The Secret

1. The Secret Revealed

Overview

A few people seem to get whatever they want. Most work just as hard and stay stuck. The usual explanations don't hold up. So what really decides who gets what, and can anyone learn it?

One Power, One Law

Everyone works with one infinite power and follows the same laws. Those laws are exact. We use them to build spaceships, send people to the moon, and land them within a fraction of a second. In India, Australia, Stockholm, London, Toronto, or New York, the power and the law are the same. The Secret is the law of attraction: everything coming into your life is pulled in by the pictures you hold in your mind. Prentice Mulford called every thought a real thing.

Kept From the Many

Denis Waitley says leaders who knew this kept the power instead of sharing it. They left people in the dark. People went to work, did their job, came home, and stayed on a treadmill with no power. Michael Bernard Beckwith, who founded Agape International Spiritual Center, reports money miracles in people's lives, along with healing in body, mind, and relationships. Bob Proctor asks why one percent of the population earns about 96 percent of all money earned. He says it's designed that way, because those people understand something the rest don't. People who draw wealth think rich thoughts and let nothing conflicting take root. Wealth is their main thought.

Like Attracts Like

John Assaraf pictures himself as a magnet and calls you the most powerful magnet in the universe. Your thoughts send out a pull you can't measure. Bob Doyle keeps it simple: think a thought, and you attract thoughts like it. Dwell on something that upsets you, and the situation seems to get worse. Holding that thought pulls in more unhappy thoughts within minutes.

The Scales Tip

Massive wealth gained, lost, and gained again in a short time shows how this works. Strong thoughts of wealth brought it in first. Then fearful thoughts of losing it took over. The balance shifted, and it was gone. Once the fear faded, thoughts of wealth took over again, and the wealth came back. The law responds to your thoughts, whatever they are.

Thoughts Become Things

See it in your mind and you will hold it in your hand. Mike Dooley sums it up in three words: "thoughts become things." John Assaraf says a thought has a frequency and can be measured. So when you keep picturing the new car, the money, the company, or the soul mate, you send out that frequency again and again. Joe Vitale calls thoughts a magnetic signal that pulls the matching thing back to its source. Charles Haanel, in 1912, described the law of attraction as the most dependable law creation rests on. Vitale's TV analogy: a station sends out a signal, and that signal turns into pictures on your screen. You pick the station by picking the channel, and changing the channel changes what you see.

Traced Through History

The law was carved in stone in 3000 BC. It shows up in every era. Shakespeare, Browning, and Blake wrote about it in poetry. Beethoven used it in music. Da Vinci used it in painting. Socrates, Plato, Emerson, Pythagoras, Bacon, Newton, Goethe, and Hugo taught it. It appears in Hinduism, Hermetic traditions, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The ancient Babylonians and Egyptians knew it too. The Babylonians became one of the wealthiest peoples in history by using the laws of the universe. They built the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders. Some wanted to keep this knowledge to themselves, but it stayed there for anyone to find.

Key Takeaways

• Pick what you let fill your mind, because whatever you focus on is what comes to you.
• Watch out when fear takes over your thoughts about something you value. That shift alone can turn abundance into loss, and then back again once the fear passes.
• Name the car, the money, the work, the partner, and picture them often enough that the image becomes your steady mental broadcast.
• This is open to you, not reserved for a chosen few. It's been carved in stone and echoed by poets, composers, philosophers, and ancient civilizations for thousands of years. Proctor's figure of about one percent earning 96 percent of the money shows who applies it, not who's allowed to.

Foreword

Overview

Almost everyone wants a better life, yet many keep meeting the same unwanted circumstances no matter how sincerely they try. Why would desire itself seem to return the opposite of what was asked for? That question is at the heart of every promise of deliberate change.

The transmission tower

Think of yourself as a human transmission tower, stronger than anything a television network could build. Your thoughts send out a frequency, things get pulled toward it, and those pictures come back as your life. Want to change anything? Change the channel. Change your thoughts. Charles Haanel said mental vibrations are the subtlest forces there are, and for that reason the strongest. See yourself living in abundance and abundance arrives, every time, with every person.

The "don't want" epidemic

Why isn't everybody living the life of their dreams? John Assaraf says people lack what they want because they think more about what they don't want than about what they do. Listen to your thoughts and to the words you speak, because the law never makes a mistake. Assaraf calls this the "don't want" epidemic, worse than any plague in human history, kept alive by people who think, speak, act and focus on what they don't want. The generation holding this knowledge can end it, by thinking and speaking about what it wants.

