Positive Thinking is Just Like Magick

The success of books like The Secret and films like What the Bleep Do We Know? has popularized a revival of the New Thought movement that first emerged in the early nineteenth century. It emphasizes that positive thinking and visualization are responsible for bringing good things into your life, and that by cultivating such an attitude you will be more successful. There's a grain of truth to that idea, in that defeatism is unlikely to produce any sort of positive outcome, but at the same time critics of positive thinking have wondered for a long time whether reflexive positivity might have a downside as well.

Recently social psychologists have put positive thinking to the test, and have found that the critics do in fact have a point - one that I would argue applies to magick as well. One of the big cornerstones of the "blogosphere school" of magick is that magical operations and rituals are no substitute for mundane action. In order to achieve the best possible result, the point is that you take every possible mundane action in pursuit of your goal and then use magick to increase your odds of success further. Using magick in place of mundane actions likely has a fair amount to do with the reason that so many occultists wind up broke. You can use a spell to get a better job, but you still need to network, send out resumes, and so forth. Even a well-done spell is unlikely to drop a new job right in your lap by itself.

As the journalist Oliver Burkeman noted in “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking,” “Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.”

James Arthur Ray Guilty in Sweat Lodge Deaths

Back in March James Arthur Ray, a New Age guru who teaches a New Thought methodology similar to "The Secret," went on trial for the 2009 deaths of three students during a sweat lodge ceremony he conducted in Sedona, Arizona. Last Wednesday the jury returned its verdict, finding Ray guilty on three counts of negligent homicide.

Prosecutors argued that the lodge, made of willow trees and branches and covered with tarpaulins and blankets, was heated to a perilously high temperature, causing the participants to suffer dehydration and heatstroke. They also said Ray didn't monitor the temperature inside the lodge or the well-being of participants and was indifferent to those clearly having trouble.

Ray's lawyers countered that what happened was a tragic accident, not a crime. They asked witnesses who were in the sweat lodge whether they signed a release form warning them of the dangers. All replied that they signed, but some said they didn't read the form. Ray's attorneys also suggested that exposure to an unknown toxin in the lodge -- perhaps a pesticide, rat poison or something in the type of wood used to heat the rocks -- could have caused the deaths.

The idea of a pesticide or poison being involved in these deaths is a novel theory, but anyone who has studied forensics knows that when a person is poisoned there's almost always some trace left behind. Rat poison in particular is easy to detect by forensic methods, as it's a readily available household chemical that is nonetheless strong enough to be used as a murder weapon. Pesticides tend to build up in the body as well, so it's hard to imagine how any of those could kill and then drop to undetectable levels by the time the bodies were autopsied.

Sweat Lodge Trial Underway

In October of 2009 I covered the case of James Arthur Ray, a self-help guru who taught a New Thought methodology similar to that popularized in Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. At a "spiritual warrior" retreat in Sedona, Arizona, several of his students were killed as the result of a sweat lodge ceremony gone terribly wrong. Ray is currently on trial in Arizona, charged with three counts of reckless manslaughter. If convicted he could face a long prison term.

They were seekers, not flakes. Doctors, engineers, salespeople, small-business owners -- professionals who paid $10,000 to break down personal barriers they believed kept them from achieving all they could.

But how hard participants in Ray's motivational seminars pushed themselves -- and how intensely Ray pushed his acolytes -- is one of the central questions being examined here in Yavapai County as his trial on manslaughter charges unfolds.

Prosecutors say three spiritual warriors died from the heat after 2½ hours in a sweat lodge on October 8, 2009. Nineteen others collapsed, vomited, had trouble breathing, hallucinated, foamed at the mouth or fell unconscious.

Some of the 55 people who followed Ray into the sweat lodge are now reliving the experience at his criminal trial at a remote desert courthouse far from the magic of Sedona. There are no New Age crystal shops or aura readers here. Roaring lions can be heard from a neighboring safari park.

Ray, a 53-year-old preacher's son, best-selling author and self-help coach, is accused of recklessly causing the deaths of Kirby Brown, 38, of Westtown, New York; Lizbeth Neuman, 49, of Prior Lake, Minnesota; and James Shore, 40, of Milwaukee. If convicted of three counts of reckless manslaughter, he could go to prison for more than 30 years.

"The Secret" Proves Deadly

By now most of you have probably already read about the case of two people who died during a sweat lodge ceremony in Sedona, Arizona at the beginning of this month. Police have announced that they will be investigating the deaths as homicides and are inquiring into whether or not the sponsor of the event, self-help author James Arthur Ray, had any idea of what he was doing in putting together the sweat lodge ceremony.

