We just rewatched the 2006 documentary called The Secret. As an introduction to the law of attraction, it’s nice but incomplete. What’s missing from the secret? Let’s review.
The documentary
The Secret is an accessible and nicely done 2006 documentary about the law of attraction (LOA) for anyone who hasn’t yet been introduced to the idea. It begins hinting there’s a powerful and life-changing secret that’s been hidden from each of us. The dramatic opening lures people in quickly enough. Early on, but almost too early, the movie explains the LOA and how to use it. They spend a tiny fraction of the movie talking about how we’re all energy and why maybe LOA would even work. The second half of the movie more or less covers using LOA for the usual big-picture facets of life that we all want to improve.
Maybe the most obvious problem with the movie in its current form is all the talk about feeling good. That alone, without explaining why, had the critical-thinking types walking away shaking their heads. All the feel-good talk landed this movie into the fru fru hippy section on people’s bookshelves.
Yes, we had to look up how to spell fru fru.
Reintroductions weren’t missing from the secret
The creators had to scope the movie down at some point, so they couldn’t include the entire universe’s kitchen sink. Given that, anything discussed as missing from the secret is bordering on nitpicking.
While this wasn’t our first introduction to LOA, it was for many people. In that regard, it provided a ton of value. Anyone can search for more answers at any time after seeing the movie, and they might even find this post if we type “missing from the secret” often enough.
Better still, a movie like this might enable people to eventually recognize the link between what they routinely think and what they experience in their lives. We’re all born knowing the relationship, but that knowing is quickly trained out of us early in (physical) life. A perfectly placed documentary like this could spark the reintroduction.
Using emotions was missing from the secret
The earliest release of The Secret included excerpts from Abraham but for reasons only the lawyers can appreciate, those parts were removed. Abraham, Esther, and Jerry did eventually produce a video that picks up where The Secret leaves off called, “The Secret Behind the Secret“.
When they later dropped Abraham, they left off any explanation of why feeling good had any relationship to anything. Without the why, we’re left with only fru fru feelings talk and cringes. There was no mention of our inner beings, souls, or any kind of broader perspective. Without any mention of our non-physical selves guiding us toward what we want, the good feelings they briefly mentioned didn’t make any sense.
Emotional guidance
Every thought has an associated emotional response. Sometimes weak when there’s no strong opinion either way, the emotional response is an indicator of how your thought aligns with the opinion of your non-physical self. When a thought feels good, then it’s an indication that you are successfully attracting what you really want. It says that your inner being is also attracting it. The purpose of emotions is to guide us in this regard.
The interviews in the documentary said a couple of times to “generate the feelings.” This they got wrong. We want to think the thoughts and then observe the associated feelings as an indication of whether or not the vibrations of the thoughts are helpful for achieving our goals.
When we navigate through complex terrain, we use a compass or GPS to guide us. Compasses use the Earth’s magnetic field to direct the needle toward magnetic North while GPS devices use a constellation of satellites at known trajectories (once the almanac and ephemeris data are downloaded). Both devices rely on a broader perspective. Similarly, our emotions provide us with navigational data about whether or not a thought is leaning in the right direction. Every thought is potentially two subjects so this navigational data is critical to finding our way.
Emotional scale
This is a subtler complaint. The movie never talked about the emotional scale, but they did display it as a graphic in the background for a few moments. It’s worth bringing up only because it dovetails into the above point so well, and because we haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet at Hack the Verse.
The English statement describing any thought is vague enough to make this confusing, so it’s difficult to communicate with other people about the creative power of thought. You might hear people say all the time, “I constantly think about more money, but I’m always broke.”
We know every subject is really two subjects, but the vibration behind a thought points to only one of the two subjects. Our emotions tell us how to disambiguate; it’s a solved problem. A good feeling says your thought is aligned with what you really want (i.e. what your inner being is thinking) while a bad feeling thought is aligned with what you don’t want.
Up until this point, we’ve only spoken in terms of good feeling and bad feeling thoughts. At face value, that’s all you need. The emotional scale covered in Ask, and it Is Given makes this more specific.
The emotions we can feel about a subject range across a scale. At the best end, we feel joy and appreciation, but at the low end, we might feel powerless or despair. Wherever you are on the scale, a new thought might feel a little better or a little worse, and the human language word you use to describe the new emotion will be neighbors of your usual location on the emotional scale.
Finally, the beginning
To wrap up, let’s return to the beginning. The documentary explains in the first 5 minutes what the law of attraction is and how to use it. Unless someone is watching it a 2nd or 3rd time, they may miss that. We’re told briefly what and how, but then for 75 more minutes, we get the sales job. By the end of the movie, we think lots of people have forgotten or missed entirely the how in its basic form. We just wish they’d reinforce the primary message throughout but particularly toward the end.
That’s probably overly critical. The rest of the movie does refine the original description, after all. Maybe it’s not a big concern.
Do we recommend The Secret? For sure, yes. We would caveat it though, just a little bit, and say don’t mind the fru fru good feeling talk. They don’t spend any time explaining why in the movie, but the good feeling talk is there for a good reason. A critical piece is missing from the secret, but if you’d like to know more, there’s this blog post you might like.
