The Secret
by Rhonda Byrne

With the title The Secret, you can't help but want to at least pick up the book and find out what the secret is. Do you remember as a kid when your classmates had a secret you didn't know, how much you want to get them to tell you the secret? We'll tell you that and more.

The secret is this: like attracts like; thought becomes things. So The Secret is the law of attraction. This message is simple, yet profound. It's easy to remember and can be hard to conceptualize.

This is simple because we all understand magnetism from our chemistry and biology classes. We see it at work in various forms throughout our life.

What's makes the secret profound is putting it into practice in our lives. Here's how it works: "Everything that's coming into your life, you are attracting into your life … by virtue of the images you are holding in your mind. It's what you're thinking." So the first step is to be very clear about what you want to have in your life. Then you need to make sure that every cell of your being is pointed in that direction. Spend as much time thinking, meditating, and reflecting on what you want.

However, it's very easy for us to unclear or ambivalent about what we want to have in our life. If so, then that ambivalence will render the magnet useless, instead drawing more ambivalence to us.

The Secret is so simple, it's easy to discount and challenge as trite. To all those that don't want to work at analyzing their thoughts to understand why they aren't getting what they want, they may tell you the secret is bogus. Even Boston Legal (on ABC) in Season 3 did a spoof where the character, Denny Crane played by William Shatner, was practicing the secret meditating on Raquel Welch who he wanted in his life. At the end of the episode, Phyllis Diller showed up, to which he replied, "the secret needs work."

However, despite the detractors, the secret has been around for ages. The author when writing the book scoured old texts and books from religions throughout the ages and discovered how frequently this law of attraction has been taught to its disciples. She quotes many of them throughout the book.

Even indigenous shamans (of non-writing cultures) understood the secret. For example, to the Peruvians, they call it dreaming their life into being, thereby creating their future. This dreaming is a conscious action of leading their lives energetically to draw forth that which they desire. Dreaming our world into being may seem symbolic, whimsical, or even fanciful. But this is how it works. We live in a world of energy, where everything is light bound into matter. As energy beings, we constantly interact with the energies around us. Therefore, through the natural laws of affinity, we draw energies to us, based on our own energy makeup. The energies that are drawn to us are those energies that we are focused on.

So read the book, practice the secret. And above all, pass the secret along.