The Father, the Son and the Shopping Channel Globe & Mail April, 21 2007 There I was a California big-box Borders in February, doing some innocent browsing, when the store intercom flicked on. A deep voice announced the arrival of The Secret. "Get yours at the front desk, they're going fast," he said, his voice exhausted by the eternal stupidity of mankind. Can an intercom switch flicked off communicate contempt? Apparently, it can. No matter how elevated your mind, you can't have missed it. The book of The Secret is at or near the top of every best seller list in the English speaking world. The print run is so close to sold out that the publisher has ordered two million more copies. Sales of the DVD are well into the millions. My hairdresser is burning it for clients she deemed susceptible; I made the list. And the journals of the bien-pensants are taking the required shots. Breaking down the reason, or rather contra-reason of the thing is a lovely walk in the park for any literary hack. The larger world could care less, The Secret's team of prophets have been feted on Larry King Live (twice), Oprah, Ellen, and every imitator out to manifest some Secret success. Using viral marketing, The Secret became, in less than six months, without any corporate help, a crowning cultural phenomenon of major proportion, the apex and triumph of ten generations of the human potential movement. Drawing on the 'if you can dream it, you can do it' ethic, it promotes the risible 'fact', that the universe exists to grant your deepest desires. Can you align yourself with your fantasies, ignoring any and all realities, believing your fantasies to be the really real reality? Well then, the genie will appear (he looks like a huge sexy giant from 300) and a voice will boom, "Your Wish is My Command." Or, as Matthew puts it, "Whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing you have received it, so you will". There are three steps: ask, believe, receive. Two methods speed up the delivery system: gratitude and visualization. As you may have gathered this is pretty much all about unlimited shopping, though love, weight loss and helping the world, show up. But the money thing is key, which is why, until The Secret manifested itself, the most successful new entry in the human potential movement was "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind," a book and system floated by a Canadian, T. Harv Eker, who grew up in Kelowna. Ecker who gives free three-day seminars from Toronto to San Diego, taking pyramid marketing to a whole new level, while re-jigging the money blueprint of his followers from failure to success. Instead of Christianity (which suffuses The Secret), Ecker draws on his experience at the Self Realization Fellowship, a Californian outfit which uses the teachings of yogic master Yogananda. Traditionalists will now be shouting 'syncretic" and talking about heresy. Perhaps, but this is stealth capitalism for people who want to own chains of pizza parlours, video stores, laundromats, parking lots, anything with a 20% return. The father in "Little Miss Sunshine", Will Smith in "The Pursuit of Happyness", the desperate, undertrained, uneducated working poor, the middle class trapped by circumstance. For them, The Secret replaces the language of failure and victimization with the language of success. The scarcity of Economics 101 becomes abundance, and working your brains out for the man replaced by an acute attention paid to the promptings of spirit, because it is there, in the meeting of human and the divine, that a really good idea for the Shopping Channel is to be found. Doesn't that sound like mainstream Christianity's definition of the Holy Ghost? The Secret, too, is a return to a pre-therapeutic way of thinking and behaving. Instead of an internal dialogue or conversation with intimates using the language of failure, insufficiency, victimization and weakness, The Secret recommends speaking the words and phrases of hope and competence, while feeling excitement, love, gratitude, bliss, and faith in a kind and good Universe. The Secret's motley collection of prophets teach that strange as it may seem, you and only you are responsible for the circumstances and conditions of your life. And that you and only you can change those circumstances. And that there is a Power greater than yourself which stands by to help. Using gratitude, focus, discipline and acute listening, your wishes will be granted. The Secret returns agency to the individual, insisting that the individual has an imperative to grow in that agency. The Christianity of the New World undergoes a complete revolution every century or so. From the arrival on Plymouth Rock, to Jonathan Edwards's Great Awakening in Northhampton in the 1730's to Charles Finney's Third Great Awakening in the 1830's which ripped through Upper Canada, to the Fourth still rocking the mega-churches of the born-agains, one thing holds true. During each revolution, the priesthood is overthrown, once again, the people hold the power, and The Secret is delivered to the dispossessed. This time it only costs $28.99. © 2007 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.