But Byrne was not saying anything new or original. In fact, she had merely packaged the insights of twenty-seven inspirational thinkers, most of them still living and many of them—like Jack Canfield, a coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul—already well known. About half the space in the book is taken up by quotes from these gurus, who are generously acknowledged as “featured co-authors” and listed with brief bios at the end. Among them are a “feng shui master,” the president of a company selling “inspirational gifts,” a share trader, and two physicists. But the great majority of her “co-authors” are people who style themselves as “coaches” and motivational speakers, including Joe Vitale, whose all-encompassing love I had experienced at the NSA meeting. The “secret” had hardly been kept under wraps; it was the collective wisdom of the coaching profession. My own first exposure to the mind-over-matter philosophy of The Secret had come three years before that book’s publication, from a less than successful career coach in Atlanta, who taught that one’s external conditions, such as failure and unemployment, are projections of one’s “inner sense of well-being.”
The notion that people other than athletes might need something called “coaching” arose in the 1980s when corporations began to hire actual sports coaches as speakers at corporate gatherings. Many salesmen and managers had played sports in school and were easily roused by speakers invoking crucial moments on the gridiron. In the late 1980s, John Whitmore, a former car racer and sports coach, carried coaching off the playing fields and into the executive offices, where its goal became to enhance “performance” in the abstract, including the kind that can be achieved while sitting at a desk. People who might formerly have called themselves “consultants” began to call themselves “coaches” and to set up shop to instill ordinary people, usually white-collar corporate employees, with a “winning” or positive attitude. One of the things the new coaches brought from the old world of sports coaching was the idea of visualizing victory, or at least a credible performance, before the game, just as Byrne and her confederates urge people to visualize the outcomes they desire.
Sports was only one source of the new wisdom, which had been bubbling up for years from the world of self-help gurus and “spiritual teachers,” most of them not referenced by Byrne. For example, there was the 2004 docudrama What the Bleep Do We Know?, produced by a New Age sect led by a Tacoma woman named JZ Knight, who channels a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha. In the film, actor Marlee Matlin gives up Xanax for a spiritual appreciation of life’s limitless possibilities. At the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, students write down their goals, post them on a wall, and attempt to realize them through strenuous forms of “meditation” involving high-decibel rock music. On the more businesslike side, “success coach” Mike Hernacki published his book The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want in 1982; the genre continued with, among others, Michael J. Losier’s 2006 book, Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t. T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind explains that “the universe, which is another way of saying ‘higher power,’ is akin to a big mail order department,” an image also employed by Vitale. 17 If you send in your orders clearly and unambiguously, fulfillment is guaranteed in a timely fashion.
What attracts the coaching profession to these mystical powers? Well, there’s not much else for them to impart to their coachees. “Career coaches” may teach their clients how to write résumés and deliver the self-advertisements known as “elevator speeches,” but they don’t have anything else by way of concrete skills to offer. Neither they nor more generic “success coaches” will help you throw a javelin farther, upgrade your computer skills, or manage the flow of information through a large department. All they can do is work on your attitude and expectations, so it helps to start with the metaphysical premise that success is guaranteed through some kind of attitudinal intervention. And if success does not follow, if you remain strapped for funds or stuck in an unpromising job, it’s not the coach’s fault, it’s yours. You just didn’t try hard enough and obviously need more work.
The metaphysics found in the coaching industry and books like The Secret bears an unmistakable resemblance to traditional folk forms of magic, in particular “sympathetic magic,” which operates on the principle that like attracts like. A fetish or talisman—or, in the case of “black magic,” something like a pinpricked voodoo doll—is thought to bring about some desired outcome. In the case of positive thinking, the positive thought, or mental image of the desired outcome, serves as a kind of internal fetish to hold in your mind. As religious historian Catherine Albanese explains, “In material magic, symbolic behavior involves the use of artifacts and stylized accoutrements, in ritual, or ceremonial, magic,” while in “mental magic,” of the positive-thinking variety, “the field is internalized, and the central ritual becomes some form of meditation or guided visualization.” 18
Sometimes, though, an actual physical fetish may be required. John Assaraf, an entrepreneur and coach featured in The Secret, explains the use of “vision boards”:
Many years ago, I looked at another way to represent some of the materialistic things I wanted to achieve in my life, whether it was a car or a house or anything. And so I started cutting out pictures of things that I wanted. And I put those vision boards up. And every day for probably about just two to three minutes, I would sit in [sic] my desk and I would look at my board and I’d close my eyes. And I’d see myself having the dream car and the dream home and the money in the bank that I wanted and the money that I wanted to have for charity. 19
The link to older, seemingly more “primitive” forms of magic is unabashed in one Web site’s instructions for creating a kind of vision board:
Leaving the four corners of the card (posterboard) blank, decorate the rest of the face with glitter, ribbons, magical symbols, herbs, or any other items linked with the attributes of prosperity. Next, take the dollar bill and cut off the four corners. Glue the bill’s triangular corners to the four corners of your card. This is sympathetic magic—one must have money to attract money. Then either on the back of the card or on a separate piece of paper, write out these instructions for using the talisman:
This is a talisman of prosperity. Place it where you will see it every day, preferably in a bedroom.
