Letters to the Editor
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she probably has more perceived moral authority than anyone in this country
"Oprah has a reputation for doing good -- she probably has more perceived moral authority than anyone in this country -- and she has done a lot of good." Yeah, well that kind of tells you what's wrong with our country doesn't it? She's "perceived" as a moral authority and being a liberal, and yada yada yada,.. But how moral can you be sitting on a fortune that would feed a small country and continuing to amass even more while espousing an individualist philosophy nearly all the time? Its easy for rich people to be perceived as doing good when they give away a little percentage of their money now and then and use their powerful voices for chosen causes. Not so easy to be seen as good as you really are if you are poor and generous with the little you have... but its got a hell of a lot more authority.
But I think Jesus said that. Not the one in Oprah's little book who was a big millionaire... the poor Jesus!
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The Beauty Part
"Secret"-style belief is a perfect product. Like Coca-Cola, it goes down easy and makes the consumer thirsty for more. It's unthreateningly simple, and a lot more facile, sentimental and, perhaps paradoxically, intractable than the old-fashioned kind of belief."
The real beauty of "The Secret" and similar scams is they can never be refuted by reality. If you believe you're going to win the Megabucks lottery and you win the Megabucks lottery, you can credit The Secret for it. If you don't win, you can just say you didn't believe strongly enough.
A perfect Catch-22.
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Answer to anonymous
Question
"Child dies of starvation or is murdered", How does Law of Attraction explain".
Your question opens up the door of what has been a paradigm shift in understanding human life in relation to the Divine, so there are so many aspects to consider. The first is the reality of reincarnation. The second is that the Soul which incarnates both before incarnation and IN its embodied form has complete control over its destiny. This is the Law of Attraction. Therefore, if a soul is carrying karma from a previous life wherby it needs to balance out traumatic energies given to others, it will engineer a similar experience for itself to deepen because the activation of those vibrations are still present. It may be that the soul (Child) has made an agreement with its family through group karma to provide a lesson and to serve to impact those around it because those group vibrations are still active. The soul's need might be to "get in, get out quickly" for a particular resson. The soul may have a desire to experience the profound effects of poverty as to deepen its understanding of human experience because that vibration is active in its larger field.
These are just a few possible scenarios but all proclaim from a higher vantage point that there is no victimhood. If one posits "God" is love, then a group negotiation such as the Holocaust, will occur to help humanity to observe the effects of its own Evil, or dissociation from its essence, which is love, and to have the opportunity for choice in the larger matter. But even that is too simplistic as each event such as that has a multitude of layers. But it definitely is one aspect in my opinion.
"The mill of God grinds exceedingly slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine."
LIfe is far vaster than we think from our intellectual and sensory view.
I recommend "Testimony of Light" by Helen Greaves, among other books, to shed light on these issues.
As Krishna said, we are immortal, the soul finishing a body like a suit of clothes, moves on to another for its next purpose. Thus nobody really dies and nothing is lost. But our human "forgetting" gives the resonant power of suffering (and earthly joy) great impact. That is part of why we do this.
Kapeesh?
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another cynical writer with too many thoughts and no insights.
It is very easy to attack people or popular movies and books. All you have to do is exaggerate, take things out of context and say a few things that are not actually true. Once you have done that you have an article much like this one.
By the way as I recall Abraham was pretty well off, and Jesus lived his life without a job trusting God to provide what he needed. Do you remember he said "Seek first the kingdom of heaven and all these things will be added...". He also said "if you have faith as big as a mustard seed, you can say to this hill. Go from here to there and it will go!." now that is positive thinking if I ever heard it. Lastly it says in the Bible "as a man thinketh in his heart so he is". Surely if the Bible and Jesus say that you can affect your life through belief and positive thinking we shouldn't condemn Oprah for advocating the same thing.
In our lifetime Science has progressed to the point where the idea that thoughts effect our world has been shown by quantum physics to be fact. The sooner we as a people begin to embrace true reality the sooner human suffering will begin to diminish on this planet.
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The Secret is: Your thoughts create your world
Mr. Birkenhead's first thought: I need something to write about. I'm a dark-hearted skeptic, a product of the 'huh me?' Letterman ethos by which casual brutalities are the common coin of the realm - a hard-boiled flat-earther, in other words, looking for something new to steamroll now that he's exposed the underbelly of the diamond industry (the other article of his that I found on Salon).
PB's second thought, this one born of contempt for the proles out there who buy the snake oil: "Oh, yes, The Secret - easy target, a sacred cow ready for the slaughter. Salon will buy that one." (I imagine this contempt is also a product of whatever unprocessed toxic emotions still live in his subconscious + the caustic voices of role models he picked up along his journey to adult sentience + all the sad & cruel worldviews that have led him to see through a glass so darkly.)
My question: What exactly is the problem with large numbers of people opting out of the harsh, mediated culture (i.e., that supplied by the Birkenheel's of this world) that has formed the collective delusion that we're living in what might be defined as a "hell realm"?
And why are attempts to suggest otherwise -- that the world may actually be filled with light, positivity, some measure of joy and happiness -- be labelled "bullshit" (as some of your more reasoned and enlightened letter writers have bellowed) -- unworthy of sane discourse in a Cartesian world where Newtonian science still has a firmer grasp on consensus thinking than the more slippery quantum field (site of modern science's most profound new insights as well as inspiration for the so-called "new age quacks" of The Secret).
Okay, it's your choice, your thought stream: Either vulgarize The Secret (as PB has done) as a delusional vehicle for uncharted new heights of American Dreaming. Or see the film as a raw, ham-fisted, potentially misguided gateway to increased joy and happiness (emotional, primarily, not material).