Demons in Hollywood's Garden of Eden
Advocates claim that the law of attraction has the absolute scientific validity of any physical law, as real and unchangeable as gravity. "These Laws are absolute, they are Eternal, and they are omnipresent (or everywhere)" (Esther and Jerry Hicks, The Law of Attraction, 2006, p. 20).
Oprah Winfrey said on her program that she has always believed and practiced The Secret. But only in the fantasy world of Hollywood-influenced media can this old New Age idea be taken as scientific truth—that your personal thoughts, positive or negative, are the ultimate reality behind the universe.
Real life has never worked that way and never will. In religious terms, self-absorption with money and power is all about loving self above God or neighbor. This psychology is directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the law of God (Matthew 22:37-39; Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18 ) and, in fact, is a never-ending source of evil.
Single-minded pursuit of one's selfish desires leads a person to damaging outcomes—distorted values, antisocial behavior, self-will, arrogance and often isolation, loneliness and self-destruction. These destructive values lie at the core of the dangerous "law of attraction" fad.
Medical science finds the claims of the movement ridiculous. Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who operates Quackwatch.com, a Web site devoted to exposing quackery and health fraud, says: "There is no evidence that thinking can modify disease other than occasional relaxation exercises. Thoughts have nothing to do with physics. They are talking about a concept of energy that cannot be measured.
"The energy involved in physics can be measured in a number of different ways," Dr. Barrett notes. "There is nothing real about what they are talking about. They are talking about imaginary energy. The idea of a secret remedy is a classic quack claim."
This is not merely harmless quackery, however. The impacts of The Secret on mental health can be seriously damaging.
It can foster abnormal and obsessive thinking. These can generate destructive emotional responses as life inevitably has its sustained trials and drawbacks. Taken to its logical conclusions, a person can develop a profound disconnect with reality.
The most prominent book in this marketing blitz, The Law of Attraction, explains that every negative experience, accident, mishap and influence in a person's world are the product of his own thinking.
"Nothing merely shows up in your experience. You attract it—all of it. No exceptions . . . We must still explain that only you could have caused it, for no one else has the power to attract what comes to you but you. By focusing upon this unwanted thing, or the essence of it, you have created it by default" (p. 30).
Where do you think this most unscientific—some would say crazy—idea came from? Esther and Jerry Hicks, the authors of The Law of Attraction, have convinced their believers that their ideas came from a cluster of supernatural spirits collectively calling themselves "Abraham."
The Hicks claim these spirits communicated the law of attraction to them through channeling—an abnormal or alternate state of mind by which some communicate with evil spirits. (This practice, incidentally, is condemned in the Bible in the strongest terms—see Deuteronomy 18:10-12 and Leviticus 20:27.)
In The Law of Attraction, these spirits have done a job worthy of the devil's deceptions in the Garden of Eden.