They May Look Harmless: But these Bok Choy can kill me.Someone is punishing me for my skeptical attitude toward Urban Zen. By someone, I guess I mean God, in the way my mother says “God is punishing you” when I trip after making fun of someone, or rip my pants after ridiculing the tightness of someone else’s.

I was famished when lunch arrived on our table during the break yesterday. A dashing waiter came bearing a beautiful wooden tray stacked with bowls of “living” food—the kind of stuff rich, enlightened, skinny fashionistas are served at every meal. The people at my table—three yoga teachers, an internist, two nurse practitioners and an administrator at the American Cancer Society—snapped them up immediately.

I reached for my bowl with hesitancy, because I have to be extremely careful about what I eat outside my own kitchen. I have severe food allergies to seafood and pine nuts; they make my throat swell and cause what I will refer to delicately as “gastrointestinal distress.”

I knew I didn’t have to worry about seafood. “Living food” is vegan. (I hope!) I unwrapped my chopsticks and started poking around in the little bowl. Beautifully wilted bright green bok choy and dark grey pieces of eggplant lay on top of a bed of black grains, which seemed wild-rice-ish. No pine nuts in sight, seemed safe. I dug in.

“I’m surprised there’s eggplant in here,” I say, trying to make conversation, because I want to kill myself with anxiety when stuck in a silent group of strangers, “It’s a nightshade, right? I thought macrobiotic people didn’t eat it.” I looked around for a response but my tablemates ignored the comment and continued eating. Oh-kay. I am a dork.

I take a bite, avoiding the eggplant as I know some people get a scratchy throat from eggplant that isn’t cooked properly and I don’t want to mistake a scratchy throat for an on-the-verge-of-closing throat as I am not holding any Xanax. The bok choy is all right but it isn’t all that. Everyone is talking about how “incredibly delicious” and “refreshing” the food at this conference has been, how they wish someone would post the recipes on the website. The food reminds me of those little plastic containers of seaweedy mystery you find under the water bottles in a health food store, but I am done commenting on it. I eat a few bites and pass my near-full bowl to a waiter, who looks at me as if I were throwing away a little bowl of gold.

As we work through our lunch—brainstorming strategies for improving the experience of dying in America’s hospitals—I feel myself growing spacier and spacier. My writing is getting messy. Is it hot in here? My forehead is beading sweat.

I know what is coming. The back of my throat is swelling; my epiglottis is irritated too, so enlarged that if I were to breathe in deep and quick you could hear it flutter. I eat a few grapes to try to clear out the bitter taste of histamine from my mouth, test my swallowing reflex.
Michael Beckwith: The fox from The Secret was there. In real life. But even he couldn't save me from myself.
Michael Bernard Beckwith—the handsome African American guy with dreads from The Secret video—is leading a meditation.

He intones, “So that which is eternally going on becomes the object of our awareness…”

The object of my awareness right now is that I might go into anaphylactic shock and barf in front of Donna Karan, Christy Turlington, and Uma Thurman’s dad.

“The realm of everything good is revealing itself through this panel, this conference, this gathering…”

But not through this lunch!

I open my eyes to locate the nearest bathroom. It is located right off the main meeting room, and were I to retch inside it, everyone would hear me. No question embarrasses me more than “Are you OK?” when I am sick, so falling apart in front of this crowd is not an option. Though if I were to fall apart, now would be the time to do it, while they’re all on planet meditation.

“Allow us to become more and never less than our true self…”

I am about to be one lunch less than myself if I don’t get out of here…

I gather up my huge bag and coat and weave through the legs surrounding our table, saying, “Bye! Thank you! I have to run!” Until this moment I haven’t noticed that I’ve essentially lost my voice due to throat swelling. What if I leave and asphyxiate on the fringes of the far West Village? No one will discover me for at least an hour—the conference is scheduled to run until 3 p.m!

Walking outside, the fresh air helps for a second. I run toward the nearest Starbucks, which is two blocks away. Outside, three weird guys yell at me, “Save your receipt for a two dollar Metrocard!” What?

