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How does one get hold of a swanky car when one doesn’t even own a bicycle? If
one were to believe Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling recipe, all you need are three
simple steps: Ask. Believe. Receive.
No need for hard work. Forget luck and say good-bye to serendipity; “Just ask
and you shall get” is the mantra promoted by the Australian TV-producer. She’s
written what could well turn out to be the Mother of All Self-Help books. She
attributes effortless wish-fulfillment to the so-called law of attraction:
everything that happens to you, good or bad, you attract to yourself.
Byrne claims that you can manipulate objective physical reality – the numbers in
a lottery draw, the allotment sweepstakes of a car and even actions of total
strangers – purely through your thoughts and feelings. And if you lose your car
or fortune, blame your thoughts. You’re also advised to keep away from the
failures and fatties of the world (who might taint your thoughts with their
negativity).
So be very careful, Minister, what you think. If, for instance, you say, “I’ll
never have a great relationship,” you’ve just given an order to the universal
genie: be prepared for a letter-bomb from your significant other.
As a reviewer remarks, “Byrne’s book brings breathless pizzazz and a
market-proven gimmick to a tired genre full of earnest bullet points and windy
exhortations”. Also, her evocation of timeless wisdom and hidden conspiracies
succeeds because it appeals to the masses yearning for magic, just as The Da
Vinci Code did.
The Secret also shamelessly plunders lives of historic figures such as Isaac
Newton, Beethoven, Martin Luther, King Jr and Albert Einstein for anecdotal
‘support’ of its just-ask-and-receive hypothesis.
Mercifully, self-help experts marshalled by Byrne to promote the book sound a few
caveats: while thoughts are powerful, it’s the feelings that these thoughts
generate that actually attract things into your life. Also, in order to attract
the things you want into your life, you are urged to follow the ‘three for
three’ strategy: your thoughts, your feelings and your actions ostensibly have
to fire simultaneously in the same direction. In the final analysis, Byrne’s
book seems to have taken a cue from the theory of inflationary cosmology
propounded by physicists like Alan Guth, which says that the universe is a free
lunch; and that everything pops out of nothing!
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