Comment: The Secret is Bull Shit

The Secret is Bull Shit: "First off, Danny, Jeff el al, it is not a 'theory' it is a recipe; do you know why cakes rise? Do you REALLY know? if so, then you are some kick-ass physicists who truly deserve a lot of letters after your name, and perhaps you can then get on to some other big mysteries like 'WTF _is_ electricity anyway?' and subscribe to Jack Sarfatti's blog so you can argue with him.

It is my guess, and just a guess, that none of you have been at all scientific about this, and by that I mean, you haven't actually TRIED the recipe, have you. Admit it. You think it is foolish and bunk and cannot possibly be for ten thousand reasons, but the evidence that you miss is how there are clearly a great many people out there who did take the empirical approach and lo, they got results. We don't need you to judge their results, they are the one's to do that, you get to judge your own results, that is how it works.

I can give you fifty-thousand good solid cognitive science reasons why The Secret works; buy me another martini and I'll probably come up with a few thousand more, but dig, that doesn't matter either because the story told in this book/movie is one of an EXPERIENTIAL reality, it is wholly cognitive, and dag blast it, as Feynmann so rightly said, "I don't care how beautiful your theory is, if it disagrees with experiment, it is WRONG"

So do stop the moaning and dogmatic pronouncements, you sound like a bunch of medieval priests. If you doubt it, then doubt it while you try it out, and don't be absurd about it, don't ask someone to give you the Queen Elizabeth II (tho you might get it ... in a way) just follow the recipe, start with a small first step, let your EXPECTATIONS guide the focus of your thoughts, your actions and your reactions. Maybe it will work, maybe you just have super-bad karma built up from so many years of being a cynical dogmatist; it is a very very easy experiment to spoil so you still have to appeal to the empirical result that "it works for others, so why not me?" and go from that.

I will qualify all this now: I'm afraid if all you have is The Secret or even the new Masters of The Secret, there may be some small details that are actually stated, but are not given perhaps the emphasis that some folks need: When you ask, you must ask WITH YOUR WHOLE BEING, and that means you must ask with your convictions, with your behaviours, with your awareness and with the choices you make. For example, if you ask to lose 15 lbs by Christmas, you have to ask that question every time you see a Twinkie :) Right there I think you may see a cognitive framework that will lure you into a belief that this may be possible, but what I'm going to leave you with is the further idea that while that may be true, you're going to see "spooky action at a distance" effects too, so just be on the lookout for them :)

btw, I'm not an American, if that matters.