I pray for no line. There’s a line. There’s a woman with a massive wheelie suitcase who has obviously popped in to do her post-flight grooming. Think of something undisgusting. Vanilla ice cream. Disgusting! What if someone asks me if I’m OK? Morning sickness, that’s a good answer. But then they’ll ask when the baby is due. How depressing. If I ever come back to this Starbucks I’ll have to come up with a miscarriage story.Starbucks Bathroom: Worth my $4.50 any day of the week.

Come on, lady. I consider throwing up in my coat. I could turn away from the baristas and just hide my face in the black wool, wrap the whole mess up, and toss it neatly into the dumpster outside. But I really like this coat. Once, after a similar anaphylactic experience which, coincidentally, also occurred in the West Village, I threw up into my favorite shawl and tossed it out the window on the West Side Highway. The cab driver didn’t even notice.

Mercifully, the post-flight girl is finished rather quickly. Her makeup looks good. I run inside and no matter how hard I push I can’t get the spring-loaded door closed quickly enough. I do so in just enough time to rid myself of a gallon of black mess—caponata!—and feel better instantly. I splash water on my face, put my sunglasses on, and crash into another Urban Zen participant as I career out of the bathroom. She looks at me sympathetically. Probably thinks I’m bulimic.

I run out of the Starbucks and the weird guys yell, “Didja save your receipt? We’ve got your Metrocard!”

“I didn’t buy anything!” I scream at them in my underwater swollen Disney villain voice. They are frightened of me.

Bounding toward the Christopher Street station I pop into another Starbucks and repeat the experience. For goodness sake, I only ate one bite!

OK, God, I promise to be more openhearted when it comes to Zen fashionistas. I’ve learned my lesson.

But tomorrow I’m going on a purifying fast.

The first panel I attend at the Urban Zen initiative is called “The Path: Doctors, Embracing a New Way of thinking.”

Its goal is to encourage doctors of Western medicine to consider alternative modalities—such as yoga, Chinese medicine, and holistic nutrition—when crafting treatment plans for their patients.

Donna Karan opens the session by welcoming the audience. When she speaks of her late husband Stephan, who inspired her alternative medicine crusade, I am surprised by my own tears. It’s hard not to get emotional—the film that follows her welcome speech features a series of still images of Stephan, and then a gut-wrenching clip of him on a ski trip. In the clip he has longish gray hair and a charismatic smile. He speaks directly to the camera before taking off down the mountain, cheerfully yelling, “Hasta luego!”

But, of course, we don’t. See him later.

Instead, we see a panel of world-renowned experts on health and spirituality, a gallery full of photos being auctioned off to benefit wellness programs, a pop-up “retail experience,” also to benefit Urban Zen. Karan has created an impressive spectacle to honor her late husband—and hopefully a dynamic initiative to help heal the sick.

In the film, Karan says, “The idea that I had an idea and I didn’t do everything there was to be done… I couldn’t get up in the morning. It’s just who I am.” Everyone in the audience looks over to her at this moment, commending her with a head-nod or wistful smile or a thumbs-up. A beautiful cancer survivor and friend of Karan’s salutes her in the film, “What an amazing miracle that you created for me.” (The miracle she is referring to is—presumably—the Urban Zen initiative.) It’s all very Oprah.

All forces at the Urban Zen initiative are conspiring to make Donna Karan feel good about herself, but they can’t give her the one thing she really wants: to bring her husband back. And this breaks my heart. It also makes me feel like a total bitch for having anything critical to say about her or her project.

But the panel discussion that follows her intro is somehow unsatisfying. Yes, there are ten extremely accomplished people onstage trying to solve our country’s healthcare problem. Well, sort of. They all agree that few sick people are getting the care they need, and that multiple healing modalities are better than one. They all use anecdotes of Easternish wisdom to prove their points, saying things like, “Our fears need to be our teachers,” and “Just be there in that calm space.” They want to “bring the healing back to the healers,” they all have “the best job in the world.” But while they are masters of mutual congratulation, they offer few concrete solutions to offer better medical care to more people.

