge information explosion purposely generated and carefully executed like a drip-feed of psychic driving.
Hey boys and girls! Werewolves or Vampires? Make your choice. Magickal formulas and invocations? Take your pick! (Just don’t think for yourselves…Conjure something that can do it for you).
If you know nothing of ritual magick, don’t worry. You’re better off. But it’s important to know that occult principles lie behind much of our institutional history and play a big part in Elite beliefs up to the present day. Which is why, in part, the marketing of magick in popular culture is so lucrative: it taps in to a human need to control in the face of uncertainty; to be part of a tribe that may have the inside scoop. It would also be foolish to say that there isn’t illuminating knowledge to be found in some forms of occult study of the dim and distant past. However, we’ll stick to the brief: how positive psychology and new age marketing is firmly selling black magick principles.
So, why is this dicing with the devil? When we attempt such magickal intrusions into the natural order with the dictum of “energy follows thought” as a purely ego-based desire for betterment, one is elevating personal fantasy over what IS. And in occult terms this becomes super-charged regardless of magickal theory suggesting otherwise. This wish to employ a framework of magickal formulas is enticing but tends to invite more chaos into one’s life, not less. Such a place may initially offer fleeting “success” much like the initial froth on a champagne glass or firework display that dies down as quickly as it begins, but it’s not a long-term solution.
If you want to align to a law that posits a type of attraction which benefits us, you have to first ask where does the focus lie? MATTER OR SPIRIT? Do I really know the difference? Ask yourself if you are channelling your desires to get something for nothing. Does it make it a short cut? And if so, are short-cuts generally useful?
There is nothing new under the sun. There are however, innumerable ways truth can be re-packaged and re-sold to humanity as innovation and relevation to keep us trapped in the same cycles of spiritual imprisonment which have remained unbroken for millennia. If you have a hard time pondering that essential reality then you’re probably a perfect candidate for the above tripartite system of control. What the accumulated wisdom of the past has tried to tell us over and over is that the keynote of our times is deception, the likes of which traverse social, cultural, political and most certainly so-called “spiritual” precepts. Such modes of high level disinformation and distortion work in ways that can easily boggle the mind.
These industries are selling is version of mainstreamed occult magick with a smiley face. Unless you are are aware of this you may blithely take on all these concepts and theories – much of which have nuggets truth within them – thinking various pots of gold are within your grasp. It is true, that occult wisdom or esotericism, the old traditions are a form of “magic” when viewed from the perspective of an ancient ancestor’s mind. (As the famous quote from futurist and author Arthur C. Clarke mentioned: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He didn’t mean that such creations are the product of magic or magical thinking, although they can be, only that it can appear that way without sufficient knowledge of the processes involved). The technological advancement of our age is as much about how to control the mind as it is about how to control matter. But sincere illusions are still illusions. Manipulation against natural order is still manipulation regardless of intent.
Magick with a “K” as opposed to the old ways of “magic” which is simply another word for attuning to God and Nature and thereby creating flow, is to use ritual, material and elemental forces to achieve something for the self – even if well-intentioned. It is to interfere with natural processes instead of striving to gain mastery over oneself so that such interference is no longer necessary. Alchemy for example, is a fascinating tradition with much to commend it. It can be considered “occult” and various modern practices align to healthy expression of initiation as do elements of ancient shamanism. In the past alchemy as a symbol of soul growth was laden with complex symbolism in order to protect these truths against the established religious orders of the day. Alchemists had no modern science to inform it, so extrapolating observation from nature, myth and the human psyche produced an intuitive understanding of the soul’s evolution. As a result, the science of today has its roots in alchemical knowledge.
Much like the metaphor of transmuting lead to gold, the alchemical knowledge was in itself akin to transferring wealth of wisdom into a holding pattern, much like the buying of gold coins today as a protection from the chaos of the market. There were undoubtedly occult groups dedicated to preserving this knowledge, acting as custodians for the future. Whereas, others wanted to invert such secrets and use it for power and glory. Such is the danger of elite hierarchies, however well-intentioned.
