Filed under: Action Research Documentary
When I was young Aladdin was my favourite story. Just a casual rub-a-dub-dub on a little lamp and three wishes were mine. Mmmm … the delectable choices one faced. Would I silence my annoying siblings forever? Should I turn the class smarty-pants into a moron? Or maybe I’d transform that spotty little schoolboy sitting next to me into a cement toad. At the time these fantasies seemed like jolly good ideas but the one I always settled for was to make my parents magically grant my every wish in future. Obviously I was born to ideas like those put forward in movies like The Secret.
Everybody is talking about The Secret; from Oprah to business execs and even popular preachers have traded their cumbersome tomes for the lighter matters of the mind. Daily my mailbox is flooded with ads for screenings or discussions about this movie’s disclosure of a previously hush-hush universal decree; The Law of Attraction.
Quite simply this law makes the curious claim that any of us unenlightened plebeians can access Aladdin’s genie. But instead of having to find that elusive lamp, this particular light-bulb moment is switched on by our thoughts and desires. Taking it at face-value, apparently all I need to do is think about George Clooney and strongly desire him to desire me. It doesn’t take a genius to know this is about as likely to happen as George Bush conducting a soulful meditation in an Indian ashram.
I’m aware that my cynical attitude may make it hard to accept but I am actually a believer. My beef is the way the material is presented. In an instant world, quick-fixes sell and this particular gift to instant wealth, health and happiness is somewhat misleading. For starters, there’s nothing new about these ideas. John Kehoe – he of mind-power guru fame – has been touting these principles for over thirty years and if one goes back further, Napoleon Hill – in his book Think and Grow Rich – kicked off this movement during the1930’s.
In fact contextualising these ideas as western concepts is the only thing that is new. Ideas about the power of the mind have been with us since before ‘pa fell off the bus’ and there is far more to this story than conjuring up an instant orgasmic moment with a wealthy prince (or a needy princess for that matter).
Regardless of how much you focus your thoughts and desires on creating a blissful life, the big despatch department in the sky will experience delivery delays if your feelings and actions contradict what you are thinking. I know dozens of people who truly desire wealth but money eludes them. These aren’t bad people but their scarcity-mentality deletes any thoughts of abundance.
Beliefs in scarcity sabotage wishful thinking and these notions are located in the old baggage department of our memory, and most of us still believe them.
Today middle-class people are either the first- or second-generation to make good money. Remember how our grandparents stored glass jars filled with ‘useful’ items like broken elastic-bands, kaput paper-clips and arbitrary bits of string. Heaven knows what they intended to do with these ‘treasures’ but this is scarcity-mentality in action. The bigger problem, however, is that this mentality is driven by fear.
Like the good things in life, fear and scarcity also manifest themselves. So from our ancestors we learnt ‘proven’ pearls of wisdom like ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’ and the value in current suffering so as to have some cash for shopping trips on rainy-days (or something to that effect). Beliefs such as these are deeply buried in the subconscious mind and because we learnt them at a young age, we seldom questioned their validity.
This baggage adds up to the irrational belief that ‘I don’t deserve’ and not deserving a good life keeps showing up time and again. So before we can become the magician creating that spectacular existence, those old closets standing in the way of the delivery conduit need to be dumped. Author Wayne Dyer said: Abundance is not something we acquire; it is something we tune into.
One of the common criticisms levelled at movies like The Secret is that it focuses too much on money issues. ‘After all,’ these critics claim ‘shouldn’t there be more to life than money?’ But in my random research sample comments like these are made by people who are struggling to fill their coffers. Wealthy people don’t condemn those revealing the secret of financial abundance; perhaps this is because the money they’ve made allows them to pay attention to those more important things.
The Secret’s forerunner What the Bleep do we Know!? delves into the messy emotional issues causing our magic wand to become impotent. Instead of appealing promises, this doccie makes the obvious connection between hating yourself, loathing your life and feeling more and more miserable.
Trying to think positively while bemoaning life’s woes was described to me like coating a pile of cow-dung in whipped cream and covering it with sprinkle-spread to pretty-up the pie. The proof of the pudding though is in the bleating because positive thinking is always obliterated by negative actions, like whining.
Instead of hosting pity-parties (those tedious ones about crime, corruption, traffic, taxis and all the other usual suspects) gurus like Kehoe suggest the unthinkable; start by being grateful for what you’ve got, even if it means beginning with the teeniest of things.
Another problem with movies like these is that they attempt to condense aeons of deeply considered philosophy into 90 minutes worth of sound-bytes. Consequently vital information can appear glib and this leads devotees to mistakenly believe that the road-to-success is paved with the encrusted sweat of frenetic striving.
If you are inspired to spend hours visualising your pristine Ferrari parked outside your opulent home, bear in mind that there are sects of Buddhism that believe striving just makes people miserable.
Now I am not a supporter of the nobility-in-poverty notion and encouraging people to find righteous value in being poverty-stricken is an insult to their creative potential. But, if you have fallen into the trap of ‘striving’, have you ever considered what you are striving for and, more importantly, have you asked yourself why?
Instead of focusing purely on material things The Bleep suggests taking the time and trouble to find out what you really want. When comb-over Trump was asked on The Apprentice why so few people live their passion his characteristically blunt response was: ‘because they are too darned lazy to find it’.
Sadly many are striving to be happy but the field of ‘Positive Psychology’ shows that most are looking in all the wrong places. The only thing that keeps us happy is knowing that our lives matter because we are making a difference.
It’s just common sense that ‘gratitude-attitude’ (sorry to be twee, but this is what it’s known as) and finding a meaningful context within which to live create the simple foundation for leading a happy life. Happiness contains potent energy and this is the power that propels the law of attraction into action.
Another illusion created by these philosophy-in-sound-byte documentaries is that success appears as an overnight phenomenon. Biographies show how deceptive this is. Success is not something that happens in an instant, it is a life-work created one step at a time. Dealing with each challenge takes courage and by being ballsey in the face of our fears, confidence is built. Feeling good is a side-effect of action; it’s not just a matter of convincing your mirror-image about how terrific you are.
If happiness provides the necessary thrust, it makes sense that this is the only foundation upon which to build a fulfilling life. Once the foundation is in place then life can be decorated with many splendid things. But, alas, life throws out some perplexing paradoxes and materialism is no exception; for the more our real needs are met, the less value we place on fancy things.
So indeed it would be really nifty if success was simply a matter of dreaming up a wish list that could be despatched by a celestial Mr Delivery on demand. But as mere mortals the only hope we have of helping Lady Luck along is if we delete our habitual negative attitudes and align our thoughts, feelings and actions around what we want from this exhilarating adventure called life.
I must confess though … as an author, the bit in The Secret about how to sell many thousands of books instantly is enormously appealing. I’m currently working on sales of 15 million copies and you can bet your bottom dollar, I’ll keep you posted on this one!
About Author
Stephanie Vermeulen of The Effective Training Corporation runs practical training programmes on Applied EQ in both business and public forums as well as being an inspiring conference speaker and personal coach. Her books, “Kill the Princess: Why Women Still Aren’t Free From the Quest for a Fairytale Life’ (USA edition)/’Stitched-up: Who Fashions Women’s Lives?’ (SA edition)and ‘EQ: Emotional Intelligence for Everyone’ are available from all leading bookstores and online from Amazon.com and Kalahari.net. She can be contacted on e-mail: steph@eqsa.co.za website: www.eqsa.co.za.