Beyond the meat suit

While waiting in a Kinkos yesterday, I skim-read a popular New Age tome called The Secret, which I had found nestled among the how-to-be-a-better-businessman paperbacks. (Boy, is that a depressing literary genre!) The Secret, written by Rhonda Byrnes and publicized by Oprah Winfrey, promises to teach an ancient spiritual method which allows the true seeker to gain unlimited money, power, sex, weight-loss, enlightenment and sales. It's Gandalf as Gordon Gecko.

I shall give away Byrnes' secret: She calls it "The Law of Attraction." Translation: Think Happy Thoughts Because Wishing Makes It So. You are awesome and godlike, and you can accomplish anything you want with a mere blink, just like Samantha on Bewitched.

The whole business comes down to little more than that.

Byrnes tells us that this is a closely-guarded covert science, passed down through the ages by the leaders of various secret societies. The book reeks of ersatz archaism, from its fake-leather cover with fake red wax seal to the interior pages printed to look like aged vellum. The current guardians of the Secret, who are quoted liberally throughout this work, turn out to be a group of New Age "writers" and "teachers" from no discernible tradition. Their sparse list of accomplishments may lead some unenlightened cynics to mistake them for hucksters.

One of these "Secret" teachers is a fellow named James Arthur Ray, who, in his appearance on Oprah's show, called the method "very scientific."

“If you think you’re this meat suit running around, you know, you have to think again,” he said. “You’re a field of energy in a larger field of energy."

Those words now seem grimly amusing, for Ray's foolishness has led two of his followers to transcend their meat suits prematurely. Red Dragon, a long-time friend to this blog, offers a special insight into this tragedy.

In Sedona, Arizona, Ray ran what he was pleased to call a Native American sweat lodge, for which his followers paid $9000. A real sweat lodge never includes more than ten people, but Ray apparently considered $90,000 an insufficient haul. So he packed roughly 60 seekers of the Secret into a tiny, poorly-designed sauna. Two people died, and a number of others ended up in the hospital.

Traditional lodges are usually made of willow branches and covered in canvas or animal skins, and are not meant to be air-tight. The authorities said that the lodge at Angel Valley was covered in plastic and blankets.

(I can't avoid noting that James Arthur Ray has three first names, as is traditional for American assassins.)

Ray, like other "Secret" teachers, believes that we create our own circumstances. That's a Secret catch-phrase. I'd like to see him tell a Holocaust survivor that those who perished in the camps made their own circumstances. I'd like to see him use that catch-phrase while talking to the children who suffered in Gaza or Lebanon or Rwanda or Darfur. And I'd really like to see him offer that explanation to the families of the two who died in Sedona.

How would he explain himself to them? Perhaps like this: "They brought it on themselves. Negative thinking can be very dangerous, you know."

Yeah. That'd go over real well.

Red Dragon is Native American, and he knows a thing or two about genuine sweat lodges:

This ceremony can be very dangerous if not preformed properly. The heat inside one of these "lodges" can be reach levels many are never prepared to withstand.

There may be some "Non-Native Americans" that have learned this ceremony from elders, but those are rare. Make sure the person conducting this "lodge" is someone who you can verify has the training and the authority to run one of these. (There are many "con-men/women out to make a buck off of your suffering. We tend to call these charlatans..."Plastic Men.")

If you are asked to "Pay" for the privilege of attending one of these.....Run away as fast as you can!

Is Jimmy Ray repentant? Well, he gave a tearful interview which contained no apology. But he has offered to conduct an investigation, just like Nixon did when the Watergate scandal broke. Mistakes were made.

His website offers no admission of guilt, no sense of personal responsibility. Ah, but the con goes on! Herrrrrre's Jimmy:

Regardless of where our economy is headed right now, you have the power and ability to create your own economy and your own results. And I'm not just talking financially...

Then there are those who claim to be really "spiritual," and they're always financially broke. That's not wealth either!

He offers no doubt as to what sort of su...er, seeker he hopes to attract:

You simply (and deeply) want to make more money and become more successful...

You want to double, triple, even multiply by ten the size of your business...

You've already achieved at least a modest level of success and want to use that as a springboard to greater things...

Listen closely. Can you hear it? It's Joel Grey and Liza Minelli singing money money money money money....

This evangelical site has a few wise things to say about the Secret fad. Alas, the writer segues into spiritual calumny when he classifies people like Byrnes and Ray as "gnostic." Wrong. The primary teaching of gnosticism was not "the law of attraction" but "the material world sucks." The gnostics abandoned all of their possessions and devoted themselves to the ideal of pure wisdom.

The Secret, by contrast, is all about acquisition, all about the Great Gimme: Gimme money, gimme good looks, gimme the ultimate fuck, gimme the admiration and envy of others, gimme gimme gimme. The gnostics taught that those obsessed with acquisition have already lost the game. If you're still saying gimme, you ain't never gonna get it.

Disdain for materiality is the never-popular teaching offered by most mystical traditions with a genuinely archaic pedigree. Such is the real secret. It was never a secret.