I admit it. I did it. In the name of research, I finally watched the movie The Secret. (And because I was also interested in seeing how people reacted to such an idea, I went to a metaphysics group showing of the movie.)
My first reaction to the movie - "Oh my God, this is boring!" I expected the watered-down psuedo-science on the level of What the Bleep, but this just took too much time to say too little of practical value. Most of the time was spent saying it again and again and again.
Skeptic Michael Shermer wrote about The Secret in this month's Scientific American. He does a great job of tearing apart the 'science' that was presented, so I won't repeat those observations here. I do want to say one thing though... the fact that this movie presented such weak 'science' in an attempt to support the idea that we can somehow control our experiences does not mean that the idea is invalid. Some people are able to exert predictable, repeatable effects upon the outcomes they observe. I'm arguing that the actual mechanism is still waiting to be brought to light.
More fascinating than the movie were the reactions to it from the various members of the group I was with. My observations from that discussion...
1) Across the board it seems, people feel safer discussing this idea when it is applied to trivial issues, such as finding a parking space or getting green lights when driving. (This phenomenon could be a series of blog entries in and of itself.)
2) No one liked the fact that someone would charge money to share this knowledge. Apparently that's not too 'enlightened'. (I object to charging money for something with such poorly detailed information as to the actual procedures for practical use.)
3) Only one person brought up the fact that this idea could be put to use in malignant ways. (And he was the person that everyone had a bad reaction to before his comments.) Just as we were beginning to drift into a productive discussion on ethics, the group ended.
One final note...
Shermer's objections to The Secret also come in the form of 'No one would have chosen that evil/suffering/tragedy for themselves. How can you say that their thoughts brought them that?!' That's a valid objection that needs to be addressed by any system/theory that claims that the mind has an influence on reality, including mine.