One doctor asserts that in order to change how doctors think, we have to encourage their process of personal transition from mechanic fixing a problem, to whole person treating whole people. But how do you teach someone to care more?

“Medical schools need to become schools of wisdom,” says a doctor who manages an integrative medicine program at a top hospital, “I want my physicians to be part of the dance of life.”

There’s no question that doctors who act like human beings make better company than those who act like automatons. But are they really better doctors? Who can know?

Getting into the first panel I attend, “Doctors, Embracing a New Way of Thinking,” isn’t easy. After I arrive at the Stephan Weiss studio, deep in the West Village, I get in line to check in with one of many frazzled-looking event coordinators in black headsets. While another writer and I languish at the entrance—“The problem is the PR people have never given us a list of press!” growls a pretty blonde—women carrying bags made of ostrich, lizard and snakeskin are waved in right and left.

I am not particularly bothered by what some might consider a snub—this scene is no different from waiting for backstage access to a fashion show, which I did for years covering beauty and fashion trends for glossy magazines. The VIPS there and here came from the same guest list—in order to attend this series of panels and workshops, one has to be a patron of the Urban Zen initiative; sponsorships range from $6000 to $250000, roughly the same price range as a piece of couture. According to the Urban Zen website, sponsors help fund the attendance of nurses, medical students, and other healing practitioners who would otherwise not be able to attend.

After about ten minutes of waiting outside, my fellow press buddy and I are ushered inside the building to wait some more in the gallery, where a silent auction of serene art photographs is being displayed. In this corral with all the other seatless people I have a good view of the audience, who seem to be getting to know one another, eager for the panel to start.

“I am meeting with Donna next week to discuss strategy,” says the woman I met outside, who is getting anxious that everyone seems to be getting seats but us, “They obviously don’t know who I am.” She is the publisher of an established alternative medicine newsletter, and her sense of entitlement is sort of charming. She may have been to Washington to lobby for universal healthcare, but she’s obviously never been to an NYC PR extravaganza.

Harboring no delusions about my own importance in this crowd, I settle into a conversation with another woman who’s waiting to be seated, a doctor of Chinese medicine. She is in her mid-thirties, Asian-American, and so fashionable and pretty I might have mistaken her for someone from the W magazine society page. She tells me she left corporate America to practice Chinese medicine and I second-guess my assessments of the other people I saw whiz past me at the door. Maybe they were all in the healing arts, too?

Five minutes after the scheduled beginning, we’re still not seated, but a hush comes over the crowd as the panel moves toward the stage, the actor Michael J. Fox, who is living with Parkinson's Disease, at its tail end. Everyone is trying to stare out of the corner of their eye. He is magnetic. With the layout of the room—the stage at the very front, mics, photographers—it is easy to pretend we are attending a press conference for some new TV show. But this is not TV, it’s real. Fox’s gait is a little shaky. And when he gets to the stage, he’s seated next to his neurologist and a melanoma survivor and the head of integrative medicine at Beth Israel medical center—not Meredith Baxter Birney or Justine Bateman. This is real.

No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that celebrities are regular people, it’s deeply disturbing when they become sick. I could offer some pat explanation about the secret sense of satisfaction we feel when the mighty fall, but I don’t think it’s that simple—or that heartless. Once illness or trauma penetrates the placenta of celebrity, affecting those who dwell in our fantasy worlds, it seems, ironically, much more real and threatening to the rest of us. Plus our sense of empathy for them is artificially inflated. We feel as though we know them, so it’s like a good friend or relative is in danger.

Because of this, celebrities can—and should—bring awareness to their diseases by speaking openly about them. This can lead directly to progress, both medical and sociological. Think what Christopher Reeve did for paralysis—he humanized it, brought a real sense of strength and dignity to the wheelchair, and he did more for stem cell research than any other individual.

So why does this who’s who of Hollywood healthcare at the Urban Zen Initiative make me a little uneasy? Why, when the session opens with a moving film featuring Donna Karan, her husband (who passed away), and other famous cancer patients such as Edie Falco, do I catch myself doing an inner eye-roll?

