Rhonda Byrne's 2006 mass-market work, released first as a film and then as a companion book published by Atria Books and Beyond Words, presenting the law of attraction: the claim that the universe responds to a person's dominant thoughts and feelings by delivering matching circumstances. Byrne draws directly on Wallace Wattles's 1910 New Thought book The Science of Getting Rich, and summarizes her method as a three step formula, ask, believe, receive. The Secret is the best known mass-market expression of the law of attraction, carrying an idea rooted in nineteenth and early twentieth century New Thought to tens of millions of readers who had never encountered that older movement directly, and its treatment of illness and hardship as products of insufficiently positive thought has drawn sustained criticism from scientists and clinicians.
Facts
Origins
Era of CompositionSourced to the subject's own account Era of CompositionSourced to the subject's own accountFilm released March 2006; book published later that year 1 LanguageSourced to the subject's own account Attributed Author / CompilerSourced to the subject's own account DisciplineSourced to the subject's own accountSelf-help and New Thought spirituality 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseSourced to the subject's own accountCritics including Barbara Ehrenreich argue that treating illness or hardship as a product of insufficiently positive thought shifts responsibility for circumstances with outside causes onto the person experiencing them, a use clinicians have specifically criticized when applied to conditions such as cancer. 1 Scholarship
First PublishedSourced to the subject's own account2006: film in March, book later the same year, by Atria Books and Beyond Words 1 Attributions
TraditionSourced to the subject's own accountNew Thought; the law of attraction 1 Status
Status TodaySourced to the subject's own accountStill an active bestseller; its law of attraction claim remains widely taught in self-help and New Age circles. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteSourced to the subject's own accountPhysicists including Lisa Randall and psychologists including Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have rejected the book's popular invocation of quantum mechanics as a mechanism for thought affecting matter. 1 Learn More
Ask, Believe, Receive
Rhonda Byrne, an Australian television producer, has said she began developing The Secret in 2004 after her daughter gave her a copy of Wallace Wattles's 1910 New Thought book The Science of Getting Rich during a period of personal difficulty. She produced a film of the same name, released in March 2006, built around interviews with self-help authors and speakers, followed later that year by a companion book published by Atria Books and Beyond Words.
Byrne's central claim is the law of attraction: that the universe responds to a person's dominant thoughts and feelings by delivering matching circumstances, so that wealth, health and relationships can be obtained by sustained wanting and believing rather than only by action. She summarizes the process as a three step formula, ask, believe, receive, and cites Matthew 21:22's promise that whatever is asked in prayer with faith will be given as a scriptural parallel to her claim. The book explicitly stands in the lineage of New Thought, the American movement that also produced Christian Science and the Unity Church, presenting the law of attraction as a hidden constant that history's successful and famous figures are said to have quietly understood and used, rather than as a specifically religious teaching.
A Publishing Phenomenon and Its Critics
The Secret sold more than thirty million copies in over fifty languages, spent 190 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and, boosted by Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of the film and book on her television show, had generated an estimated 300 million dollars in combined sales by 2009. It remains one of the best selling self-help works of the twenty-first century.
Its reception among scientists and clinicians has been considerably less favorable. Writing in the New York Times, the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons singled out the book's invocations of quantum physics as a mechanism for thought affecting matter, and the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall likewise rejected its use of physics as unsupported by the science it names. The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, in Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009), placed The Secret within a broader critique of the positive thinking industry, arguing that books in its genre encourage political and personal complacency by treating unwanted circumstances, including illness, as failures of a person's own thinking rather than as outcomes with causes outside anyone's control. Clinicians have specifically criticized the implication, drawn out in the book's own discussion of illness, that patients bear responsibility for conditions such as cancer through insufficiently positive thought, a claim with no support in medical evidence and one capable of adding guilt to an already difficult diagnosis.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Authored By
Belongs to Tradition
Related To
Both stand in the New Thought lineage that treats mind as causally shaping circumstance, though The Secret is a mass-market self-help work rather than a denomination's scripture.
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