A search warrant was executed Wednesday at the James Ray International offices in Carlsbad, California, the sheriff said. Authorities were attempting to determine whether documents exist on how to construct sweat lodges and on their proper use, as well as documents showing whether participants were advised of the risks of sweat lodges either before or during the program.

One of the things that I did not realize when I first heard the story is that James Arthur Ray is one of the more prominant individuals teaching the spiritual method that Rhonda Byrne wrote about in "The Secret," a modern interpretation of the New Thought Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has recently been embraced as part of New Age theology. New Thought postulates that the universe is made of thought, and as a result you attract positive situations to yourself by thinking positive thoughts and attract negative situations to yourself by thinking negative thoughts. Physics never even enters into the equation.

I've criticized "The Secret" a number of times on this blog, and this case is a perfect example of everything that's wrong with it - what negative thoughts was Ray thinking that killed two of his students and has landed him in the middle of a murder investigation? If the model of the universe proposed by "The Secret" is correct he must have drawn this experience to himself and clearly should not be teaching others because he has not even mastered his own mind. On the other hand, if the postulates that make up "The Secret" are wrong Ray shouldn't be teaching either because the subject matter is bunk.

I'll say it one more time in the hopes of moving my comments further up in the search engine listings. "The Secret" is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of magick. Reality isn't made of thought, reality is made of energy. Thought is less substantial than energy. There's a reason that it's easier to light a fire with a lighter than it is with a thought, even for experienced magical practitioners. That doesn't mean thought is useless for manipulating the physical world, but rather that it is limited in its effectiveness.

My friend Frater Barrabbas posted an article on his blog earlier this month about practical magick. I'll repeat an excerpt from my comment on that article here because it explains the basic truth that "The Secret" completely glosses over.

The laws of probability make the role of mundane action in practical magical operations abundantly clear. To use the lottery example at the beginning of the article, it is possible for a lottery spell to be successful even if the magician doesn't buy a ticket - he or she could, say, happen upon a winning ticket lying on the sidewalk while out for a stroll. It's just that such a thing is very unlikely, much more so than picking a jackpot winning number. If your magical powers are such that you can produce a probability shift of 100 to 1 against or even 1000 to 1 against there's really no point in bothering unless you shift the odds into a more reasonable range by buying a ticket. Similarly, you can do a spell for a better job and there's a possibility that you will just happen to be out at a party or something one evening and meet the right person, but again your odds are a lot better if you send out resumes and go through the usual job-hunting steps in addition to casting a spell.

The key to understanding this is that magick is not all-powerful, despite the fallacious arguments of skeptics that imply if you can do anything paranormal it automatically implies that you can do everything paranormal. In my experience, there is a limit to the probability shift that any given magician can produce and the key to successful practical magick is to take enough mundane actions that your goal falls within that probability range.

The positive visualization advocated by "The Secret" can be useful, but many of the teachers who talk about the method treat it as all-powerful. The idea that any bad circumstance you experience must have been drawn to you by your own negative thinking is a wonderful exercise in victim-blaming that I encourage James Arthur Ray and others to clarify, especially in light of the "circumstances" that Ray apparently "drew to himself" in conducting this deadly sweat lodge ceremony.

My guess is that in this case "The Secret" will prove to be the root of negligence on the part of Ray and his staff. After all, if the universe is made of thought and ruled by good intentions as long as none of the people working on the sweat lodge ceremony wanted anyone to be killed nobody would be, even if serious errors were made in the lodge's construction. Unfortunately for the victims the universe is made of energy, heat is energy, and energy is a lot more tangible than thought.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, in this article I'm using the term "energy" to mean tangible, physical energy - in this particular case heat. I'm not talking about "psychic energy" or "magical energy," which I agree are terms that get thrown around pretty freely among magicians and often don't correspond to anything physical. I think the last sentence makes that pretty clear, but at least a couple of readers seem to have gotten the impression that I was saying "thought is less substantial than psychic energy." Obviously, that's a meaningless statement without some way to physically quantify "psychic energy."

Your Own Dan Brown Bestseller

Author Dan Brown unveiled his latest novel, The Lost Symbol, this week. The novel is a sequel to The Da Vinci Code and continues the adventures of Robert Langdon, the "professor of symbology" featured in both the aforementioned book and Angels and Demons. Have you ever wished that you could write your own Dan Brown bestseller? Well, now you can, thanks to modern technology. Slate introduces the Dan Brown Sequel Generator! Just select your city and a nefarious group up to no good and the computer does the rest. It's too bad that it only writes plot summaries, not full novels, since one well-received book of this sort can make an entire writing career, just like The Da Vinci Code did for Dan Brown. I've heard that prior to the media frenzy surrounding that particular novel none of Brown's books had sold more then ten thousand copies, but as we all know that one bestseller changed everything for him. His older books have now sold in the millions as well and Angels and Demons was made into a film. With its pre-Da Vinci sales numbers that never would have happened.

