The Secret: Vision Quest

The Secret is big on visualization. Visualization is one of its more logical concepts, actually, considering the role it’s played for years in managing pain and chronic disease. It’s certainly better proven than the Aladdin’s-genie-lives-within-you tenet, or the your-feelings-tell-you-what-you-are-really-thinking belief. A guy named Mike Dooley, described as an “author and international speaker,” introduces the concept of visualization in the video:

Look at the back of your hands, right now. Really look at the back of your hands: the color of your skin, the freckles, the blood vessels, the rings, the fingernails. Take in all those details. Right before you close your eyes, see those hands, your fingers, wrapping around the steering wheel of your brand new car.

(This is perhaps a good time to note that The Secret People don’t make any judgments about what you want to use The Secret for. It’s perfectly fine to ask the universe to give you a Maserati, for example, rather than the job that would earn you the money to buy said Maserati. I find The Secret’s unabashedly materialistic bent simultaneously refreshing and sinister.) After Dooley, a guy called Dr. Joe Vitale—who is a “metaphysician, marketing specialist, and author”—chimes in:

This is such a holographic experience—so real in this moment—that you don’t even feel as if you need the car, because it feels like you have it already.

Yeah, right, I thought, as I leaned back on my couch to try it. But, this assignment to write about The Secret allowing me to embrace exercises I would normally consider too embarrassing, I held my hands out in front of me. I looked at their chubby snowman structure, their week-old chippy manicure, the way that, gripping an imaginary steering wheel, they resembled bear claws. Gosh, I think it’s time to start waxing my arms. Eeew. I have really hairy arms. No! I have hairless arms. I believe I have hairless arms. I am sending out a hairless arm vibration. Genie!