The full story of how Rhonda Byrne turned a positive thinking realization into “the greatest success story in the annals of viral marketing”-–to quote The American Spectator-–is only now emerging in court papers filed in the US and Australia, and from interviews with the participants. To Byrne, it’s the story of a small group of people bringing “joy to the world”; to some of those involved it’s a story of hypocrisy and ruthless double-dealing.
Like many of her public utterances, the message that Australia’s platinum-haired self-help guru Rhonda Byrne sent out last November to her millions of followers was a rhapsodic outpouring of goodwill. Thanksgiving Day was approaching in the United States, where Byrne now lives in a Californian celebrity enclave just up the road from Oprah Winfrey’s 17-hectare, neo-Georgian estate, and the creator of the New-Age blockbuster The Secret wanted to remind the world about the crucial importance of gratitude.
“Remember,” Byrne wrote, “if you are criticising, you are not being grateful. If you are blaming, you are not being grateful. If you are complaining, you are not being grateful.”
Those are worthy sentiments, but it was an odd time for Byrne to be expressing them because her lawyers had just sued two of the very people who were instrumental in launching her book and film The Secret to phenomenal success. Drew Heriot, the Australian director of the movie, and Dan Hollings, an Arizona internet consultant whose “viral marketing” helped propel Byrne to global fame via Oprah, had both been demanding that Byrne pay them a share of the estimated $US300 million ($340 million) revenue they claim she’d promised them. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, Byrne’s lawyers had counter-attacked by launching legal actions against both men in jurisdictions far from their homes, a tactic one judge has since described as vexatious and harassing.
For a woman whose central message is the power of positivity, Byrne has a surprisingly long history of such bust-ups, stretching back to her days as a television producer in Melbourne. But those past disputes pale next to the legal storms swirling around The Secret, a New-Age marketing phenomenon the like of which has not been seen for decades. It’s a bunfight of cosmic proportions that has drawn into its orbit some of the best-known figures and most fundamental tenets of the global self-help industry.
Continued in The Weekend Australian Magazine.
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6 responses so far ↓
1 Mr. Patterson // Aug 27, 2008
The big Secret is that the secret is most likely bunk.
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Story?id=2975835&page=1
If only I could think of something like this to get rich on. Then again, I can’t make money of off giving the terminally ill false hopes. I’m funny that way.
2 Thomas // Sep 5, 2008
I’ve gotta say, when I watched the Secret, I wasn’t all that impressed. This just gives me more reason to think she’s out for the money than any genuine desire to help people.
3 Chris // Sep 6, 2008
I hope her followers are paying attention. The real secret is, getting what you want may destroy you.
4 Karate_and_Taiji_student // Sep 12, 2008
Thanks a lot for the articles. Very interesting, indeed.
5 Tashi // Sep 23, 2008
I used to be a “believer” of the secret. Now, I am a practitioner of “the secret” without getting scared by the “superstition portion” of it. The new age slogan “you create your reality” does indeed have great merit without getting into the quantum-reality debate.
Your mind has superb information processing capabilities. It can generalize, distort, delete any information it sees fit. If it doesn’t, we would suffer from information overload. Each of us create a map of reality inside our mind. You create your map of reality, and if you change the map, you change reality itself. Robert Anton Wilson called this “Reality Tunnel” in Prometheus Rising.
Now, “reality tunnels” are positive feedback mechanisms. If you adopt a “positive” reality tunnel, you will behave in a very different way than if you adopt a “negative” reality tunnel. This is the “secret” within The Secret.
Is the “law of attraction” true? We would never know. Everything is a perspective, a map of reality. When you believe something too much, you become dogmatic, and you lose track of the magic of living. If you’re happy, enjoying the “abundance” the universe provides you, life will treat you well.
Oh ya, if you haven’t truly realized this yet: money doesn’t always bring happiness. Happiness is within you. If “law of attraction” is true, the Secret lady doesn’t is attracting what she’s looking for, “money”.
PS. English is not my native language. Sorry if there’s grammar problems, i’m too lazy to check.
6 Chris // Sep 23, 2008
Tashi, Robert Anton Wilson is a cool cat. I believe that if he were still around, he would be speaking out against this, as I have.
Have you heard the old saying, “the dose makes the poison”? Well, The Secret is an overdose, and the doctor is a quack.
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