The sharing of these discoveries could have easily got you burnt at the stake for heresy hence the occultation of such knowledge and hierarchical secrecy which developed. Even then there was a big difference between ceremonial magick derived from the Babylonia and the Kabbalah, as opposed to esoteric Christianity. (But that’s another story). We are no longer burnt at the stake for thinking out of the box, but heresy is still alive and well in the form of groupthink and adherence to the authority of Official Culture. More importantly, the crude and brutal suppression of the past has now been replaced my mass mind control and social engineering memes which deliver the same result through more covert means. The trappings of occult symbolism is still evident in much of our culture but certain developments in the healing arts in partnership with psychology represent key truths without the occult trappings of the past. The key difference here is how we integrate this knowledge into our daily lives and whether or not it aligns to natural order or seeks to surpass it.
An illuminated page from a book on alchemical processes and receipts, R. Lullius, Ymage de Vie, late 15th | Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org
Thus we have to be aware of how any belief can be used to serve Official Culture and its warping of the mass mind. This is especially true of practices that potentially access subconscious and unconscious material without our awareness and by claiming they are something other than what it is actually presented. There are plenty folks happily unaware they are doing the bidding of less than healthy forces to allow these memes to propagate unhindered.
Again, such beliefs are short-cuts of self-gratification dressed up as serving others (white magick) as opposed to serving self (black magick) yet the popularised versions of both bypass the process in favour of short-circuiting the point of the journey. To manipulate means to control “…someone or something to your own advantage, often unfairly or dishonestly.” To go against the natural flow to obtain something for the self is a form of dishonesty since one is choosing to change what is in favour of a distinctly human desire (thus a limited perception) to interfere with free-will and the unfolding of Creation. By embracing these magickal formulas one is going against the very flow of Creation itself.
To access a path that is aligned to your most authentic self is a creative process that is ultimately an expression of love because there is nothing more loving and nourishing to oneself and others by facing the dragons of obstruction – in all their myriad forms – because the struggle toward victory must provide positive effects for those we love and those that make up our community. Such effects must be grounded in the real to make a lasting difference.
What if the Hermetic maxim “as above, so below” reveals a input/output scenario where dimensions or densities out of phase with ours reflect and extrude realities into our world? We can easily set up static interference within that process by strengthening forces that go counter to it. i.e. by violating free-will of others and of the universe by thinking we know best. And let’s face it, how often do people truly ask themselves and others for permission to do what is in their heart’s desire? Right. We just go ahead because it feels good and it relieves us from having to do the very un-sexy dirty work of transformation from the bottom of the staircase.
If you are seeking to change reality in order to receive some form of benefit, through ritual, mantras, positive thinking, law of attraction etc. then you are already assuming a self-appointed role of arbiter and manager of reality, sending a signal to the Universe that you not only know best but you anticipate rewards for a role that isn’t yours to assume. That’s a pathway to entropy because hubris is the bridge you have unwittingly built to cross those gaping chasms in your self-awareness. You are essentially forcing the Universe to do your magickal bidding true to dark magicians everywhere. The only difference is whether you are conscious of that fact. But that difference doesn’t negate the net results. We choose to ignore or selectively edit the warning signs because our feelings and emotions seek the path of least resistance. Which is why the forcing of Creation has inevitably created more chaos and pain throughout history as human beings sought relief from their self-seeded demons through a perceived authority that sold us the idea it was in our best interests, rather than theirs.
The results of positive thinking in the face of negative momentum and the denial that gave rise to it.
Image by Jürgen Sieber | Pixabay
We can change the world
Don’t you find it curious that any attempts to spiritually change the world at a global level have been met with more chaos throughout history?
Harmonic convergences, group prayer and light workers conferences seeking to send love and light to people and situations appear to precede and manifest the exact opposite. Imagine the level of prayer that was going on before the the Second World War broke out? Literally thousands of millions of people were praying that it wouldn’t happen. It did. And the result was over 65 million dead.
I remember participating in the protests of 11 million people around the world protesting against the soon to be war in Iraq in 2003. A similar number of people – maybe more – were praying and meditating on a daily basis for love and compassion to prevail. It didn’t. And millions or Iraqis and hundreds of thousands more died, and continue to die as a result of that carefully planned carnage.
That’s not to say there isn’t evidence that we can’t produce effects in our local and regional environments, nor that the power of prayer is beneficial. But there seems to be a cut-off point for planetary change, where human desire for change crosses a Rubicon of hubris and we fly too close to the sun. And don’t forget that the history of planetary transformations have been cataclysmic. Interfere with that cyclic process and you might just bring it on in ways we don’t yet comprehend. And unless understand the ABC of our material world it’s an easy jump into entropic sleep by claiming we have the answer to getting what we want by forcing Creation to give it to us.
