Editorial
See other Editorial ArticlesTitle: Pssst...It's A Secret
Source:
Rense
URL Source: http://www.rense.com/general76/secret.htm
Published: Apr 27, 2007
Author: Rip Rense, RipRense.com
Post Date: 2007-04-27 09:04:17 by robin
Keywords: None
Views: 112
Comments: 6
Pssst...It's A Secret
By Rip Rense
RipRense.com
4-26-7
- I'm sitting in a little tea joint in Westwood right now,
and a guy has just walked in---waddled in, really---who preceeds himself.
Which is to say, his stomach enters the room before he does. He is dressed
in a giant hooded sweatshirt which was yellow but is now closer to brown,
and jeans that have not been washed or perhaps changed since Bush first
stole the presidency. He has a beard that was also yellow but is now closer
to brown, and he exudes the sour smell of old socks on a hot day.
-
- This man does not know The Secret.
-
- A woman just passed by on the sidewalk outside. One of
her legs is twisted and about half the size of the other, and she walks
with a kind of hobble-hitch, hobble-hitch rhythm that Stravinsky would
have liked. Her face is pained, defensive.
-
- She obviously does not know The Secret, either.
-
- My friend Craig, who is drinking tea with me, also does
not know The Secret. When people bump into him and fail to say "excuse
me," or do not move to one side on a sidewalk, it bothers him. Same
for my pal, Jenn. She's a brilliant, modest UCLA grad student who just
wants to study and learn, yet she keeps running into fellow grad students
trying to push her around, drawing her into ego games. It annoys the hell
out of her.
-
- And I sure as hell don't know The Secret. I am the most
irritated person I know. Well, next to Dick Cheney. I can't stand the way
most people drive, speak, think, dress, write, sing, tell jokes. The gluttonous
manner in which humans exploit this paradise disgusts me. Pretty much everybody
I admire is dead, sick, or worse, unpopular. Oh, and I hate the way everyone
says "stu-dent" and "impor-dunt." Guess that about
covers it.
-
- The funny thing about The Secret, though, is that it
is no secret. It was the top of the New York Times bestseller list, which
is the greatest measure of what poorly educated people who cannot read
very well are buying. And it has been touted by no less a personage than
Oprah Winfrey, who tells poorly educated people who cannot read very well
what to read.
-
- As for those poorly educated people who don't or can't
read, a two-hour television special about The Secret was shown last year
in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Europe, and probably
Antarctica---where hundreds of millions, if not several billion, are reported
to have watched. For those who were too poor to own TV's, The Secret was
streamed into mobile phones in Africa and China. Right now, tens of thousands
are staring at whatisthesecret.tv.
-
- Why, The Secret must be the worst-kept secret in history!
-
- If you are gleaning that your faithful weekly Internet
columnist (that's me) is being snide and sarcastic again, and that this
is a piss-poor attitude for a mature male adult to have, then I'll just
bet that you know The Secret! If you are thinking, "Oh, there goes
Rense being reactionary and lashing out from his wretched little website
at more successful people again," then you almost certainly embrace
The Secret. And if you are thinking, "Cynical curmudgeon," "Cranky
middle-aged man," or especially, "Loser!" then you are probably
the proud owner of "The Secret"---the book, the DVD, the CD-set,
the perfume, the hand towel.
-
- The Secret is new evidence, as if any more is needed,
that, to quote the great, eerie song by Cream, we're goin' wrong. We are
headed for a supersize spiritual self-immolation that will lead either
to a one-world not-so-benevolent dictatorship with a corn syrup and water-based
economy and no animals other than domestic dogs and cats---or a violent
reversal of priorities that will see kindness, empathy, compassion, conservation,
creativity, and tweetie-birds manifest as social structure. (I'd bet the
bullion on the former.)
-
- But to end the big suspense here, allow me to "reveal"
some of The Secret's "precepts"...
-
- *It's not how you play the game, it's whether
you win or lose that counts
-
- *Don't try---do! Trying is just "failing
with honor."
-
- *When you project negative thoughts, they become
reality and your life becomes negative.
-
- *When you answer "not bad," or "hanging
in," or "doing my best," to someone asking how you are doing,
then you will make that mediocrity your reality! When you say, "Fantastic!"
or "Everything is fabulous," you create a fabulous reality!
-
- Those fans of the great "Fawlty Towers" will
understand what I mean when I say that I now hear Basil Fawlty screaming,
"Brilliant!"
-
- The Secret was concocted by a shrew---er, shrewd---highly
ambitious woman who probably had very little money and wanted to change
that in a big way. Her name is Rhonda Byrne, and she is Australian, and
that should tell you something about The Secret right there. When is the
last time you remember anything sane happening in Australia?
-
- The Secret is snake oil of and for the snakes of our
time, as they coil and slither their way to cheaply won riches. In essence,
it pretends to be The Answer, The Light, The Revelation---a popthink Yellow
Brick Road to Hap-Hap-Happiness. What it really does is to allow the aggressive
to be arrogant---er, confident---with impunity, giving them license to
ignore and pity those of us who can't help but see warts, scars, hypocrisy,
deceit, George W.