The law does not take sides

Bob Doyle says the law of attraction is indifferent to good and bad, wanted and unwanted. Stare at a mountain of debt and feel terrible about it, and you are telling the law, on every level, that debt is what you want. More of it comes. This is a law of nature, impersonal, receiving thoughts and reflecting them back as experience. Lisa Nichols says the law obeys, but it cannot read negation. Words like don't, not and no never register, and whatever holds your focus is called into existence.

• Worrying about spilling something on an outfit asks for spills, and more of them.
• Not wanting a restaurant to give away your table asks for tables given away.

Always running

The law works whether you believe in it, understand it or have heard of it, and it is the law by which everything is created. Bob Proctor compares it to electricity: not understanding how it works is no reason to reject it, and the same current can cook a man's dinner or cook the man. It responds to whatever you think about, past, present or future, and it never pauses. What you think about most is what will appear as your life. Complaining attracts more to complain about, and sympathizing with another person's complaint does the same.

Robert, in six to eight weeks

Bill Harris taught an online course with email access to him. A student named Robert described the grim realities of his life: coworkers ganging up on him, homophobic strangers accosting him in the street, hecklers at every comedy set, all of it circling his being attacked for being gay. Harris told him to reread that email and see how much of it described what he did not want, noting that his passion only made it happen faster. Within six to eight weeks the coworkers had transferred, quit or left him alone, he loved his job, the street harassment stopped, and his comedy sets drew standing ovations instead of heckling. He had changed the frequency he gave off, and his life changed with it.

Where the law shows up

You attract the thoughts you hold most often, conscious or unconscious, and learning this wakes you up. Lisa Nichols says the law is visible everywhere, drawing to you the people, the job, the health, the wealth, the debt, the joy, the car and the community, like a magnet. Nothing is left out of this Universe, and your life mirrors your dominant thoughts. Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, a quantum physicist, holds that a Universe cannot exist without mind entering into it, and that mind shapes what is perceived.

Working with the mind

An affirmative thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative one, according to the book, so it takes a great deal of persistent negative thinking to bring something negative about, though persistence will do it. The lag between a thought and its manifestation is a gift: if everything arrived at once we would be in trouble, and the delay allows reassessment and a new choice. Dr. Joe Vitale says you are the Michelangelo of your own life, and you are the David being sculpted. Quieting the mind is a route to mastery; every teacher in the book meditates daily, and three to ten minutes a day is enough to begin. An intention to hold and repeat: "I am the master of my thoughts."

Key Takeaways

• Your attention doesn't just comment on events, it causes them. The circumstances you keep meeting are the ones your usual thoughts have ordered.
• The law takes no moral side and responds to intensity rather than preference, so dread and desire work as the same kind of instruction.
• Words of refusal are wasted on a mechanism that registers only the object of focus, which makes resistance to something the same as requesting it.
• The process needs no belief and no rest to operate, so your life is settled by where your attention habitually rests, not by what you wish for occasionally.
• The gap between a thought and its visible result is room to catch a pattern and choose again before it becomes fact. That is why mastery of life comes down to mastery of attention.

2. The Secret Made Simple

Overview

Unwanted events happen. If they are not random, then the person going through them must have caused them somehow. That idea hits victims the hardest. Even if you accept it, you can't watch every thought you have. So how do you live with that demand?

A Law Like Gravity

The law of attraction works like gravity. It's a law of nature, exact and fair. It doesn't care whether you're good or bad. Fall off a building and you hit the ground either way. The same fairness applies to what shows up in your life. Every circumstance you have right now, including whatever you complain about, was drawn in:

• a car accident
• a difficult client
• a debt

This is the hardest idea to accept, and accepting it changes your life.

Mass tragedy is the hardest test. Crowds caught in a disaster didn't have to picture that event. Their thoughts had to match it. Fear, a sense of separation, and a belief that you have no power — if those stick around — can put a person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Either life is luck of the draw and circumstances decide, or your experience rests in your hands and only good can reach you because that's how you think. Nothing enters your experience unless a thought you keep thinking brings it there.