My point is emotions are supremely powerful – for good or for ill. And if you able to channel, subvert and divert that collective emotion then war, conquest and social engineering over centuries becomes as easy as conditioning Pavlov’s dogs. It is the bread and circuses upon which Empires are built and the pliable cultures that normalise their emergence.
Back in 2004 in the aftermath of 9/11 false flag, and Global War on Terror (GWOT) and the decimation of Iraq, an “unnamed white house aide” under the Bush Administration shared a view to New York Times reporter Russ Suskind which was to be quite revealing. It was an opinion later attributed to National Security Advisor and dark Svengali Karl Rove, who felt compelled to reject the bedrock of an evolutionary and creative process, namely: “that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” Rove believed this wasn’t the way the world worked anymore and with egomaniacal anticipation claimed: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [1]
It’s scary enough that Rove and others like him had long since got high on the neo-conservative “ends justify the means” interpretation of geopolitics, but to buy into the self-serving abstractions of new age doctrines shows just how easy a fit it was for the psychopathic mind.
That should give us some pause for thought.
Sure, all ideologies and great ideas can be inverted toward their dark expression. The question is: do these LOA beliefs lend themselves to abuse since they are, at their very inception deeply flawed and philosophically and practically useless? But we don’t have to go into the planetary or cosmic realms to see that the Law of Attraction and YCYOR are a direct expression of the darker elements of occult principles when mixed with Official culture.
All the above brings us back to the positive thinking as the gateway to the Law of Attraction, Creating your own reality and The Secret...
The Secret (to making money)
When Rhonda Bryne’s The Secret was published in 2006 it became a runaway best-seller and spawned further successful variations on the same theme. These included: Secret Gratitude Book (2007); The Power (2010) The Magic (2012); The Secret: Daily Teachings (2013); The Secret: HERO (2013) and How The Secret Changed My Life: Real People. Real Stories (2016) as well as DVDs, seminars, conferences and a salivating stampede of authors and coaches eager to cash in on exhortations to manifest and to be eternally grateful for the secret bestowed. Which isn’t surprising, since there was just enough truth in all that word salad sweetness to offer near universal appeal.
The Secret is a scrapbook of theories culled from self-help coaches and new age gurus from the last few decades. They in turn, got their ideas from sacred texts, philosophy and ancient wisdom and of course, numerous occult treatises. This were all put through the positive thinking shredder and purged of any inconvenient nuance and complexity. If this industry stopped at motivational techniques that would be fine and dandy. Unfortunately it’s not so innocent. Rhonda Byrne’s “secret” isn’t really a secret at all but a marketing coup; an exposition of a business plan using cultish, motivational absolutism.
The real Law of Attraction at work here is the speed by which so many people flocked to believe despite an absence of anything approaching science, experimentation, source notes, references, discussion and data – in fact nothing at all that could remotely be likened to evidence. It is however, bursting with cherry-picked anecdotes, verbose opinions and misinterpreted quantum physics clumsily grafted on to psychological theories which in the end, offer a dessert of anticipatory magick to get what you want.
To say this has anything whatsoever to do with “spirituality” is akin to comparing Ted Bundy with the Dalai Lama.
What The Secret does do is elevate spiritual solipsism to stratospheric dimensions. This is a philosophical theory and ideology that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that it is the only existent thing. Nothing about objective reality can be truly be known because it’s all a dream….And if it’s all a dream, an all-encompassing cosmic fantasy, then there’s no reason one cannot chip off a bit of that fantasy for oneself. Therefore, it gives people a free ride to grab all they can under the mantle of a singular manifester grasping for gold. Anything else is just a footnote in that hunger.
The universe isn’t a complex, mysterious reality of unimaginable majesty but a huge amazon warehouse ready to take your order. If that isn’t asking for something other than you desired, I don’t what is.
