Newsflash: The Secret, the revolutionary book/DVD that says you can think a totally awesome new BMX bike into existence, isn't such a secret after all! Apparently, people have been using their powerful minds to suggest to hoardes of people with less powerful minds that they can produce thought bikes for centuries. It's true! In fact, according to this highly illuminating article in USA Today, there has always been bullshit! And some of it has been peddled by very minor television actresses:
Rhonda Byrne's book tops USA TODAY's best-seller list for the seventh consecutive week, and the companion DVD is No. 1 on Amazon's sales chart. It has captured wallets and water coolers like nothing else since Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown suggested Jesus was a daddy.
But such pop culture fascination leaves actress and minister Della Reese Lett laughing.
"Child, The Secret hasn't been a secret since the times of Moses, if not before," says the former Touched by an Angel star, founder and minister of the Understanding Principles of Better Living church in Los Angeles. "But every generation needs a new way to look at things that have been around a while. I suppose right now The Secret is it."
Lett's church is one of hundreds of loosely affiliated metaphysical churches that have been around for more than a century. Their guiding principles are anchored to self-fulfillment via the power of the mind.
Child, I hear you. But I have two questions: 1. Are there angels in your metaphysical church? and 2. If not, can I make the angels appear with the power of my mind? But Della Reese isn't the only preaching, Secret-knowing crazy. In fact, there are others who are even crazier, and their inner "vibrational forces" sound more than a little peeved:
Just ask "Abraham," the disembodied, vibrational force whose teachings have been transmitted for the past few decades through the physical form of lecturer and author Esther Hicks. Although she dismisses the popular term "channeling," Hicks is a modern link to the past Spiritualist movement.
Hicks and her husband, Jerry, have written about the so-called law of attraction – the "secret" that was the focal point of The Secret DVD. But contractual issues find the couple, and their Abraham entity, excised from the version now circulating.
"The secrets of life have never been a secret. It's like calling the law of gravity a secret," says Abraham via Esther Hicks, whose normally lilting twang suddenly takes on a robotic tone.
"People have been calling Jerry and Esther, saying, 'I have bought The Secret, but now what do I do?'
"The truth is, The Secret is merely a powerful catalyst that presents the possibility of a better life," says the monotone voice. "Abraham is smiling in the simple knowledge that, in truth, The Secret has not revealed 'the secret.' "
Wow. Rhonda Byrne better watch her back. If there's one monotone vibrational force embodied in a low-rent huckster she doesn't want to piss off, it's Abraham.