More on this later.

Choose Your Guru: This photograph of legendary yogi Sting (by Karin Catt) is being auctioned to benefit Donna Karan's Urban Zen Initiative.I am taking notes on a pad designed and provided by fashion guru Donna Karan. Sitting in her studio on an overstuffed floor pillow, Fiji water and raw walnuts within reach, I am admiring scores of taut, burnished individuals dressed in asymmetric, scapula- and clavicle-bearing organic cotton ensembles. Coldplay and Sinead O’Connor’s plaintive melodies emanate from hidden speakers and Donna Karan’s image is projected on white walls in the massive space.

But I am not at a fashion show.

I am at the Well Being Forum, the first event being put forth by Karan’s Urban Zen Initiative. This project began as a legacy for Stephan Weiss, Karan’s husband, who died of cancer in 2001. Its goal, according to Karan, is to “connect the dots” between eastern and western medicine.

For this conference, Karan has summoned a who’s who list of doctors, yoga practitioners, nutritionists, healers—and their famous acolytes—to address an audience of philanthropists, patients and health professionals. Dean Ornish will talk nutrition, Rodney Yee will do yoga. Mehmet Oz—Oprah’s doctor—will discuss patient care. Michael J. Fox and his doctor will discuss living with Parkinson’s. Lou Reed—yes, that Lou Reed—will teach Tai Chi. His longtime partner, artist Laurie Anderson, will lead a meditation. The model Christy Turlington will serve on a women’s health panel.

Think of it as Vogue’s editorial staff taking over the New England Journal of Medicine.

While the motivations behind the project are undeniably good, the concept of an incredibly wealthy celebrity inviting her friends and their gurus to brainstorm in front of a studio full of people either wealthy or powerful enough to get on the guest list is complicated.

Over the next few days, I am going to attend some panels and report back on them. Some questions I’m already asking myself:

Who has access to “spirituality” in our society? What happens when our health and wellbeing are contingent on our ability to pay for guidance?

How can any movement transcend preaching to its own choir?

What’s behind the creative impulse that arises when a loved one passes away? Is it about trying to resurrect the lost person, or satisfying the living person’s narcissism?

How can a room full of like-minded people avoid getting mired in sanctimonious self-congratulation and challenge each other to move forward?

And, finally, if we believe people are capable of healing themselves, doesn’t that assign a cruel and irrational sense of responsibility to the terminally ill?

Feel free to respond to any of these questions now, or later. And do propose any others you think I should be asking.

To check out the Urban Zen Initiative's website, click here.

The Secret is no secret.

Everyone—including my most intellectual, pop-culture-deprived friends submerged in academia—has heard of it. I think it's safe to say The Secret has reached its saturation point. Which makes me think, if the whole planet knows about it, it can't possibly work anymore. There isn't enough room in the world for everyone to build their dream house.

The Secret is exhausting.

There are gratitude lists to write, vision boards to collage, imaginary checks to forge—not to mention the constant exertion of active self-delusion. Investing this much time and energy, The Secreter convinces herself that it works in order to preserve any remaining dignity. (My paycheck is here A DAY EARLY? Must be The Secret.)

Not everyone thinks The Secret is dumb.

I spend my days consulting for an Internet company. When I told our CEO—a boy wunderkind Faith Popcorn-y sales genius—that I was blogging about The Secret, he said, "That's a great movie." Ironic smile? Not so much. In fact, an informal survey I've conducted has shown that most extremely successful people I know personally think living The Secret is a given—the way they've always conducted their lives (the ever-humble Oprah said this on her show). This leaves me wondering about the difference between me and them. Will I concede that certain tenets of The Secret can lead to success? Absolutely. Will I ever be able to practice the Law of Attraction sans irony or self-deprecation? Nope. It doesn't look like I'll be facilitating any Fortune 500 team-building retreats anytime soon.

The Secret gets boring.