Although it would take way too long to go into every detail of this grotesquerie, here’s a small snippet of what you can expect if you haven’t soiled your mind with this garbage already. She offers this to get us in the mood:
“Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think, those thoughts are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency. Everything sent out returns to its source. And that source is You.” [2]
All hail the black hole of service to self…That’s apparently the real “secret” here. It is then as easy as pie to place your order from the drive-thru burger-king that is Bryne’s conception of the cosmos. It goes like this: Asking the Universe for what you want in order to get clear about … what you want. As you get clear in your mind, you have asked. Believing involves acting, speaking, and thinking as though you have already received what you’ve asked for. When you emit the frequency of having received it, the law of attraction moves people, events, and circumstances for you to receive. Receiving involves feeling the way you will feel once your desire has manifested. Feeling good then puts you on the frequency of what you want.
Which leads to howlers like this:
“To lose weight, don’t focus on losing weight’. Instead, focus on your perfect weight. Feel the feelings of your perfect weight, and you will summon it to you. It takes no time for the Universe to manifest what you want. It is as easy to manifest one dollar as it is to manifest one million dollars.” [3]
Ask. Believe. Receive. Feeling, desire, summoning perfection, manifestation. It’s one big heavy protein shake of ego-nutrient on the go; a classic example of the kind of magick that was so popular in ancient Babylonia. (“The Whore of Babylon” should give you an idea of how beneficial those practices were for the society at the time).
Apart from the fact she doesn’t understand physics, I find it hard to find anything that directly worships service-to-self principles then the above. In other words, this is classical “will to power” of the Satanic variety: The Worship of Self and matter.
“The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts. Every negative thought, feeling, or emotion is blocking your good from coming to you, and that includes money. It is not that the money is being kept from you by the Universe, because all the money you require exists right now in the invisible”[4]
An true to form, be it illness, finances, relationships – it’s all because your negative energies are blocking it. Otherwise, we can just get with the programme and banish negativity forever and live in bliss in an instant. We, the Great Deluded Masses are separate, reductive cogs in the cosmic machine functioning in isolation and a personal vacuum of wishful thinking. Want to solve your debt? Just purge those pesky negative emotions by renting some positive emotions so that you can think selfishly and obsessively about wealth and fantasize about it every second and get what you want and deserve.
See the bait and switch?
Forget that loan or that overdraft – just manifest what you need by Friday and the debt-collector won’t take your furniture. That isn’t being “negative” or lacking faith, that is paying close attention to objective reality for yourself and loved ones and not seeking to bypass a situation that you probably created yourself through the exact same wishful thinking. This time however, you are fully embracing that subjective abyss and disempowering yourself.
Fatal Attraction
You see, the force of attraction is a natural expression of the cosmos. The magnetic pull of an atom’s nucleus to centrifugal forces that flow through a galaxy – attraction is the engine of life. The result of this “Law of Attraction” is entirely dependent on the quality of consciousness which is determined by knowledge and intention.
You can be an attractive force for greed and covetousness or for inclusiveness and compassion. What gravitational pull are you under right now? What type of energy do you pull into your world and what do you send out?
What message do you send to the universe when you fixate on material acquisition and giving in order to get?
What about those Secret followers who were undoubtedly caught up in the subprime crash of 2008 and who must have seen their dream homes swiftly foreclosed on them? I wonder if they pondered on whether something more than just their mere desires were reflected back to them? Or did they believe that they had momentarily dropped their guard and lapsed into less than gushing positivity for moment?
Sign on for another DVD bumper pack so you get ir right next time and ensure you can control mother Nature so that that a tornado passes by your house. That means it’ll careen into someone else’s. That’s solipsism for you and not the magickian’s concern. Surely sufficient blocking can work in reverse right? Tell that to a diehard manifester and they’ll likely see you as unbearably “negative” with an attitude problem. Logic doesn’t go down too well.
In the same vein, Byrne tells us to ignore the news because it makes us “feel bad.” She goes on to say without a hint of irony: “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 feeling good is obviously the primary goal here. Sure, the mainstream news is best avoided, but what about independent news media and making the effort to get as close to truth as you can? Nope. Just switch off your thinking and plunge into your own ignorance.