Bush, and be bothered by them. The Secret? Flush those anti-depressants
away! (So they can go into the water system and cause people to grow fins
and redundant sex organs.)
-
- Rhonda Byrne, who might or might not have redundant sex
organs, claims to have culled The Secret from the thoughts of, among others,
Plato
and Einstein. (What,
no Nietzsche?) Now, forgive my darkness here, but I vaguely suspect that
Einstein and Plato were not quite happy-go-lucky, "positive-thinking"
souls like Oprah, Rudy
Giuliani, and Hugh
Hefner. I seem to recall something about Einstein playing around on
his wife a fair amount, and having oh, some mixed feelings about having
paved the way for the uh, annihilation of the human race. And I'm not real
well versed in philosophy, but I think Plato's dedication to preserving
the work and thinking of Socrates---someone who saw warts, scars, hypocrisy,
and deceit very clearly---stemmed from being a bit disturbed by Socrates'
persecution and death.
-
- But never mind all that unhappy gunk. The world is screaming
help me, Rhonda---and Rhonda is obliging. Who am I to spoil the party?
Want to join in? Have a ball! Here is the basic Secret for you, courtesy
of an article in the Hartford Courant:
-
- "It's the law of attraction. The power of positive
thinking. Like a magnet. . .the thoughts and images held in one's mind
determine what is attracted to them and, ultimately, the quality of life
they live. Go anxiously through the day with a negative loop of thoughts
in your mind, anticipating bad things will happen, and they will."
-
- Or as Oprah
so Winfreyly puts it:
-
- "We create our own circumstances by the choices
that we make, and the choices that we make are fueled by our thoughts."
- (Quick, cue Basil Fawlty again!)
-
- Hmmm. Maybe it's that "negative loop" that
caused the well-dressed elderly gentleman on the sidewalk to yell obscenities
at me the other day for no apparent reason (must have been the way I nodded
a polite hello to him.) And darn that "negative loop" for making
three women in a row run over my feet with their shopping carts in a Whole
Foods last week. Oh! Maybe it was also that negative loop that caused my
stepmother to kick me out of the house at age sixteen!
-
- And well, I've got this loopy problem, see. . .I tend
to "go anxiously" through every day. I know, I know, what is
there to worry about? Lousy health? No money? No health insurance? No job?
No publisher? Iraq? People driving like prison escapees? The country going
to hell? Scabies? American Idol? Pshaw! If only I could embrace The Secret!
-
- It got me to thinking. . .What a tragedy it is that Rhonda
Byrne was not around during World War II to share The Secret. All the Jews
and gypsies who died in concentration camps would have lived to ripe old
ages had they just adopted The Secret attitude and projected a positive
reality for themselves! If they had just ignored the fact that they weighed
90 pounds, were covered with sores and lice, and proclaimed, "I feel
fabulous!", all would have turned out well. As Oprah said, they created
their own circumstances by the choices they made!
-
- Whoops. There goes my "negative energy" again.
Oh yeah---and it is all energy, you see---that's more of The Secret, as
I found on a Secret website: "Everything is energy. Your thoughts
and actions control the flow of energy. A thought is a unit of mental energy
that can be measured and that affects every aspect of your life (insert
Elaine Benes saying blehh blehh blehh and other Seinfeld
sounds here.)"
-
- Wow. I wonder what will come of the units of mental energy
expended in typing this column? Maybe lots more people will send me no
e-mail. I'm so negative, after all. Who wants to talk to a human Negative
Loop? Someone who is merely Failing With Honor? Well, just in case some
of you readers are also prisoners of seeing the world for what it is; in
case you have a little trouble feeling fabulous, here are a few more units
of mental energy for you:
-
- The Secret attracts what I call the tyranny of The Smilers.
Oprah is the Queen Smiler, with the likes of Tom
"The Scientology Jesus" Cruise not far behind. They are part
of an epidemic of pseudo-positivity sweeping the land (usually found among
the rich and famous) which is really arrogance in disguise. Capped
and whitened teeth are exposed from shore to shore as never before, but
they radiate the leer of the slavering carnivore.
-
- The Smilers, in other words, are really
The Frowners. They are motivated not by beneficence, but by self-aggrand-isement,
a compulsion to dominate, and a fear of anyone who does not embrace their
giddy, rose-colored quasi-religion. They are not far afield of holy-rolling
Evangelicals, in that sense---and have even included some bastardized Christianity
about "forgiveness" (piousness) and "gratitude" (my
personal relationship with The Secret) to give the veneer of humility.
Gooble-gobble,
one of us, one of us. .
-
- What The Secret all comes down to is a license to indulge
ego and self in the guise of projecting "fabulous" thoughts---preferably
the kinds of thoughts that might make you as fabulously rich as Rhonda
Byrne (but usually don't.) And to tacitly dismiss as destructive those
who do not do the same; those increasingly anachronistic, empathetic souls
who believe that it is how you play the game, that trying is a downright
valiant act, and that "hanging in there" takes a lot of guts
and fortitude. . .
-
- Notions that are becoming so scarce they might as well
be. . .a secret.
-
- ____
-
- Rip Rense is a Los Angeles-based writer and Jeff Rense's
brother.
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