At least once a day hold it to your heart and spend several minutes reciting the chant: talisman of prosperity, All good things come to me.
Notice the magic begin. 20
Homemade talismans aside, most coaches would be chagrined by any association with magic. What gives positive thinking some purchase on mainstream credibility is its claim to be based firmly on science. Why do positive thoughts attract positive outcomes? Because of the “law of attraction,” which operates as reliably as the law of gravity. Bob Doyle, one of the “featured co-authors” of The Secret and founder of the “Wealth Beyond Reason” training system, asserts on his Web site: “Contrary to mainstream thinking, the Law of Attraction is NOT a ‘new-age’ concept. It is a scientific principle that absolutely is at work in your life right now.” The claims of a scientific basis undoubtedly help account for positive thinking’s huge popularity in the business world, which might be more skittish about an ideology derived entirely from, say, spirit channeling or Rosicrucianism. And science probably helped attract major media attention to The Secret and its spokespeople, a panel of whom were introduced by the poker-faced Larry King with these words: “Tonight, unhappy with your love, your job, your life, not enough money? Use your head. You can think yourself into a lot better you. Positive thoughts can transform, can attract the good things you know you want. Sound far-fetched? Think again. It’s supported by science.”
Coaches and self-help gurus have struggled for years to find a force that could draw the desired results to the person who desires them or a necklace in a store window to an admirer’s neck. In his 1982 book, Hernacki settled on the familiar force of gravit
y, offering the equation linking the mass of two objects to their acceleration. But even those whose science educations stopped at ninth grade might notice some problems with this. One, thoughts are not objects with mass; they are patterns of neuronal firing within the brain. Two, if they were exerting some sort of gravitational force on material objects around them, it would be difficult to take off one’s hat.
In an alternative formulation offered by Michael J. Losier, the immaterial nature of thoughts is acknowledged; they become “vibrations.” “In the vibrational world,” he writes, “there are two kinds of vibrations, positive (+) and negative (-). Every mood or feeling causes you to emit, send-out or offer a vibration, whether positive or negative.” 21 But thoughts are not “vibrations,” and known vibrations, such as sound waves, are characterized by amplitude and frequency. There is no such thing as a “positive” or “negative” vibration.
Magnetism is another force that has long lured positive thinkers, going back to the 1937—and still briskly selling—Think and Grow Rich!, which declared that “thoughts, like magnets, attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with [them].” Hence the need to “magnetize our minds with intense DESIRE for riches.” 22 Now, as patterns of neuronal firing that produce electrical activity in the brain, thoughts do indeed generate a magnetic field, but it is a pathetically weak one. As Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer observes, “The brain’s magnetic field of 10 [to the minus 15th power] tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth’s magnetic field of 10 [to the minus 5th power] tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!” Ten orders of magnitude—or a ratio of 10,000,000,000 to one. As everyone knows, ordinary magnets are not attracted or repelled by our heads, nor are our heads attracted to our refrigerators. 23
There does exist one way for mental activity to affect the physical world, but only with the intervention of a great deal of technology Using biofeedback techniques, a person can learn, through pure trial and error, to generate brain electrical activity that can move a cursor on a computer screen. The person doing this must be wearing an electrode-studded cap, or electroencephalograph, to detect the electrical signals from inside the head, which are then amplified and sent to an interface with the computer, usually for the purpose of aiding a severely paralyzed person to communicate. No “mind over matter” forces are involved, except metaphorically, if the technology is taken as representing our collective “mind.” A technologically unassisted person cannot move a computer cursor by thought alone, much less move money into his or her bank account.
Into this explanatory void came quantum physics, or at least a highly filtered and redacted version thereof. Byrne cites quantum physics in The Secret, as does the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know?, and today no cutting-edge coach neglects it. The great promise of quantum physics, to New Age thinkers and the philosophically opportunistic generally, is that it seems to release humans from the dull tethers of determinism. Anything, they imagine, can happen at the level of subatomic particles, where the familiar laws of Newtonian physics do not prevail, so why not in our own lives? Insofar as I can follow the reasoning, two features of quantum physics seem to offer us limitless freedom. One is the wave/ particle duality of matter, which means that waves, like light, are also particles (photons) and that subatomic particles, like electrons, can also be understood as waves—that is, described by a wave equation. In the loony extrapolation favored by positive thinkers, whole humans are also waves or vibrations. “This is what we be,” NSA speaker Sue Morter announced, wriggling her fingers to suggest a vibration, “a flickering,” and as vibrations we presumably have a lot more freedom of motion than we do as gravity-bound, 150-or-so-pound creatures made of carbon, oxygen, and so forth.