Bad things happen in the world. They are a rallying cry to change ourselves so that we can ameliorate things by becoming the change we wish to see. What she does not say is to seek out news sources that actually offer REAL information rather than the mainstream propaganda blitzes which pass for news these days. Disempowerment is offered by switching off our thinking and turning on our feeling and desires; to put the real world at arms length and to give full rein to serving the self. And that’s pretty much the whole point of the Law of Attraction under the auspices of the The Secret: it’s all about feeling good as opposed to discovering Truth. It’s anti-intellectual and pro-warm, fuzzy sentiment and the encouragement of a fantasy-mediated world. And if you question this new religion of spiritual greed then you are a heretic; a blasphemer and Satan himself. Be gone negative vampire! (Said with a broad grin and gritted teeth).
Like all cults and dogmas infecting the minds of participants there are dire warnings to keep away from anyone “negative,” otherwise manifesting abundance won’t work. To keep from those that would question the LOA cardinal rules and potentially poison your purity toward the Luciferian drudgery of balance all negative heathens must be resisted at all costs. Which means support groups and people suffering should be avoided since they are just victims of their corrupted thinking and therefore – brought it on themselves.
It goes like this: if you think about positive things, surround yourself with positive people and desire a continuous stream of positive things to occur outside the seemingly pedestrian value of effort and self-knowledge then it must also be true in reverse. Therefore, the LOA-er cannot surround him or herself with anything that would interrupt that magickal formula. Which means that compassion and empathy is eroded. If another’s problem begins to encroach into that positive/LOA bubble then you’re on your own. And all of this of course, requires bucket loads of anticipation and the lip-service of “love and light.”
Despite attempting to facilitate the “power of now” one is actually wholly and completely a creature of an as yet undefined future and thus in a state of limbo and signalling to the universe that you want to stay there. it’s a literal mindlessness instead of balanced mindfulness that would allow us to find a compromise between our own needs and those of others.
As the reader might remember, I am not sceptical about the power of the mind, the placebo effect and even the influences which may impinge on this reality from other dimensions. But snake-oil salesmanship is just that. If it’s a spade, then you call it a spade, no matter how appealing and well-intentioned it may be.
For example, there is much about energy, love, light and negative or positive vibrations in the new age industry/religion and how these determine your thoughts, mood, ergo, your reality. But what does that really mean? For starters, thoughts are not vibrations and there’s no such thing as a “positive” or “negative” vibration. If you wish to talk about soundwaves, amplitude, frequency and oscillation and they relate to each other, this would be a better descriptor for what goes on when we come into contact with another force whether we attract or repel. Otherwise, it’s all just word salad designed to distract.
Psychologist Neil Farber M.D, Ph.D lists the LOA principles apparently based on “real science”:
a) Electrons have positive charges. b) In physics “Like always attracts like.” [magnets?] c) Thinking burns up brain matter. d) Only ether (not air) conducts light and thought. e) Ether connects all minds together. When 2 or more minds come close together, “mind stuff” mixes, and creates a third, “master mind.” f) Higher altitudes have more oxygen, better air for breathing. g) Vibrating sound more quickly turns it into heat, then light, than thought. h) Thought energy is 40,000 Hz to 4 X 1014 Hz or above 7 x 1014 Hz. In reality brain waves are slow 1 – 100 Hz. i) The universe hears nouns, not adjectives or qualifiers or only sees pictures of your thoughts. j) Every thought you have (about 70,000/day) has a specific frequency or wavelength of energy. “Thought Stuff” leaves your brain, travels through the ether around us and causes “Formless Stuff” to create whatever you are thinking about.
Why are any of these important? Because it is these “scientific truths” that form the scientific basis for the LOA. [4]
When it comes to corrupting its principles science is no paragon of virtue either. But we have to at least try to honour facts as a basis for reasonable speculation. When spirituality becomes Santa Claus dispensing gifts to all by virtue of their strictly internal efforts to magnetise, manifest and anticipate, it’s hardly surprising that LOA followers encourage us to let go of purpose, and therefore, any deeper meaning to our lives. If material goals and desires are the primary movers behind such a movement, it’s no surprise that values and efforts will be misplaced and thus the outcomes. Yet, there are any number of ways we can lie to ourselves and rationalise things away.
As Neil Farber further explains:
Evidence that the LOA is an effective way of attaining goals is anecdotal, non-scientific and self-reported. This fact does not prove it doesn’t exist. But closely scrutinize whether you want to invest time, money and energy into something that is ineffective and potentially harmful. People are much more likely to publish successes than failures. We also practice apophenia (the belief that there is meaning behind random data) when we focus on coincidences without regard to the much greater number of times that we do not experience coincidences. How many times did you think of that person and they didn’t call you? Of the two thousand people I thought of today, only two actually called. That’s not a great percentage – 0.1%. But if I think of it in terms of the people that called we get a different story. I thought of Bert and he called me – that’s 100%!
