|
The Secret of The Secret(continued) By Matt Evans Of course, this was before the April 2007 release of Esther’s new DVD: The Secret Behind the Secret, featuring her and her husband Jerry… and Abraham. The DVD lists for $39.95, but let me save you some cash. Here’s the secret: Abraham. It's true, Abraham is a group of spirits that one day decided to contact Esther by making her trace the letters of the alphabet with her nose. Here's how Esther describes the experience:
Jerry Hicks, almost the very next day following the scary freeway encounter, in fact, immediately started plying Esther-cum-Abraham with all manner of meaning-of-life type questions. I imagine his voice as that of a two-year old who has just learned to speak and now, Daddy, wants some answers. A decade or more of these Q&A sessions can be found in Hay House publishing's recent offering: The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Law of Attraction. The give and take between Jerry and Abraham flows along so naturally that it's easy to forget that Jerry is really just talking to his wife, who is pretending to be a collective of do-gooder spirits that identifies itself in the masculine singular but speaks in the first-person plural, like a publicist, pop star, or blogger. (Inquiring minds think suddenly to ask about Esther and Jerry's sex life, what with potential role-play and/or other such kinky bedroom shenanigans, but upon second thought decide to keep such inquiries to themselves.) Ironically, Esther used to be frightened of Ouija boards, that is, before she became one. But the book, with its conversations between Jerry and Esther and their mutual imaginary friend, doesn't seem creepy so much as it seems, well, selfish. That selfishness, I suspect, is probably closer to the reason why the Hickses and Abraham jumped off The Secret gravy train. Or not. But the Law of Attraction is a patently selfish belief, if not scarily solipsistic. I mean, who other than four-year-olds controls the world alone with their power of thought? Jerry and Esther may have had the same concern, but Abraham put their minds at ease:
Do you see the lie? The frightening "it is not possible to be otherwise" that could serve only to tempt susceptible individuals (okay, me) into justifying increasingly self-indulgent behavior? Such cleverly disguised selfishness often metastasizes with horrific speed, and before you know it, you're downward-bound on greased rails, destination Sunset Boulevard: I just vant to be left a-lone! Even though Jerry and Esther (and anyone else swept into their rhetorical corner) probably aren't consciously lying to us about their great happiness at having discovered the Law, I have suspicions that somewhere deep in their hearts something like a moral question prickles and goads. For instance, how should one respond to a crisis of, say, Darfur proportions? Should the suffering of stranger Africans on a continent far, far away be of concern if, ultimately, all that matters is how I feel? Jerry asked Abraham for clarification on this very matter:
That might, to some ears, sound a little cruel, this idea of blaming the victim for attracting the perpetrator. The upside, of course, is that such a belief absolves we standers-by from stepping in and offering help. Let's take as an example the recent shooting at Virginia Tech. Apparently, if the Law of Attraction holds true, those 32 men and women somehow attracted their crazy executioner to themselves. Mass homicide, in this light, is simply a game played between the shooter and his frightened victims. Rhonda Byrnes attempted to defend this belief in a telephone conversation with Newsweek's Jerry Adler. They were speaking on the topic of Rwanda, which dwarfs Blacksburg in terms of scope but certainly not in terms of horror:
Totally. Totally, those words that are so important, whether thought or spoken consciously or not, let the victims enjoy their just deserts. It's true that any survivor of genocide or attempted homicide is responsible for picking up the various shattered pieces and attempting to make something of what's left of life. But to pretend that tragedy is nothing more than a game is to diminish its victims suffering in the cruelest possible way. The word "compassion," incidentally, comes from the Latin com + pati, to bear, suffer. If compassion would have us bear another's suffering, what then is its opposite? What is the word for ignoring or minimizing another's suffering for the primary purpose of easing the bystander's discomfort, and, as Law of Attraction espouses, the dubious secondary purpose of somehow inspiring the sufferer to quit wallowing in his own tragic juices? Am I overreacting here? I feel like my parents yelling at me for listening to heavy metal music. But Jerry's question, remember, was whether one could actually reach a state of consciousness where he isn't bothered in the slightest by another's pain or suffering. Here's Abraham's response:
Yes, learning to crush one's instinct for empathy has the upside of reducing one's vicarious experiences of pain, but the downsides are pretty horrific. This horror should be apparent to anyone with even a cursory understanding of Nazi Germany or the Rwandan massacre, to name just a couple of too many recent horrors. If you can view the destruction of a human without feeling pain, if you consistently smother the inner voice that strives to represent your victim as something other than an abstraction, an insensate statue, incapable of consciousness and feeling similar to yourself, what does that say about your own humanity? Did the Nazis hear only the dulcet strains of Wagner as they ushered naked shivering women to their final shower? Did their victims' gaping mouths emit valkyrian arias instead of screams? Certainly not, but they strived to attain precisely that sort of Abraham-endorsed psychic distance from their horrific actions. Question: How is the bystander different from the perpetrator if he views the victim from the same dispassionate distance? When Abraham states that we have no other choice but to be selfish, Henry Frankfurt, Dr. Bullshit himself, counters that, "...as conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them." Thus, it isn't too hard to imagine a scenario wherein adherents of the Law of Attraction, viewers of The Secret, labor diligently to block the outside "negative" world from their consciousnesses and hold on only to what they imagine to be the "positive" things in life — "imagine" in the sense of fantasize, because they haven't taken the time to really get to know someone's plight. After all, really getting to know someone often involves pain and sacrifice and inconvenience, and in the case of tragedies, often horror and revulsion, too — these individuals block out so much of objective reality that they ultimately know less and less about more and more until one day they know absolutely nothing about everything. Their world is utterly of their own making, and it corresponds not a whit with the world you and I attempt to share. This is called insanity. Here's a secret: the Mother Theresas of the world will be remembered long after the Rhonda Byrneses and Esther and Jerry Hickses (and Abrahamses) have faded from collective memory, for the same reason that generosity of spirit is appreciated so much more than selfishness. Magnanimity represents the apotheosis of human nature. Other people, it turns out, aren't barbarian hordes beating on the gates so much as hungry strangers looking to come in from the cold. Success, lasting success, takes place only when one figures out how to best serve a large number of people. Real people, real service first, the money will probably follow. Failure, then, reverses that equation, puts money before people, and ultimately comes to no lasting good, because yes, you're rich, but without a community of friends, without actual loved ones, who will you spend it on? After all, even Dorothy, when all the monkey business bushwah was over, had the good sense to finally just go home.
|