It's been three weeks since The Secret came into my life, and while I was giddy from all the positive self-talk in Week One, my enthusiasm dropped off soon after. I stopped looking at the Vision Boards on the back of my front door, I ripped the 125 Post-It off the scale, I decided pretending my bills were checks was too stupid even for an experiment. I tried visualizing the opposite of what I wanted just to test the theory. And I got it. What does that prove again?

The Secret doesn't go deep enough. Just ask Oprah.

The other day, Russell Simmons was on her show promoting his new self-help book, which is all about seeing yourself as connected to a higher power. His is the god of yoga, but yours can be whatever. It's a personal choice. Anyway Oprah really liked this metaphor he used—we are all cups drawn from the river that is God, I think ("Which means we are made of God!" she gleefully explained to the studio audience). Then she sort of dissed The Secret. (I know, how Benedict Arnold.) The problem with it, she said, is that it doesn't connect us to any higher power.

Oprah and I agree on a lot of things and it just so happens that I also have this problem with The Secret. In fact, looking for books to expand my understanding of the philosophy a few weeks ago, I came upon a book called The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham. Eureka! I thought. Finally, a way to connect this Secret stuff to something concrete, sacred. I tried to guess the connection while I waited for the book to arrive. Abraham uses the Law of Attraction to father the people of Israel! He believes he's going to help God populate the world… and so he DOES! Abraham totally lived The Secret!

When the book came I put down the X-Acto knife I was using to cut the head off a naked picture of Heidi Klum (I was going to replace it with my own—Vision Board) and tore into it. Well, um—it turns out this Abraham is not that Abraham. The Abraham husband and wife authors Esther and Jerry Hicks are talking about is a group of otherwordly beings, who collectively call themselves "Abraham" and speak through Esther. When she channels him, Esther / Abraham addresses skeptics with phrases such as ""We are not so much interested in that you believe in our existence, as we are interested in that you come to adore your own." So yeah, not the same Abraham as the one in the bible.

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Ever since two horrible events last week—the massacre at Virginia Tech and the brutal rape and torture of a Journalism student at Columbia University—I have had a hard time sitting down to write about The Secret. Not only because such ethereal musings seem frivolous in the face of such real nightmares, but also because of The Secret’s dirty little secret: Not only does it teach the law of attraction for good, but also for bad.

Here’s Secret Person Joe Vitale:

Everything that surrounds you right now in life, including things you’re complaining about, you’ve attracted. Now I know at first blush that’s going to be something that you hate to hear. You’re going to immediately say, “I didn’t attract the car accident. I didn’t attract this particular client who gives me a hard time. I didn’t particularly attract the debt.” And I’m here to be a little bit in your face and to say, yes, you did attract it. This is one of the hardest concepts to get, but once you’ve accepted it, it’s life transforming.

Hearing this statement on the video, and reading it later in the book, I was horrified. What does this guy mean, accidents are our fault? Accidents are, by definition, accidents. This concept of total individual responsibility has dangerous implications: it can make us feel all-powerful—omniscient even—which is exhilarating when what’s happening is good, potentially devastating when it isn’t. The Secret plays to both sides of narcissism.

Why would we be attracted—no pun intended—to a philosophy that assigns blame to the blameless? Aside from what might be a sense of masochistic martyrdom inherent to the new American character, I would also attribute it to our culture’s endemic solipsism. A terrible thing happened to them, but I am a positive thinker, so it cannot happen to me. It’s a mode of superstitious self-protection. Yet another way to differentiate us from them. Until we become one of them.

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I've had a hard time writing about my trivial dalliances with The Secret since the shootings on Tuesday.

Until I think of something to say, here's a funny article in the Times about a quirky San Francisco restaurant that espouses the philosophy.

Cafe Gratitude Review by Christine Muhlke

This morning I had a video iChat with my mom. First she gave me a diet idea. Then she asked me when I was sending out my book. Touchy subjects, to say the least. I snarled at her like an adolescent and she retreated. Poor Mom.

Then she asked, “Hey, how’s The Secret going? Are you still doing it?”