If you read LOA websites and posts, you’d guess that it is might be over 90% effective – everybody seems to be achieving their goals this way. Talk to experts who deal with the general public trying to use a LOA, there’s a completely different story. The failure rate is huge! In fact, LOA expert John Assaraf estimated that the success rate is about 0.1%!! We believe this number to be correct. [6]
Again, we see the same kind of overly-porous mindset that exists in the new age and self-help sellers as it does in the an increasing amount of belief in the left-liberal sphere. Just as the influence of post-modernist extremism that suspends objectivity in favour of subjective no-man’s land of relativism, where truth is as pliable as play-dough, here too if the LOA new ager can tell you that particles act as waves and vice versa then whatever they decide is true – is true, just like the social constructivism underlying the infantilism of SJW ideologues.
That sense of entitlement is the same glue of belief that exists in the LOA universe and when the anticipated manifestation of one’s material desires isn’t forthcoming, self-esteem plummets (since LOA and YCYOR precepts tell us that we are demigods in the making) and disappointment and resentment descends. The problem is a rejection of objective reality and fealty to subjectivity. This promotes a constantly fluid relativism which further “attracts” a cocktail of narcissism, selfishness and spiritual nihilism disguised with pretty pink wrapping paper. As author Marcus T Anthony, PhD, states in a recent article: “Conscious intention is important and influential in bringing a vision into real-world reality, but it cannot (with perhaps the odd remarkable exception) transcend the physical, economic and social systems in which we live, work and create.” And it is that false transcendence, that elevated hubris, that causes so much harm.” [5]
Surrounding the LOA universe is the idea of being in the present and taken to an impractical extreme (probably thanks to the “power” of Eckart Tolle). Here, because we are leaving it up to the Universe, no action, no planning and no deadlines or timelines are necessary. This is manifesting doubt and faith that the Universe will provide that new Ferrari if we just will into being and chant those mantras of self-love. Apparently, you don’t create through action but find one’s safe place within, think positively and like a fast-food restaurant your free-lunch will manifest in front of you. God forbid that the perceived ice of critical thinking might balance the excess heat of optimism and positivity gone mad.
Making plans is for negative thinkers it seems, presumably because one’s sense of entitlement could be breached. It’s the Universe’s job to figure it all out for us – we don’t have to do anything. Why bother when one’s unrelenting will to download those fantasies is all that’s needed to birth a new world, a magickal conjuring that must attract what is rightfully yours?
The ‘Secret’ Cult
This was just the kind of cross-promotional pyramid scheme of spiritual consumerism that would prove so appealing for Queen of soft, social engineering Oprah Winfrey. It was she who led the charge for a legion of other celebrities to pump this sweet sewage into millions of ordinary living-rooms.
By streamlining and simplifying threads of truth regarding the power of belief to the point of caricature, the pitch basically involves visualising what you want in order to get it. And if you don’t get it by the end of the week, you’re not trying hard enough. As Winfrey chimes in: “…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.” And because we are little Gods in the making we can bend reality to our will regardless of the consequences and as if by magick…That synchronicity was just for you, signalling your new home is about to materialise; or that dream job is just around the corner…All you have to do is pump up those desires and will it into existence from the comfort of your armchair!
Winfrey made a lot of money from promoting the idea … that you can make a lot of money by just believing it and actually doing very little. Wishful thinking and willful blindness are highly lucrative for some. You have to hand it to Winfrey’s willful blindness and Rhonda Byrne’s hucksterism. They obviously choose to believe they made it happen through manifesting such a reality and by discovering this “secret” than the simple manoeuvre of tapping into the coaching industry’s beliefs which had been around since the late 1950s.
Ultimately, The Secret, LOA and YCYOR tosh is just as good a fit for narcissists and sociopaths as it is for the gullible and lazy. It lauds the ideal of perfectionism as if it is attainable in an imperfect world; as if that is even something healthy to acquire. There is great beauty in imperfection and it is the process of striving, suffering and vanquishing obstacles through the triumph of adversity ennobles and elevates beyond notions of “perfection.” The Secret states: “You can think your way to the perfect state of health, the perfect body, the perfect weight, and eternal youth. You can bring it into being, through your consistent thinking of perfection.”
