Decoding 'The Secret'

Byrne herself seems nonplused by her success, and remains a somewhat elusive figure; she is sparing with interviews and didn't even appear on the second of the two hours Oprah devoted to "The Secret." Her family in Australia said they were told by Rhonda not to talk to reporters, although her mother, Irene Izon, did offer this assessment to NEWSWEEK: "The thing is that Rhonda just wants to bring happiness to everybody. That's the reason it all began. She just wants everybody to be happy."

And to give her her due, she might actually be achieving some of that. There is nothing, in principle, wrong with thinking about what makes you happy. Here is someone she did make happy: Cheryl Cornell-Powers, 59, a Chicago training consultant, who saw Byrne on "Oprah" and then watched the film. She discounted the idea of curing one's own cancer, but liked the segments that emphasize gratitude over resentment. "We look at our money and say, 'What fun it would be to go out to dinner to places that are on our budget,' not, 'We can't do this because we're on a budget'." Even a serious academic like Harvard psychologist Carol Kauffman is willing to credit the idea that you can change your life by consciously directing your thoughts in a positive direction. "Basically, it's chaos theory," she says. "I don't think you can actually attract things to you. But if you're profoundly open to opportunity, then when ambiguous events occur, you notice them. I think what positive thinking does is raise your consciousness to possibilities so they can snag your attention. We're starting to see some empirical studies on that now."

Of course, that's a long way from the simple model of Ask-Believe-Receive. In most people's lives, positive thought leads to success only through the transforming medium of action. For obvious reasons, this is a much less popular message. "The Secret" dubiously appropriates a number of historical figures to illustrate the law of attraction. Beethoven was probably bipolar; Newton ruminated obsessively over personal salvation; Einstein derided quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance." Martin Luther King Jr. is enlisted as author of an epigram about taking a staircase one step at a time. King certainly could visualize. But he also knew better than to sit back and wait for the law of attraction to send down justice; he went out and worked for it. And there's no secret to that.

With Matthew Philips in New York, Mary Carmichael in Boston, Karen Springen in Chicago and Kendall Hill in Sydney

© 2007