Product Description

The new "extended edition" of this ground-breaking feature length movie presentation reveals The Great Secret of the universe. It has been passed throughout the ages, traveling through centuries... to reach you. This is The Secret to everything - the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted. In this astonishing program are ALL the resources you will ever need to understand and live The Secret. For the first time in history, the world's leading scientists, authors, and philosophers will reveal The Secret that utterly transformed the lives of every person who ever knew it... Plato, Newton, Carnegie, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein. Now YOU will know The Secret. And it can change your life forever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #140 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-04-23
• Rating: Exempt
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 91 minutes

Synopsis
The secret has been travelling through time and has crossed centuries to help you. The secret is the key to everything – joy, health, relationships, money, love and happiness… everything you have ever dreamed of and all the resources you need to get them.

Customer Reviews

The Secret is...Santa Claus!
The notion behind this is the so-called 'law of attraction' which is basically if you can fantasize about a sports car and make it real enough, then a sports car will turn up on your doorstep.

That's it!

What stops this Father Christmas philosophy from being merely humorous, however, is that it claims that illnesses such as breast cancer can be cured by 'the secret'. This is not just dangerous, but quite offensive.

There is some sound psychological advice (available elsewhere and in a more sensible context) but the creators of this dvd have taken it and interwoven a great deal of pseudoscience and metaphysical claptrap to make it sell. The comparison with the Da Vinci Code is an accurate one.

The basic good advice from this (to save you wasting money on it) are:

*Be grateful for what you have
*Think positively
*Live in the present, not in the past
*Visualize what you want
*Enjoy life

Certainly following these principles will improve your lot. but they won't make a ferrari appear in front of your house.

Loved it!
If life isn't going your way, watch this and you'll feel revived by the end of it!

Tha Danger of The Secret
The Secret is presented as a single, coordinated idea, it is not. The movie is a rather unstructured walk over a wide range of topics, some it treats in a reasonable, if rather shallow, way and others it does not. The collection of people speaking on behalf of "The Secret" are billed for example as a Philosopher, Quantum Physicist, Doctor of Medicine, Finance Expert, Metaphysicist, Fen-Shui Expert and a Visionary. For the most part, they talking about different things and though they keep presenting their pieces as a build on what has been said before, they really are not. The style is that of a "get-rich-quick" infommercial with a slightly tugged stylistic forelock in the direction of the da Vinci Code and The Lord of the Rings.

In essence, the main idea is about being thankful for our gifts and visualizing success which increases the chance of something working verses doing very little and getting into a victim mind. This idea is variously ascribed to a collection of from the past luminaries such as Buddha, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Issac Newton, Ralf Waldo Emerson, Beethoven and Einstein as well as NASA and even God, depending on who is speaking. Examples are given where thinking positively and visualizing what you want has brought in vast riches, a trophy-house and upping the rate at which a man could get dates with wannabe Los Angeles actresses. These lofty goals are crystallized into the "Law of Attraction" which appears to imply that if you think about money and beautiful people they will come to you and if you think about miserable stuff you will get poor, miserable people around you. The extensive piece on the desiring and acquiring of consumer goods was, quite frankly, repulsive to me.

The "ancient text" that has been re-discovered by entrepreneur Rhonda Byrne, the instigator of all this, is actually "The Science of Getting Rich" (1910) by Wallace D. Wattles. This is presented as an ancient lost tome, though in reality thousands of copies are available on Amazon at dioscounted prices. The suggestion is that this "secret" idea was suppressed by the authorities for thousands of years, passed covertly from the pyramids of Giza through secret sects, the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucians appears to be an attempt to make the marketable link between ancient mysteries and the modern obsession with consumerism.

On a positive note, the film does go on to say that money was not everything and that true happiness comes from learning to love yourself as well as consumer durables. Unfortunately there was a rather sneering introduction to this piece that said to the effect that people who have developed a spiritual awareness are usually happy, though quite often they do not have a lot of money. This is not an accurate quote but the sense that I took from this piece. Again on a more positive note, they did actually come back twice to the counterproductive nature of "The War on Terrorism" and showed examples of people overcoming extreme adversity through the power of their will.

From here it skips around the theory behind holistic medicine and most alternative therapies, that good health it is all about getting the body and the mind in balance. I am not sure that was actually a secret. There is also a piece on energy that was largely borrowed, and presented by, some of the talking heads from "What the bleep do we know?!" which is probably the best piece. Unfortunately this was extensively edited and now appears mostly in the "out-takes" part of the DVD.

For me, most of the concerning comments came from The Reverend Dr. Michael Beckwith, Visionary. Amongst other things, he is a leader of the Christian "New Thought" movement and of his own church. He seemed keen to purvey the message that the world was full of endless abundance and that all you need to do is to want it, believe that you will get it and to receive. I cannot think of a more unsustainable message at a time when the a spirtually challenged world is creaking under the burden of an excessive demand from a rapidly growing population of consumers, and expanding population, and shortages in the supply of energy, food and water.

This film ignores any idea of getting your heart-mind in synchrony with the heart mind of the Universe. God appears mainly as a provider of earthly wealth. It is all about trying to get more of the heap of riches, happiness and good health on your own stack. Don't worry where it's coming from because there is an infinite supply, for all. However, if you do worry about this then you won't be surrounded by beautiful people and nice things. In the materialistic and narcisistic world of "The Secret", it does not get much worse than that.

To me this film was a mess on just about every level, as a piece of art, economics and spirituality. Those who are always looking for the new self-help answer to life, the universe and everything may hang on to it for a little bit but I think that it is too much of a parody of itself to be taken seriously. Some of the speakers are quite well known and I hope that they are suitably embarrassed about being involved in this project, however I read in Wikipedia that only one of them was actually paid. So may be that's the secret, get people to work on your project for you for free and then run off with the money. Even that's been done before.