Journalist Peter Birkenhead writing for salon.com in 2007 describes the book’s iniquities fairly well:
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. [7]
Opraph Winfrey puts her signature to The Secret Empire and uses her global reaach to disseminate spiritual disinformation
At its worst, this is another CIA spiritual CoIntelpro programme to turn yet more minds to mush. If purely a symptom of our culture, it’s a hugely successful marketing ploy, a clever rehash of new age/self-help coaching beliefs designed to fleece the unaware and fill up the bank accounts of the purveyors. Or both.
This phenomena is a collective talisman that promotes power objects to focus our intent and magnetise our desires from “in there” to “out there” and back again. It’s like you are using a lasooing a steer and pulling it to the ground without any awareness of your place on the universal prairie. You an isolated object, instinctive and souless, feeding self-gratification. Combine this with the mantra of whatever positive mental image is operating then you have a distortion and fetishization of spiritual practice where ritual becomes divorced from meaning. That doesn’t mean however, that there are not a vast smorgasboard of material accoutrements to temp you into greater acts of external ritualism. Think of vision boards, angel cards, ouja boards, scrying mirrors, etc.
It is the apparent ease to which we just jump into what is effectively ego-based black magick formulas that keeps us coming back for more and more. If we didn’t get that pay rise or that tropical holiday then it wasn’t the authors, gurus or coaches’ fault, we just didn’t get it right. Think more positive, smile wider, be more optimistic and keep those negative emotions shackled with an extra lock and key of denial. If our inner sense of well-being remains absent then you need to work harder to force it into existence. The fact that The Secret sellers like Rhnda Byrne, Oprah Winfrey, Jack Cranfield, James Arthur Ray and many others are filthy rich and proselytizing the tripartite cult of positive thinking, LOA and YCYOR, it doesn’t follow that they are self-evident role models of its efficacy (nor does it mean they are consciously deceiving people). It provides clues that they and their products serve a purpose that assists the system maintenance and its the engineers.
What you are being sold is straight out of the advertising/marketing manual. A set of linguistic and semantic tricks with cherry-picked elements of science and spirituality as the lubricants of an innate desire to attain comfort and excellence with as little effort as possible. Like the adverts that take AD-vantage of an array of induced trance states, The Secret and its numerous spin-offs sell an anticipatory story of your life potential. When you belief that story you believe a lie. Given sufficient accumulation of lies from disparate sources, this is corrosive to the soul. Be suspicious of formulas with an overriding priority in making you feel good.
True social, cultural and political transformation will not occur from such “successes” which derive from a subtle or blatant butchering of more genuine modes of metaphysical truth. The system always needs butchers to strip away truthful paths since they are the first to be rewarded with material dividends, producing the fame, ego-flattery and material resources to furnish the echo-chamber of “secrets” and lead more followers down paths to non-being. That Faustian contract will always be alive and kicking and we need to learn the signs and language of that psycho-spiritual deception if we are not to be led astray.
It seems manifesting what you desire by plagiarizing ancient occult magick principles bypasses authentic emotions, spiritual work and self-development resulting in the inflation of the very negative things we hoped to avoid. We’ll look at this spiritual bypassing in the next post on constructive emotions.
Notes
[1] ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’. New York Times, Ron Suskind, 17 October 2004. | http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
[2] p.10; Byrne, Rhonda; The Secret (2006) Published by Simon & Schuster UK.
[3] Ibid. p.99
[4] Ibid.
[5] ‘The Truth About the Law of Attraction’ It doesn’t exist! By Neil Faber, Sep 18, 2016. | https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-blame-game/201609/the-truth-about-the-law-attraction
[6] ‘Delusion and the Law of Attraction’ by Marcus T. Anthony consciouslifenews.com June 30, 2014 | https://consciouslifenews.com/attractive-law-attraction-part-1/1174782/#
[7] op.cit. Faber
[8] ‘Oprah’s ugly secret’ 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, March 5, 2007 | https://www.salon.com/2007/03/05/the_secret/
INFRAKSHUN 