Attracting by Default

Most people attract by default. Thoughts and feelings run on autopilot, so unwanted outcomes appear without anyone intending them. Nobody deliberately attracts what they don't want. Unwanted results come from not knowing how much power your thoughts have. Watching every thought sounds like hard work at first, but that's where the fun begins, because shortcuts exist and you choose the ones that work best for you.

Feelings Show You Your Thoughts

Watching every thought is impossible. Researchers cited in the book put the figure near sixty thousand thoughts a day, and tracking all of them would be exhausting. Feelings are the easier route because they show you what you're thinking. Thought comes first. Everything else, feelings included, follows from it. The signal is instant, as quick as the drop in your stomach when bad news lands.

Feelings come in two sets. The bad ones are:

• depression
• anger
• resentment
• guilt

They leave a person without power. Only the person feeling them can tell which set is running. Asking "How am I feeling?" through the day builds that awareness. You can't feel bad while holding good thoughts, because thoughts cause feelings. Thoughts set the tone; feelings announce which tone is playing. If you sit in a bad feeling and don't change the thought, you're asking for more of what feels bad.

Feelings Are Feedback

Feelings are feedback about whether you're on course. A thought you keep thinking goes out, attaches to a matching signal, and within seconds the reading comes back as emotion. Feeling good confirms good thinking. Feeling bad is a warning to change the thought before things get worse. What shows up tracks feeling more than the surface content of thought. That's how stubbing a toe on the way out of bed can set a whole day: one bad thought attracts more, the mood locks in, something goes wrong, the reaction draws more of the same, and the loop holds until you deliberately change your thoughts.

Secret Shifters

Bob Proctor's Secret Shifters change a feeling in a snap, and a written list gives you something to reach for when anger or frustration sets in. Candidates include:

• beautiful memories
• future events
• funny moments
• nature
• a person you love
• favorite music

If one fails, try another, since different things work at different times, and a minute or two of changed focus is enough. Music, singing, or dwelling on a baby or on someone you love all work. Closing your eyes, focusing inward, and smiling for a minute lifts a mood on purpose. Adding feeling to what you want makes the signal much stronger.

Love, the Strongest Signal

Love is the strongest signal available, which is why some thinkers called the law of attraction the law of love. Loving a pet puts a person in a great emotional state. Unkind thoughts about another person harm the thinker rather than the target, while loving thoughts pay the one who holds them. Charles Haanel wrote that feeling gives thought its life, that desire is love, and that a thought filled with love cannot be defeated.

Mastering thought and feeling is where freedom and power sit. Einstein's question, whether this is a friendly universe, has one answer under this law: yes, and answering so makes it true. Affirmations that the universe brings all good things and meets every need follow from the same logic. Winston Churchill's line that a person creates their own universe as they go captures it. One contributor describes a life that became magical, with a four-and-a-half-million-dollar house, travel, mountains and safaris, credited to applying the Secret. Expecting struggle produced struggle; good things are yours by right.

Key Takeaways

• Treat the law as neutral the way gravity is neutral: being a decent person, or complaining loudly, doesn't exempt you, so trace whatever you dislike in your life back to the thoughts you've been running on repeat.
• Make your feelings the instrument you actually use, since thought comes first and emotion only reports on it; check in with yourself through the day and change the thought the moment the reading turns bad.
• Prepare a written set of quick mood shifters — memories, music, nature, a person you love — and use one for a minute or two before a sour mood gathers momentum.
• Aim your attention at what you love and expect good to arrive as a matter of course, because love carries the strongest signal available and the answer you give to whether the universe is friendly is the one you get to live in.

3. How to Use The Secret

Overview

You can want something with all your heart, yet wanting alone changes nothing. What separates a wish that remains a wish from one that becomes a fact?

The Genie and the Lamp

Aladdin is the model for how creation works. He asks, and the Genie answers that his wish is his command. In the original story, there is no limit of three wishes. The Genie is the law of attraction. It is always present and listening to everything you think, speak and do. It never asks whether you really want what you are asking for. Whatever fills your thoughts, your words and your actions, it takes as its command. Then it moves people, circumstances and events to deliver.