Another, even more commonly abused notion from quantum physics is the uncertainty principle, which simply asserts that we cannot know both the momentum and position of a subatomic particle. In the more familiar formulation, we usually say that the act of measuring something at the quantum level affects what is being measured, since to measure the coordinates of a particle like an electron is to pin it down into a particular quantum state—putting it through a process known as “quantum collapse.” In the fanciful interpretation of a New Agey physicist cited by Rhonda Byrne, “the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.” 24 From there it is apparently a short leap to the idea that we are at all times creating the entire universe with our minds. As one life coach has written: “We are Creators of the Universe. . . . With quantum physics, science is leaving behind the notion that human beings are powerless victims and moving toward an understanding that we are fully empowered creators of our lives and of our world.” 25
In the words of Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, this is so much “quantum flapdoodle.” For one thing, quantum effects come into play at a level vastly smaller than our bodies, our nerve cells, and even the molecules involved in the conduction of neuronal impulses. Responding to What the Bleep Do We Know?, which heavily invokes quantum physics to explain the law of attraction, the estimable Michael Shermer notes that “for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck’s constant (h) [6.626 × 10?34 joule-seconds],” which is far beyond tiny. He cites a physicist’s calculations “that the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of the synapse are about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential.” 26 In other words, even our thought processes seem to be stuck in the deterministic prison of classical Newtonian physics.
As for the mind’s supposed power to shape the universe: if anything, quantum physics contains a humbling reminder of the limits of the human mind and imagination. The fact that very small things like electrons and photons can act like both waves and particles does not mean that they are free to do anything or, of course, that we can morph into waves ourselves. Sadly, what it means is that we cannot envision these tiny things, at least not with images derived from the everyday, nonquantum world. Nor does the uncertainty principle mean that “the mind is shaping the very thing that is being perceived,” only that there are limits to what we can ever find out about, say, a quantum-level particle. Where is it “really” and how fast is it going? We cannot know. When contacted by Newsweek, even the mystically oriented physicists enlisted by Byrne in The Secret backed off from the notion of any physical force through which the mind can fulfill its desires.
But no such qualms dampened the celebration of quantum physics, or perhaps I should say “quantum physics,” at the gathering of the NSA conference in San Diego. Sue Morter fairly bounded around the stage as she asserted that “your reality is simply determined by whatever frequency [of energy] you choose to dive into.” Unfortunately, she added, “we’ve been raised in Newtonian thought,” so it can be hard to grasp quantum physics. How much Morter, a chiropractor by profession, grasped was unclear; quite apart from the notion that we are vibrations choosing our own frequency, she made small annoying errors such as describing “the cloud of electrons around an atom.” (Electrons are part of the atom, orbiting around its nucleus.) But the good news is that “science has shown without a shadow of a doubt” that we create our own reality. Somehow, the fact that particles can act like waves and vice versa means that “whatever you decide is true, is true”—an exceedingly hard proposition to debate.
After Morter’s presentation, I went to a workshop entitled “The Final Frontier: Your Unlimited Mind!,” led by Rebecca Nagy, a “wedding preacher” from Charlotte, North Carolina, who described herself as a member of the “quantum spiritual world.” We started by repeating after her, “I am a co-creator,” with the prefix “co” as an apparent nod to some other, more traditional form of creator. Slide after slide went by, showing what appeared to be planets with moons—or electrons?—in orbit around them or announcing that “human being
s are both receivers and transmitters of quantum (LIGHT ENERGY) signals.” At one point Nagy called for two volunteers to come to the front of the room to help illustrate the unlimited powers of mind. One of them was given two dousing rods to hold and told to think of someone she loves. But no matter how much Nagy fiddled with the position of the rods, nothing happened, leading her to say, “No judgment here! Can we agree on that? No judgment here!” Finally, after several more minutes of repositioning, she mumbled, “It ain’t working,” and suggested that this could be “because we’re in a hotel.”
I began to make it my business to see what other conference goers thought of the inescapable pseudoscientific flapdoodle. They were an outgoing lot, easy to strike up conversations with, and it seemed to me that my doubts about the invocation of quantum physics might get us past the level of “How are you enjoying the conference?” to either some common ground or a grave intellectual rupture. Several modestly admitted that it went right over their heads, but no one displayed the slightest skepticism. In one workshop, I found myself sitting next to a woman who introduced herself as a business professor. When I told her that I worried about all the references to quantum physics, she said, “You’re supposed to be shaken up here.” No, I said, I was worried about what it had to do with actual physics. “It’s what I’m here for,” she countered blandly. When I could come up with nothing more than a “Huh?” she explained that quantum physics is “what’s going to affect the global economy.”
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