Years ago students at M.I.T. developed a romance novel generator, but I haven't heard anything about that particular technology in many years and am left wondering what became of it. Especially with today's more advanced computers it should be possible to build a much more complex program that could produce something akin to a Dan Brown novel. It's not as if the computer's fact base needs to be all that accurate - Slate also points out that there's no such thing as a "professor of symbology" and that the new novel set in Washington DC gets a lot of things wrong about the city. To be fair to Brown I did enjoy both The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons for what they were, so it might be a bit of challenge to program a computer with the necessary language skills to build suspense and keep the story moving along at a brisk pace. As a writer I know there's a lot of nuance involved that very well might still test the limits of artificial intelligence, and as a software developer that strikes me as pretty compelling problem to solve.

By the way, is it just me or does the cover of The Lost Symbol look suspiciously similar to the cover of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret? If the resemblance isn't coincidental, maybe it's a teaser for Brown's next novel in which followers of The Secret and that What the Bleep? movie kidnap a famous quantum physicist and threaten to banish one fundamental particle from reality by the power of concentrated attention each hour unless the National Academy of Sciences issues a proclamation declaring that all objects in the universe are constructed from thought rather than matter. In the climactic scene, Robert Langdon could defeat the cultists by demonstrating that positive thinking can't stop a bullet fired at the group's leader and then taking advantage of the ensuing confusion to escape with the physicist and Marlee Matlin. Matlin could even play herself in the inevitable film, and maybe we could give Byrne and that "messages in water" guy bit parts.

Hey, that sounds like a winner to me! Now where's my royalty check?

UPDATE: I finally came across a review of The Lost Symbol that summarizes the plot, and it sounds like the teaser is for this novel, not the next one. The plot actually does have to with "water memory" and that What the Bleep? nonsense, except with Freemasons. So much for my great idea - but maybe they can still get Marlee Matlin to be in the movie.

"Secret" Criticism Gaining Prominence

Criticism of "The Secret" has hit the mainstream media. There's really nothing new here that Slate hasn't covered in their series, but it appears that now the Associated Press is taking interest. AP feeds a number of major media outlets, unlike Slate which has more limited exposure.

Critics of 'The Secret' Bemoan Claims

Yes, even if you see it on a DVD, just wishing for something doesn't make it automatically happen. This is even true for trained ritual magicians, let alone folks who just watch a DVD or read a book. Positive thinking is helpful and can improve your life, but it has its limits just like everything else.

Slate Takes On "The Secret"

Emily Yoffe of Slate has a new article up discussing her attempts to apply the techniques published by Rhonda Byrne in The Secret for two months.

I've Got The Secret

As I've discussed in several articles, The Secret is essentially a rehash of the basic postive thinking methodology that originated with the New Thought movement in the early 1900's. That does not make it worthless by any means, but as Yoffe discovered, its power is substantially more limited than Byrne's sweeping claims. Positive visualization and affirmations constitute a system of magick, but one that is less precise and effective than systematic ritual work.

UPDATE: Slate has another article today (May 17th) that gives the pessimistic counterpoint to The Secret.

Think Negative!

The trick that allows a person to always think positively and at the same time be effective in the world is actually pretty simple - keep your emotions positive while maintaining an accurate view of facts. This is done by cultivating the realization that how you feel has less to do with your external surroundings than society normally implies.

UPDATE #2: Slate is really hammering these folks. Yet another article today (May 29th) on the "power of negative thinking."

Pessimist Nation

To be fair, negative thinking has little to do with these testimonials and contingency planning has everything to do with them. That's a good lesson - never assume that any magical method is all-powerful. Visualize success, but always make sure that you have a plan solidly in place for those times when the method doesn't work.

UPDATE #3: (May 30th) Some Christians don't like The Secret either.

The Secret: A Cosmic Dream Machine

Take a look at the references at the end - they cite me! Unfortunately the author's logic is something like (1) This ritual magician (me) says The Secret is magick, (2) Magick is bad, so (3) The Secret is bad, rather than anything constructive or interesting.

To materialize non-matter into matter, and to effect causal change through the power of thought is a hallmark of sorcery/magick. In essence, this is an attempt to be one’s own god, deciding for one’s self what is best and what is needed, and then endeavoring to create that desired reality.

I suppose what distances me from most Christians is that my first response to this assertion is "and?"

