Decoding 'The Secret'

And today, she maintains an ideal weight of 116 while eating anything she wants. A woman in the film claims to cure her breast cancer in three months, without chemotherapy or radiation, by visualizing herself well and watching funny movies on television. Whatever you think of that as medical advice—Byrne insists she's not telling people to avoid doctors—it makes psychologist John Norcross, a professor at the University of Scranton who is an authority on self-help books, wonder: what about the people whose cancers don't get cured? "It's pseudoscientific, psychospiritual babble," says Norcross. "We find about 10 percent of self-help books are rated by mental-health professionals as damaging. This is probably one of them. The problem is the propensity for self-blame when it doesn't work."

On a scientific level, the law of attraction is preposterous. Two of the "teachers" in the film are identified as quantum physicists, which they are, although on the fringes of mainstream science. One, Fred Alan Wolf, is mostly an author of science books with a quasi-mystical bent, and the other, John Hagelin (who has run for president on the Natural Law ticket), is affiliated with Maharishi University of Management, in Fairfield, Iowa, which does research on transcendental meditation. Both of them, contacted by NEWSWEEK, distanced themselves from the idea of a physical law that attracts necklaces to people who wish for them. "I don't think it works that way," says Wolf dryly. "It hasn't worked that way in my life." Hagelin acknowledges the larger point, that "the coherence and effectiveness of our thinking is crucial to our success in life." But, he adds, "this is not, principally, the result of magic."

Wolf said he used his time in front of the camera to talk about the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, but all that evidently wound up on the cutting-room floor. What he might have said is something like this: modern physics says that atomic particles influence one another in ways that violate our ordinary understanding of space and time, a phenomenon called "quantum entanglement." The question is whether quantum signals can be perceived on the scale of something like a neuron, a brain or a human being. Overwhelmingly, physicists dismiss this idea. A minority, very much out of the mainstream, think it's worth investigating, and a few claim to have experimental evidence that thoughts can influence physical objects, such as the circuitry in a random-number generator. But the effects are tiny, on the order of a few hundredths of 1 percent. And there's no evidence you can use it to move a BMW into your driveway.

But modern physics has reinvigorated a long tradition in American philosophy, one in which "The Secret" stands squarely. "I can show you books written 100 years ago that say the exact same thing," says Beryl Satter, a professor of history at Rutgers. Long before there was a "New Age," Satter says, there was "New Thought"—a self-help movement that drew on 19th-century Americans' suspicion of elites and on the Protestant tradition of looking for the "inner light." You don't need doctors to heal you, priests to save you or professors to instruct you: the secrets to health, success and salvation are within you. A best seller in 1869 called "The Mental Cure" unleashed a flood of imitators, which increasingly evoked "science" in their titles, hoping to capitalize on the fascination with inventions like the telephone. "It was a short leap from 'You can use the telephone to send messages' to 'You can use your mind'," Satter says.

It was one of those books, "The Science of Getting Rich," by the long-forgotten Wallace D. Wattles, that Byrne's daughter handed her one day in 2004, when she was struggling with her various setbacks—the recent death of her father and a budget overrun on a series, "Sensing Murder," she was producing for Australian television. (She was a longtime producer on an Australian version of "The Tonight Show," and her company was behind a reality series about marriage proposals called "Marry Me.") Wattles's book struck such a chord with Byrne that she plunged into a crash course in Western, Eastern, ancient and modern thought, devouring "hundreds" of books and articles in just two and a half weeks. "That was in December," she told NEWSWEEK. "In January I told my team we were going to make the greatest film in history to date. They thought I'd gone mad." Inspired, she flew to the States in July 2005 and began lining up people to interview; the film was finished six months later and she began trying to find an Australian network to air it. The top-rated Nine Network was intrigued by her proposal, but the finished film struck Len Downs, the program manager, as just "a whole range of talking heads giving their basis of the secret of life." (It eventually ran in Australia just a few weeks ago, and, says Downs, it didn't do all that well.)

But armed with the law of attraction, Byrne was confident things would work out. A Web company just blocks from her office in Melbourne had a technology for distributing streaming video over the Internet. Last March, her site (http://thesecret.tv) began selling downloads and DVDs, one of which found its way to Cynthia Black, president of the New Age-oriented publishing house Beyond Words. Black, who had recently entered into a relationship with Atria, saw its potential; by late November the book was in the stores and soon after got its first break when Ellen DeGeneres featured it on her show. By the time Oprah ran her first segment on it, on Feb. 8, it was already a huge success.