And I said, “Well, there’s nothing to do, really—there’s just something to be, and I haven’t been feeling much like Secret Rebecca lately so, no I guess haven’t been. Doing The Secret. I mean, I made that vision board…” I glanced at the yearbook-page style collage I had hung on the back of my front door, a piece of cardboard covered in seascapes and babies and bookshelves and Oscars and trillion-dollar houses in Malibu.

“Yes, but that was like a week ago!”

“And I stuck that ‘125’ Post-It on the scale, but the cleaning lady moved it. Maybe it’s a sign?”

My mom laughed. “The honeymoon is over, huh?”

Maybe it is. I’ve stopped experiencing that silly buzz I used to get from pretending my life was perfect. Now it just feels like a lie. I feel like a big lying liar.

My shrink isn’t surprised. “The Secret sounds, to me, like a simplified form of cognitive-behavioral therapy,” she said to me in her office on Friday, “And if CBT worked, I’d be out of a job.”

What is cognitive-behavioral therapy?

According to the British Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Psychotherapies:

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is an approach to help people experiencing a wide range of mental health difficulties. The basis of CBT is that what people think affects how they feel emotionally and also alters what they do.

During times of mental distress the way the person sees and judges themselves and the things that happens to them alters. Things tend to become more extreme and unhelpful. This can worsen how the person feels and causes them to act in ways that keep their distress going.

CBT practitioners, who come from many training backgrounds, aim to work jointly with the person to help them begin to identify and then change their extreme thinking and unhelpful behaviour. By doing this, the result is a significant improvement in how the person feels and lives their day to day life.

So our own negative thinking—not events or circumstances or biology—creates depression and other psychological maladies. Change your thoughts and feelings, change your life. Sounds a lot like The Secret, huh?

The problem with this method, according to my therapist (a fan of psychoanalysis), is that it addresses symptoms but not their causes. “Things may be different for a while, but actively creating thoughts all the time is exhausting. And there’s no guarantee these positive thoughts will ever feel authentic.”

But my shrink, as a critic of CBT, is in the minority. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is the second-favorite form of talk therapy in the U.S. according to a segment on NPR, and its controversial founder, Albert Ellis, is cited by the American Psychological Association as the second-most-influential therapist of the century. Insurance companies love CBT because it is a short-term solution to concrete problems, rather than an opportunity to endlessly free-associate formative childhood experiences with a therapist at a rate of $200 per hour.

I can see the appeal of CBT—simply extinguish the negative behavior instead of obsessing about it. But say I am depressed—if a therapist succeeds in convincing me that my depression is irrational, does that mean I won’t be depressed anymore? Conversely, does rationally acknowledging that there are no barriers to my success except the ones I create myself mean that I will be able to achieve success?

It just seems too simple. Like the Secret. While CBT differs from The Secret’s think-positive-be-positive model in that it involves extensive homework (patients often carry a stack of flashcards to remind them how to think), it still blames us for things we can’t always control.

Which empowers some people, but leaves others feeling even more powerless than they did in the first place.

Celebrity ScaleLast night I watched a PBS documentary called Fat: What No One Is Telling You. Narrated in Meredith Vieira’s empathic alto, it introduced viewers to a handful of Americans struggling with obesity. The show took a stand against weight-based prejudice by showing overweight men, women and children engaged in a struggle against what all the scientists and doctors on the show deemed a biological imperative.

The big question: Why can’t these people be who they want to be? What’s stopping them—self control, or forces beyond their control? Hovering over all the compelling research presented by the scientists was the haze of defeat. No matter how successful these people were in other areas of their lives—as parents, Microsoft employees, public health advocates—they seemed a little bit pathetic. Here they are running on a treadmill—fat. Here they are grilling chicken breasts—still fat. Here they are sitting in a bariatric surgeon’s office—fatter than ever.

In our culture, obesity is a failure no one can hide. Being overweight is like wearing a sign that says “I am not in control of my own destiny.” Sure, science has proven that setpoints and leptin and serotonin levels and a second gut-brain are really in control of our weight, but most people—even fat people—believe the obese could be thin, if they really wanted to be. If they weren’t so lazy. OK, so it may be harder for a genetically fat person to develop Nicole Richie’s physique, but so what? It’s harder for learning-disabled people to do well in school, but they still manage to win Nobel prizes. It’s harder for Heather Mills to suffer through Dancing With The Stars on only one leg, but she twirls away. Thin people ridicule fat people’s failure to get a hold of themselves; fat people ridicule themselves even more for it.