The Creative Process

The Creative Process comes from the New Testament. It is a simple three-step guide for creating what you want:

• Ask. Let the Universe know what you want. Bob Proctor says to write it out on paper in the present tense. Begin with a line of gratitude, and cover every area of your life. Clarity is the work here. An unclear request sends a mixed signal and returns mixed results. Joe Vitale compares it to ordering from a catalogue. Place the order once and never repeat it out of doubt. Make asking a habit, and you will never be stumped on a decision.
• Believe. Believe in what you cannot see, and know that what you want is yours the moment you ask. See it as already in your possession and stop worrying about its absence. The Universe mirrors your main thoughts. So think, speak and act as though you are receiving now. Make-believe like a child does. It is the feeling of a booked vacation, a purchased house, or a lottery win you know about before the money arrives.
• Receive. Feel good now, and feel wonderful about what is coming. Feeling good places you on the frequency of what you want. This is a feeling Universe. Intellectual belief with no feeling beneath it lacks the power to manifest anything. Feel it as though you have already received it.

Inspired Action

The how is not your job. Working out how it will happen sends out a signal of doubt, and the way will be shown to you. Most people never allow themselves to want what they truly want because they cannot see how it would happen. Yet nobody who ever accomplished anything knew how. They only knew that they would. Action is sometimes required. Inspired action, taken in order to receive, feels effortless, like moving with a river's current. Acting in order to make something happen feels like fighting it. When the impulse or the inner nudge arrives, act, because the Universe likes speed.

No Time, No Size

There is no rulebook saying a desire takes thirty minutes or thirty days. Time is an illusion. If everything is happening at once, the version of you that already has what you want already exists. Any delay reflects only how long you take to believe and feel that you have it. Size is irrelevant for the same reason. According to Bob Doyle, one dollar and one million dollars are equally effortless to attract. The million only appears slower because you decided it was a large amount. Start small: a cup of coffee, or an image of an old friend getting in touch. A young man pictured a feather with unique markings. Two days later, he found that exact feather at the entrance to a high-rise in New York City.

Expect It

People marvel at how David Schirmer lines up parking spaces. Since he first understood the law of attraction, he has pictured a space exactly where he wants it. 95 percent of the time it is waiting and he pulls straight in. The rest of the time he waits a minute or two while someone pulls out. People who always get parking spaces keep getting them because they expect to. People who call themselves lucky keep winning because they expect to. Begin to expect great things and you create your life in advance, right down to the next thing you do today.

Prentice Mulford on Setting the Day Ahead

Prentice Mulford, writing in the 1870s, taught that telling yourself a visit or a journey will be pleasant sends elements and forces ahead of your body to arrange it. Setting out in a bad humor, or afraid of something unpleasant, sends hidden forces ahead that create unpleasantness. Our state of mind is always at work fixing things up, good or bad, in advance.

Rushing Is Fear, Waiting Is Creative Time

Rushing and hurrying rest on fear, the fear of being late. They fix up bad things ahead of you. Keep rushing and one bad thing after another lands in your path. Then the law of attraction arranges still more future circumstances that will force you to rush again. Stop and shift off that frequency. Many people, particularly in Western societies, chase time and complain they never have enough of it. By the law of attraction, that is exactly what the complaint must deliver. Declare instead that you have more than enough time, and turn every situation into a positive one.

Waiting can become a powerful stretch for creating future life. Whenever you are kept waiting, seize the moment to imagine having everything you want, anywhere and anytime.

The Daily Habit

Make it a daily habit to determine every event in your life in advance through your thoughts. Set the Universal forces ahead of you in everything you do and everywhere you go by thinking the way you want it to go. That is creating your life on purpose.

Closing Reminders

• The law of attraction answers every command, as Aladdin's Genie did.
• To lose weight, do not focus on losing weight. Focus on your perfect weight, feel the feelings of it, and summon it.
• Powerfully intend something small. As you experience your power to attract, you move on to creating much bigger things.

Key Takeaways

• Treat every thought, word and action as a standing order. Say what you want plainly and in the present tense, and never doubt-repeat the request once it is placed.
• Once you have asked, act as if the thing is already yours. The feeling of having it is what carries the frequency. Agreeing with your mind alone carries none.
• Keep your hands off the how. Wait for the impulse that feels like moving with the current rather than against it, then act the instant it arrives.
• Prove it works on small things first, a cup of coffee, a returned call, a parking spot. Expect those, and bigger things will follow.
• Write tomorrow before you live it and stop hurrying. Rushing tells the Universe you are short on time, while time spent waiting is spare hours for building what comes next.