The Secret by Rhonda Byrne | Teen Ink

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

January 13, 2009
By Anonymous

“The Secret”: A best-seller in Australia, England, and Ireland. There are 5.3 million copies of the book in print, and it sells approximately 150,000 per week. Rhonda Byrne wrote this book because she had discovered the law of attraction: The Secret. It states that thoughts control the universe. By visualizing what you want and believing it is already yours, the universe will attract it to you. Byrne compares the law of attraction to being a magnet or ordering from a catalogue. If you order something, you never question whether you will get it. You already know it is yours. That is how the law of attraction works. “It works every time with every person.” That quote from the book explains that The Secret works whether you believe it or not. It’s your choice if you choose to make The Secret work for you, or let things be attracted to you by default.

Emily Yoffe, the writer for a Human Guinea Pig column, decided to test if The Secret really works. She was tying to attract three simple things: a kitchen floor, unclogged sinuses, and a new desk.
Yoffe’s father knew of The Secret; as a young child, she remembers hearing her him tell stories of this wonderful theory. Because her dad ended up dying alone with nothing, Yoffe came upon The Secret with a negative attitude. Yes, her dad died with nothing but, he believed that only certain people, excluding him, could attract wealth, power, and happiness. Because that was his thought pattern, the universe attracted that to him and he never got anything he wanted. Yoffe’s notion of The Secret being fruitless was contradictory .The universe manifests the frequency of your thoughts. If you send out negative frequencies, negative situations will be attracted back to you, and vice versa.

When Yoffe tried attracting the kitchen, she had the same attitude. Even though she was negative and skeptical, she began visualizing the floor exactly how she wanted it and began to believe that it was already hers. One night she awoke at 3am and had the idea to paint it to look the way she wanted it. It worked beautifully and she saved thousands of dollars. The Secret attracted the idea to her.
The second thing Yoffe wanted was to have clear sinuses. The moment she stopped her meds and began visualizing breathing clearly, there was a cold snap in her town. Yoffe argues that The Secret didn’t work because the weather eventually warmed up and she had clogged sinuses again; however, The Secret did work because otherwise that week without meds would’ve proved ineffectual.
The third thing Yoffe wanted to attract was a new desk. She never completed this last objective because she was already convinced that The Secret was a bunch of nonsense and Rhonda Byrne was almost certainly out of her mind.
Yoffe completely contradicts herself and holds her negative predisposition throughout her entire article. If she took the time to step back and look at her so called experiment from an un-biased perspective she would be surprised at her finding. Because then, instead of cracking quips and judging someone who is trying to share something good with the world, she would come out with an article worth the time it took reading it.



JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.