I have struggled to keep my own weight down for my entire life, trying this diet, that vitamin, this yoga class, that fiber capsule—always ending up voluptuous and self-punishing. Could The Secret put an end to my lifelong battle?

Rhonda Byrne says yes.

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Tape This to Your Ceiling: And watch the money roll in.Last year I did some work for a Hollywood stylist who never paid me. This has really been irking me the past few weeks, the fact that I am the sort of person someone else deems stiffable. And also I need the money. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s enough not to forget about.

I’ve been sending this deadbeat fashionista one pathetic email per week, tone carefully calibrated so that he’ll know I am serious, but not so abrasive as to make him mad at me. No threats or anything.

As you know, The Secret doesn’t tolerate negative thinking. The Secret People would probably say I wasn’t getting my money because I was thinking about not getting it, sending out a poor-me vibration instead of an I-am-rich vibration. One Secret Person, Jack Canfield (half the brainpower behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul series), says that taping a homemade $100,000 bill to the ceiling above his bed changed his life. He was just barely getting by, but instead of trying to make ends meet, he set what seemed like an unachievable goal (in today’s terms, just enough, after taxes, to pay the rent on a two-bedroom NYC apartment)—he wanted to make $100,000 per year.

He had no idea how he would do it, he just taped that bill to the ceiling and started to visualize. He explains:

So the first thing in the morning I’d look up and there it was, and it would remind me that this was my intention. Then I would close my eyes and visualize having this hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year lifestyle.

I figured, why shouldn’t I try approaching this debt the same way? I won’t think about this guy owing me—I won’t picture his shifty eyes or the gold chains cascading over his skintight wifebeaters—I’ll think about him paying what he owes me. Each night last week as I fell asleep—my twilight time has become visualization hour—I pictured opening my mailbox and seeing his check. (This mailbox visualization technique is espoused by another Secret Person, Lisa Nichols, co-author of Chicken Soup for the African American soul. She claims it can erase debt completely.)

For the first few nights, nothing happened. Then I got my tax return back from my accountant. And lo and behold, my refund from New York State matched the amount this guy owed me. Do you have the chills?

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The Mirror Has Two Faces: I'm not the only one with two selves.For the last week, I have been asking myself the same question countless times per day: What would Secret Rebecca do?

Secret Rebecca was born out of my inability to see myself on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, or waking up in a $10-million-dollar house in Malibu, or leading my 10-child brood—half birthed, half acquired—through the more complicated harmonies in the Sound of Music score.

The Secret requires constant positive visualization, but when I’m sitting on my couch watching Sex and the City on demand with an empty bag of baked Cheetos (come on, they’re baked!), it’s hard to pretend I’m a skinny person who has eschewed TV for the meditative, life-affirming power of a saltwater fish tank.

Secret Rebecca is that person.

Secret Rebecca looks like me, except she’s thin and her hair is less frizzy. She loves waking up at 6 am for yoga and she thinks that if fruit and ice cream had equal nutritional values, everyone would choose fruit because it really does taste better. Secret Rebecca is not creatively paralyzed—neither by fear of failure, or success—and so she manages to churn out one excellent book a year. She’s not delusional—she knows she’s no Phillipa Roth—but she sees no reason she shouldn’t be able to earn a living by writing quality trade paperbacks. So many dumb people do! But Secret Rebecca doesn’t think of them as dumb people. Why waste time and energy harboring negative emotions? Secret Rebecca thinks, Good for them! They’re following their bliss! They’re doing the best with what they’ve got! Unlike Rebecca, who thinks, if I had just a little less obsessive self-awareness I could have published ten books by now and bought myself a nice little pad overlooking the Barnes and Noble on Astor Place from which I could drop water balloons on all the entitled double-stroller-pushers attending chick lit signings with their nannies. Secret Rebecca moonlights as a chick-lit writer under a pen name, just for fun. She donates all the proceeds to an anonymous send-a-nanny-to-college fund.