Ritual Magick Versus Positive Thinking

The New Age idea of positive thinking is an old standby in the field of self-help. Books on positive thinking have made bestseller lists for years, and the latest of these is The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Having only read a synopsis of the book I can't really comment on its quality except that it is popular enough to put up good sales numbers. The essential idea of this book and others has been around for a long time. It proposes that according to the "Law of Attraction" our thoughts tend to become our realities, so in order to create good conditions in our lives we should visualize the conditions that we want to experience so that they can manifest.

So is this magick? Of course it is. Ritual magick is predicated on many of the same ideas, it just works a whole lot better than simple visualization.

[UPDATE: Newsweek just came out with a bit of a slapdown of the book recently. Their basic criticism is that, first of all, it's nothing new or even especially profound. Second of all, by claiming the the law of attraction "always works" the potential for blaming victims for their situations and yourself for your own failures is very high. It frustrates me when people make ridiculous claims for magical techniques such as implying that they are always successful. Magick gives you a solid statistical edge, but even if you cast a spell very well and have a lot of magical power you still can't guarantee success.]

This is not to imply that positive thinking is worthless. It is more like a good first step, in that most people will see some improvement in their lives if they focus on having an upbeat attitude and keep their mind open to new opportunities. What most of these books are short on, though, is the mechanism behind those improvements. In most cases, while the changes practicioners might seem paranormal in nature, operant magical effects are really more the exception than the norm, since the underlying mechanism is usually psychological in nature. This still may be thought of as magick in that it is change in conformity with will, but for most people the process by which desired changes are accomplished lies firmly within the microcosmic realm of the mind.

There are three ways in which this sort of practice can work. The first is related to Robert Anton Wilson's idea that "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves" discussed in Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology. Human beings usually notice only a small percentage of the information that they are receiving from the outside world. Rather than trying to process everything all at once our brains have evolved the ability to pay attention to only "important" information. Wilson recommends the experiment of spending a day expecting to find quarters on the sidewalk. You usually will find at least one or two if you are in an area that gets a lot of foot traffic, but without the expectation held firmly in mind you are likely to miss them. If you expect to come across fulfilling opportunities and train yourself not to dismiss them out of hand, you are much more likely to notice them when they come along.

The next way in which this practice can work is that your body language tends to mirror your thoughts. Skilled actors and confidence artists can learn to suppress this natural relationship, but mastering this process is difficult. You can usually safely assume that the people around you can perceive what you are thinking, at least to a degree, simply through their own unconscious interpretation of your body language. The bottom line here is that people like to be around others who exude confidence and happiness. Such people are just pleasant to deal with, as opposed to "psychic vampires" who actually have no paranormal powers but are nonetheless tedious and negative enough to make most people feel drained after dealing with them. By maintaining a positive outlook, you send out the kind of unconscious signals that other people want to be around. Since most success in life is predicated on other people who know and like you, this is especially effective when combined with an open mind that is always on the lookout for new opportunities.

The third way in which this practice can work is the creation of operant magical effects. People who fail to make positive thinking work usually make the mistake of discounting the power of the first two ways in which the practice works in favor of expecting magical effects to appear out of nowhere if they can manage to visualize hard enough. This, however, is quite difficult to manage unless (1) you are a trained ritual magician who maintains a regular schedule of spiritual practices or (2) you have a very high level of magical aptitude, which is as rare as any other heightened ability. The sad part about this is that some New Age self-help books are written in a manner that implies you just need to visualize hard enough and all your dreams will come true. The inevitable conclusion is that if your life is unsuccessful you just haven't been wishing hard enough, so in a sense your problems are all your own fault.

The truth is that ritual magick would never have developed as a discipline if simple visualization worked just as well. What would be the point of elaborate ritual structures and years of disciplined practice? In fact, ritual magick is a collection of techniques that allow thought to create reality in especially efficient and effective ways. A ritual procedure is a way of tuning the mind to a specific idea and that idea alone, in order to focus all of the energy of thought upon a single point. Engaging the bioenergetic centers of the nervous system empowers this single-pointed thought, transforming it into single-pointed will. Finally the magical link, a concept completely absent in most of the available positive thinking schemes, allows that single-pointed will to connect with its target in the material world and create a real change external to the magician. This process does not happen automatically, but is instead developed and cultivated in the course of disciplined practice.

The positive thinking crowd has a lot to learn from ritual magick, but the stereotypical dour ritual magician can also learn something from the positive thinkers as well. Thinking positive thoughts is not necessarily sappy or silly, and an upbeat attitude is not incompatible with a serious approach to practice. Similarly, directing some attention to more mundane opportunities is not necessarily a deviation from the spiritual path. In my experience a materially successful life supports a successful spiritual and magical practice. As above, so below.