The Seeker Academy Bookblog

With the ground frozen in cold lands, with more darkness still than light and with the new year having already brought a U.N. report that affirms the enormous threat of global warming, the #1 best-selling book and video at Amazon.com is The Secret. Propelled by online viral marketing and made iconic by presentations on daytime TV, it is in February 2007 the most-discussed cultural object in the developed world. Oprah Winfrey calls its central message (that a “law of attraction” causes like to attract like) the one she always most tries to convey; Ellen Degeneres pledges to bring The Secret up often on her show.

So The Secret is already a financial tiger, purring with spin-off products and services. And now a long-respected voice in the holistic healing movement, The Omega Institute, has announced that it will co-host the film’s May New York City theatrical premier with Oprah, and then hold a workshop on The Secret at its retreat center. A scan of the Internet reveals several other holistic programs that are planning similar screenings and workshops.

Very quickly, though, The Secret was ridiculed in the mainstream media. A week after the first Oprah interview with the film’s personalities, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a deeply ironic piece that pictured using the “law of attraction” to change the Bush-Cheney policies in Iraq.

At first glance, Dowd wrote, “The Secret might seem like inane piffle, a psychobabble cross between Dr. Phil and The Da Vinci Code.” However, understanding the secret to be that the universe and its beings respond to one’s thoughts, that like attracts like, Dowd realized that to get “certified chuckleheads to stop mucking up American foreign policy, all I have to do is let the universe know.” Dowd’s attack, however contemptuous, made its point: magic-makers who say they can bend life’s brutal, exhausting reality might show us how in Iraq.

Those forces in the common culture whose orientation is defensive, ironic and distancing, who make their mark and profits by exposing the ridiculous and linking it with other points of ridicule in a daisy chain, will have a party with The Secret. Oprah’s guidance that one should be open and uncritical and Stephen Colbert’s guidance that one should be critical and closed appear to be the only pop culture rocks left to hide behind.

Still, many people spend at least parts of their days trying not to hide. While largely this is managed in the context of everyday living, of family life and work life, some people try to be better personally, some try to make the common, political world better, and some try to do both. How such seekers respond to The Secret seems a different matter from how the popular culture does.

In this context, a critique of The Secret by Julian Walker, an integral healer and writer who blogs at the social networking site Zaadz.com, is worth reading. It is in three parts, though I’ll react only to the first part here.

Walker, a student of the philosopher Ken Wilbur, begins with observations. In the healing circles he inhabits, he says, he had begun to hear about The Secret everywhere. He hesitated to watch it, because of a previous New Age film, What The Bleep, that he thought drove “towards all sorts of misguided spiritual and psychological conclusions,” and, more elaborately, from “having been around the spiritual community my entire adult life and being perennially surprised, amused and infuriated with … the naivety, superficiality and gullibility of most ’spiritual’ people, [and by] the basically banal nature of the material that gets recycled and marketed … year after year.”

To Walker, The Secret (which he finally watched) is hucksterism. He notes its use of “meaningless titles/qualifications, very badly constructed arguments, category errors, logical fallacies etc., [and] scientific seeming images that then never go anywhere to strengthen its points, and examples/case histories that are anecdotal at best.” He calls its message less “high spiritual truth passed down through the ages” than “narcissistic delusion, bordering on the psychotic, plugged into the akashic records by a tinfoil hat.”

… the makers of The Secret want us to believe that if your mental focus is strong enough and the intentional “joy” in your being is brimming over enough, everything will happen as you want it to. That’s the highest spiritual truth and the secret to life…. They assure us that the reason a tiny percentage of the world’s population has so much of the wealth is because they know this secret. Never mind social conditions. Never mind racism, homophobia, colonialism, world history, psychology, trauma, economic oppression. Everyone, absolutely everyone could be wealthy, happy and in love if they just knew how to use the Law of Attraction. Um, what does that mean for people who are not happy, wealthy or in the perfect relationship? Well, for lesson number two - see lesson number one. You’re just not doing it right, silly.

All of which Walker finds “so insulting of the true nature of suffering, so ignorant of the realities of privilege and oppression, so authoritative in its endorsement [of] magical thinking and [its] judgment of those who are not doing it right as to set any nascent spiritual development and self-awareness back a good 5 to 10 years.”

Interested in neither gullibility nor ironic remove, Walker looks for answers to these problems. He calls first for critical thinking in spiritual development circles-for “studying actual philosophy, psychology, literature and art that grapples with the universal spiritual themes that great minds have been expressing since at least the ancient Greeks.” Then he turns to the central issue, which he sees as the fears, low feelings and real-world problems that in different arrangements shadow us all. Addressing his readers, he brings his own spiritual practice to bear:

Your so-called “negative emotions” have value and meaning. They are communications from your psyche. Be curious about them… Spiritual practice requires that you turn to face your shadow. That you get real about your social conditioning, your political situation, the distinction between what you have power over and what has power over you.

Spiritual practice is inspiring, but it’s also deeply humbling. It does not tell you that you can have anything, be anything, do anything, without limit. Sorry. That’s the kind of fantasy high The Secret promises-and the hangover is a real drag.

Many people believe that the holistic healing (or mind-body-spirit) movement, born in the beatnik-hippie counterculture, is shedding fresh, needed light on how people might live their lives in our confusing era. A growing network of retreats and learning centers offer workshops that in a variety of ways take participants behind their everyday experiences. Meditation in its different schools is the central teaching, and meditation bears a relation to the idea of like attracting like only in the sense that through it one learns to relax and see one’s life with less personal urgency and then, if it is important, to act based on this broader perspective. All this means in terms of action is that meditation gives you a clearer idea of what you should do. People often respond well to clear-headedness, and being clear-headed can make it easier to get things done. A fact of life does kick in here: an honest smile brightens the world. But no physical or physical-spiritual (that is, magical) laws are at play, and no material outcomes are guaranteed.