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The Car of Your Dreams: Dr. Joe Vitale with Francine, a 2005 Panoz Esperante GTLM, described on his site as "a rare exotic luxury sports car."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!

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The Dianetics Picture Book: Grab your crayons and self-actualize!Years ago I interviewed an actress for a beauty story—an actress who happened to be a Scientologist. She was delightful: warm, funny, smart, and, of course, gorgeous. And she looked preternaturally young for her age. When I asked her what her anti-aging secret was, she brought her teacup down from her lips and, gazing deep into my eyes, she said, “I believe I am going to stay young, and so I do. It’s part of my religion.”

I don’t know if she performed some Jedi mind trick on me or what, but at that moment, I wanted to be a Scientologist. In fact, I let her tell me about it for the next 45 minutes. She managed to convince me—temporarily—that L. Ron had discovered the Way to self-actualization (“There are Jewish Scientologists, you know…”). At the end of our conversation, she ran into the back wing of her Brentwood mansion and came back with two huge adult-size coloring books—one on Dianetics, and one on Scientology. A surge of power pulsed through my arms as I accepted the books—I felt like Harrison Ford at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I zoomed out of her driveway toward my hotel so I could lock my doors and read—OK, color—the books.

Of course I didn’t believe that what was inside them could make me look like a movie star—even if I became a believer, that would require years of auditing and some trips to the Celebrity Centre. I was freaking out because I had top secret information! In my possession were books that usually cost serious cash, books that were carefully kept out of naysayers’ hands. The information in these books had convinced some of the world’s richest, most successful people to believe in aliens.

So now you want to know what those coloring books said. Admit it: you’re feeling a little bit of nervous anticipation. (Got to Amazon if you really want to know; they’re available there for $13.95, much to my chagrin.) Now you understand how I felt when an Amazon box appeared in front of my door, holding a copy of The Secret.

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He's also got The Secret: Bob Proctor is one of many "philosophers" to appear on The Secret DVD.By now you’ve read about the self-help phenomenon that is The Secret. You’ve probably heard that the book is #1 in its category on the New York Times bestseller list, and that the DVD is #1 on Amazon (with the book second only to the new Harry Potter). The Secret's cadre of experts has been featured on every major talk show, from Oprah, to Larry King, to NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Unsurprisingly, the media is fascinated by our country’s infatuation with a philosophy that insists you can get everything you’ve always wanted… simply by pretending you already have it.

That’s right, The Secret is, above all, about the power of positive thinking. Its central tenet is the law of attraction; according to Bob Proctor, one of the gurus on the DVD and in the book, “Everything that’s coming into your life you are attracting into your life…Whatever is going on in your mind you are attracting to you.” OK, so this is nothing new. This is what self-helpers through the ages have always believed, it’s why they go around smiling their gooey smiles and inviting random strangers to meditation meet-ups and community kitchens—in order to attract other self-helpers to meditate and cook and self-congratulate with. You are what you seek: This is what Scientologists believe; what people take home from the Landmark Forum, what they learned from EST back in the day.

So what makes The Secret so different from all these “self-actualization” groups many of us think of as cults? It requires nothing of you. You need not spend anything beyond the cost of materials to reach your full potential--$34.95 for the DVD, $23.95 for the book—even less on Amazon. You don’t have to go to classes with people who annoy you, or fear being seduced into a pyramid scheme, or believe in Xenu, or force your bladder into submission during an overlong revival at some airport Hilton. The Secret fits perfectly into the lazy, thrifty hole in the soul of America.

It also plays into Americans’ beliefs in omnipotence and magical thinking. Who among us hasn’t believed they might be discovered while walking down Hollywood Boulevard, or made a billionaire by purchasing a Powerball ticket? Who doesn’t fantasize about instant success without effort? Transformation without perspiration—a total life makeover in one thirty-minute segment—that is the real American dream.

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