Dear Katie,
I’ve been hoping “The Secret” craze would pass as quickly as the Hula-Hoop, then this afternoon I saw it featured on Oprah.
It seems to me that this so-called “secret” is just another way of tricking the mind into thinking it is in control, a message that is diametrically opposed to your invitation to make friends with reality, love what is, just notice, etc.
I don’t understand how someone who has The Work can take this movie seriously; yet, I’m hearing from people I usually consider sensible that they [the moviemakers] are “saying the same thing Katie says.” Lots of people.
Please consider commenting on this movie/book in the Parlor.
Much love,
Susan
Dearest Susan,
Here are Stephen’s thoughts:
The Secret: “You can have whatever you want.”
The Work: “You can want whatever you have.”
The Secret: “My will be done. I know what’s best for me.”
The Work: “Thy will be done (=Thy will is done). What’s best for me is what actually happens.” (In A Thousand Names for Joy, Katie says, “God’s will and your will are the same, whether you notice it or not.”)
The Secret: “You can control your thoughts.”
The Work: “You are not the thinker. It’s not possible to suppress your stressful thoughts. But when you question them, they let go of you.”
The Secret: “You can manifest your positive thoughts as reality.” The Work: “Reality already is the best thing that could be manifested. When you realize this, you’re home free.”
Thank you, Susan, for your work during the Los Angeles relationships weekend, and thank Gayle also for being so amazingly generous and present as she gives the Work to people in this world through her excellent recordings. I and thousands of others are so very grateful.
The Secret? So, let’s discover for ourselves if there really is a secret, if in fact one exists. “There is a secret”—is it true? I don’t know, I just don’t know, could be, and how would I know when I have found it? Wouldn’t it mean (if it were really powerful) that when I truly found it, my life and the lives of everyone I love, which is everyone on the planet without exception, would be perfect? That I and all of us would no longer have to suffer from needing, wanting, and shoulding, and would be excited and grateful for what we have as we watch more and more flow in as we need it and always on time, just loving what is here for us right now in this moment? Hmmm. Okay, let’s keep moving.
“There is a secret”—can I absolutely know that it's true that there is a secret which, if known, would give me the key to having everything that I want and need that I don’t have now in life? One that will give me later what I don’t have now (examples: a BMW, the necklace that I really want, weight loss, a bike)? No, I can’t know. How do I react when I think the thought that there is a secret and others know it and I don’t? I must live in a past and future that don’t exist as anything other than unfulfilled imagination, yearning for what I don’t have and believing that material wealth and better health are the key to my happiness, left out, isolated, unhappy, trying my best to get the things that I want and often failing and feeling like a failure. I begin to believe that I cannot harness this “secret” and end up with the same life that I started with in the first place, with or without material success. Who would I be without believing that there is “the secret?” Loving life, being “the obvious,” rather than being the secretive.
There is a secret? Now it’s time to look for the turnarounds that are as true or truer for you, dear Parlor family. The one-liner is “There is a secret.” What turnarounds do you see and are willing to share with us? Post your comments below, at the end of this post.
If I believe it and cannot find it, see it, bring it in as fact, then I cannot prove it to “myself” in this world. There is nothing that isn’t manifested by mind, everything is as we see it, and that isn’t much of a secret. It is only when time and ownership of “things” (and body is also a thing) are misunderstood that you attempt to dictate and manipulate these two factors (time and ownership).
The secret is that wanting what I don’t have leaves me wanting what I don’t have again when I have what I thought I wanted then. I don’t need to map out a plan for the future, and I would if it made sense to me or if I needed to, but I would have to distrust the nature of the universe and myself first, and I trust “myself” totally without question to love all of life. There is never a limit as to what to do now, as what “I do” is what we all get, and it accumulates because I don’t argue, I follow the simple directions that are always kind. I don’t do later what I am to do now, and no one does. Later is now.
The secret is to love what is. I love what is because this “what is” right now is all that is and all that ever will be! Right now, not later, all my needs are met, all my desires, my wants are visibly in plain sight and my eyes are open to it, and the feeling is love and gratitude for all that is right now at my beck and call without beckoning or calling or having even asked for it, prayed for it, planned for it.
I didn’t see Oprah’s show hosting the Secret guests, I was traveling, but I have heard from others that they more or less ended the show with two, maybe three, of the Secret guests showing their prior plans and desires, wishes, wants, imagining, imaging, making real in their minds whatever it took to “manifest” themselves as guests on the Oprah show and that is why it worked. There may be millions of people doing the same thing, just wanting to meet Oprah in person. They may really want to meet her with all their heart, and it isn’t enough. This could easily move into despairing thoughts such as “It doesn’t work for me, I’m doing it wrong,” and for some of you that I have met on the book tour, this opens the door to “I created my own cancer,” “What did I do to create this cancer?” “If I knew what I did to create my cancer I could uncreate it, and if I can do that it means that I never have to suffer again. I must know the secret or suffer and die unnecessarily,” “I am going to die if I don’t know the Secret; after all, the doctors say they can’t save me. What did I do to create this in me?”
True creation is like this: There is no cancer until the doctor tells someone that they have cancer and then until they believe it they can’t have it. If they have never heard of cancer before, they must first be taught that it exists, and then they can believe that they have it, and that must be taught too. If they don’t believe it from the doctor, then the family has to teach them. We teach them to have it and then we teach them to try and get rid of it, and if they can’t, then they die. We have to teach them that they live first, though. If we haven’t been taught, how can we believe? And we ourselves create “it” (cancer, everything) the moment we believe. All the evidence shows that it’s true, and that is how the belief is held in place. The mind goes from nothing to crazy with fear (really crazy, sometimes). This is the way people create, reinforce, and maintain their beliefs: “I am going to die, they can’t save me, my children can’t make it without me, God is punishing me, I don’t know how to unmanifest my cancer,” on and on. When the phone rings and it is someone you love talking to, you are laughing, talking, enjoying life in that moment: where is the cancer in that moment? Do you have cancer or are you absolutely cancer-free in that moment? Of course, we are absolutely cancer-free until the mind brings back the unquestioned cancer story into reality. I use the term “absolutely” on purpose. The mind creates who and what we are when we believe our thoughts and experience the concepts, feelings, and images in our heads in the moment. This isn’t right or wrong, it is just so in the moment we believe what we seem to be experiencing as our identity.
In my world, cancer has a right to live or die. Everything has a right to life and death, because I know what everything is, and its true nature. If “I” have cancer, that is my identity (that is who mind identifies me as) and as that identity, I may choose to have chemotherapy, do alternative medical practices, medical practices, change my diet, think positively, even though we continue to believe the “negative” unquestioned thoughts, the opposites of what we want to believe, even though we don’t want to believe them. We believe them until we don’t, and inquiry breaks the spell of “negative” thoughts and therefore what we negatively feel and believe. The negative thoughts, unless we question them, override the positive thoughts that we want to believe, and negative thoughts win out, and the positive thoughts are just powerful and ring true enough to make us feel better occasionally. They don’t work when we really are believing the stressful ones, the one that we don’t want to believe: “I have cancer, I’m going to die, they can’t heal me, my condition is hopeless, it’s not fair, I have created this,” etc. With or without cancer, my life is what it is, and I am grateful for that. With or without cancer, I am still sitting in this chair writing to you, and there are two ways to sit here. One is happy, and the other is stressed out.
I look forward to the turnarounds and examples from you, dear family. I want everyone to come to understand what so many of you are coming to understand about the ease of internal life. Please share your secret thoughts with all of us.
Loving you all,
kt