Where there is magical thinking, though, is back out in our everyday life. The half-century that gave rise to this movement saw the rise of TV, PCs and the Internet, the breaking of the genetic code and the start of cloning. It also saw the consolidation of business power and a resulting physical and social world that is largely shaped by these seemingly untouchable business forces. The circumstances and things these forces create fill up our lives as if by magic. Making this even more confusing is the fact that when we step back to think about these subjugating forces, we feel conflicted. Given a choice, what in our culture would we accept and what reject? And could we have the good without the bad?

It seems to me that, as with fifty years ago, when, during McCarthyism, Gary Snyder climbed his tower at Desolation Peak to study Buddhism and begin to write his poems, spiritual seekers and their communities face a social world that is deeply lacking in moral perspective. The holistic movement, borrowing and inventing, is working out spiritual practices that let people, in Julian Walker’s words, turn to face their shadows. This facing up to things perhaps can lead to a new moral perspective—liberal-minded but also rooted in soil that is fed by a deep course of multicultural (including Western) spiritual investigation.

What the holistic movement also often cultivates, unfortunately, is magical thinking, with The Secret and its promise that one can mechanistically have whatever one asks for as the current crop. Whether it does so to bring in revenue or because it sees magical thinking as something other than a harmful misdirection is unclear.

From a binding idea that life in the world, for non-fundamentalists, today holds extreme uncertainties, this weblog will comment and report on and gather resources around three thematic groupings. They are related, often plainly and at other times less so—that is, the postings and conversations will try to work out the relationships.

The Mind/Body/Spirit movement sets its sights on wellness and spiritual presence and more generally on how to conduct one’s life. Practical and philosophical, it looks beyond consumer culture and codified religions to take an individualistic, experiential approach to self discovery. Following or adapting various wisdom teachings, its members explore, give attention to their minds, their bodies, their hearts and their souls. For a tangle of reasons the explorations can feel to participants and observers alike both deeply meaningful and deeply silly.

The Spiritual/Progressive movement, founded in recent years, is taking steps to build a progressive political movement anchored in spiritual beliefs and practices. It opposes the politics of conservatism and reaction, which has a fundamentalist and often hierarchical spiritual orientation. Yet, it is emerging in a progressive movement that is now weak; it faces opposition from some progressives, who don’t think spirituality matters or should matter in politics; and its leaders are taking positions that the movement will probably wrestle with further as it matures. Having just begun, spiritual progressives may have also just begun to know what they believe and what their questions are and who their allies are.

These first movements undergird The Seeker Academy, my literary novel, which 4361 Press is publishing; and an aim of this weblog is to foster a conversation about ideas the novel presents. My posts will provide journalism and commentary. These movements, Mind/Body/Spirit (or Holistic Healing) and Spiritual/Progressive, complementary at times, both against the grain of mainstream culture, provide a rich, worthy subject.

A third thematic area, Virtual/Physical, seems not to fit the other two. Yet it is a point of entry for this weblog to the vast ongoing technology-driven changes to everyday life that are a source of this era’s uncertainties. A reason to seek spiritual grounding and a related political stance must be to better face life’s turmoil. Thus this weblog will on occasion probe the Internet, a creator of turmoil and the one technology I am equipped to write about. My primary area of study will be the impact of virtual space and community on physical space and community. I now consult on this question, which has strong moral components, to the non-profit Libraries For The Future.

Recently, visiting another city, I was twice at the Torah study group of a politically progressive synagogue. I was happy to find that the readings followed the story of Jacob. I only get back to the Jewish and Christian testaments every few years, but I always feel glad, and no one in them moves me more than Jacob, selfish, pompous, yet with a need (strange-sounding today) to be “blessed.” On each visit, I found about fifty people assembled; the age spread was twenty to eighty and there were other first-time visitors. Over two hours, we in the room painted these intense stories with our own intense, varied interpretations. Jacob’s need, leading to his night-long wrestle with an angel, and his way of living in the world, leading arguably to the murders committed by his sons, in being so recognizable, were cathartic for us.

Afterwards there was a friendly potluck lunch. On my second visit, I sat beside a man in his twenties. After some further Torah talk, I learned that he’d recently moved from across the country for graduate work he now was ready to abandon. He thought he might get a job in high tech, he was exploring rabbinical school, and he wondered if he should travel. He was also uncomfortable where he lived. Two of his housemates, a man and a woman, both heavily invested in gender politics, were about to take some kind of Buddhist vow. He’d had an interest in their discussions, but, based on their changeable convictions, they also dictated rules to live by for the group house. Two other housemates had rebelled, and the dwelling was ever at war.

This story speaks to a problem I see with the spiritual progressives movement as it is so far evolving. Created to counter the religious right, by providing a progressive political vision that incorporates spiritual longing, it seems rather to send a message of spiritual conviction. A multifaith group, it interprets many world religions to make them building blocks for a political position. The Network of Spiritual Progressives website points in this activist direction, and it is truly what is required. Yet it gives those who feel longing but little conviction, who are lifted for a morning by Jacob’s story but go back fatefully to their shaky lives, little to grab hold of. Living so unsteadily, does one continue to act politically or, in time, fall away?

Can a spiritual progressives movement admit our cultural dislocation and our uncanny, science-driven historical moment? Can it create practices that support both action and meditation? Can it allow in outlanders, shaky seekers, the people that many of us are?

The Chautauqua Institution, begun by Methodists in 1874, progressive, meditative, is an example to be studied. A potential large ally is the mind-body-spirit movement, which admits the shaky seeker. It, though, has not yet been very willing to look history in the eye.