I’ll make certain to put this in good use!

I just listened to your show with Valerie Orsoni, whom I sat next to on a plane ride recently. Good show.

The whole Wallace Wattles phenomenon and what I call the Science of Believing is a great place to start with your listeners. Ultimately, if you are so committed to a vision that you’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen, it almost certainly will. We all forget how much power we all have to design our own lives.

We are a San Francisco investment management and financial planning firm, with an emphasis on helping our clients find their goals and modify their behavior to actually realize them. If you’d be interested in talking about all this, I think there is a place in your list of experts for this kind of orientation and financial expertise. Check my credentials on our website.

Thanks for your fine efforts.

Rating:

In “The Power,” Rhonda takes the law of attraction in another direction and teaches the power of using your emotions to FEEL what you want to have so that what you desire will come quicker. It is a way of engaging the mind and heart and getting them to work together.

I felt “The Power” was inspirational, because it reminded me of why we have feelings and the different energy that comes from feelings. Not surprisingly, love is the most powerful feeling . . .genuine love can change anything. . . or any situation.

Rhonda teaches how to use the power of love in all aspects of your life, from relationships to money, to health, and more.

I would highly recommend getting this book along with another that I read early this summer and has meant a lot to me. It seems that there is a 3rd dimension to the Law of Attraction. The best way to describe it is “Serendipity.”

I’ve been so inspired by Serendipitously Rich: How to Get Delightfully, Delectably, Deliciously Rich (or Anything Else You Want) in 7 Ridiculously Easy Steps which was written by Madeleine Kay, along with a foreword by Joe Vitale (a star in “The Secret” movie). This book gives you a really fun and delightful feeling as it moves you positively on a path of change. However, it also gives you some practical steps which are akin to putting the law of attraction into action by teaching how to make decisions based on serendipity.

It is like having a deeper level of faith. It has made a difference for me. . .it might for you too.

Rating:

In another example, the universe drives your dream car past you for you to select. But in the midst of focusing all your intensified love at the car in order to attract it, you feel a twinge of envy for its driver. “You just gonged yourself out of having your dream car,” Byrne tells us. Just like that. Cancelled. That is “The Power”. A universe where concern for a lost companion is labeled “negative”, but obsessive love for a car is “positive”–until you mar it with a whiff of the negative. A universe where any human feeling besides a relentlessly imposed positivity is considered deficient, and might even be considered, in the words of Neville Goddard, cited in the book, an infection: “to think feelingly of mistakes of the past is to re-infect yourself.” Re-infect yourself with what? A conscience? This relentless universe, which can only copy everything you think or feel (Byrne offers the terms “boomerang” and “copying machine” as helpful in understanding it) unfolds with Byrne’s opening remarks: “Life is simple. Your life is made up of only two kinds of things, positive things and negative things.” Well, no. It’s not. Not my life. My life is made up of many things, most of which are not reducible to a positive/negative dichotomy. To reduce all things and experiences to one of two polarized categories is to rob the world and life of their grandeur, their beauty, their complexity, and yes, their difficulties and their heartbreak, too. And there is nothing in Byrne’s universe that escapes being reduced in this way.

Take relationships. Byrne encourages us to think of people as our personal Emotional Trainers, monitoring them on the positive-negative scale to be utilized as teachers in building our own personal universes, or to be avoided, accordingly. “When you’re happy, then only the happy version of other people can come into your life.” Never mind the stunningly obvious untruth of this claim. What does it mean to admit only controlled versions of whole human beings into your presence–controlled by you? What kind of friends, partners and parents would that make us? Doesn’t being in relationship with others ask us to be people of many dimensions, capable of understanding the full range of human experience and extending that understanding to others? Screening others through a positive/negative filter for their usefulness to us is not love.

Yes, the world would be a better place if people cultivated more love and gratitude in their lives. But we don’t employ them to manipulate people and things to our uses. In Byrne’s construction, love is no longer the highest human virtue. It is a mechanism, designed to trip the switch of the mechanical universe to have your desires unblinkingly, unthinkingly delivered expressly to you. In fact love is not even love, desire is love, Byrne reveals at one point. Where is the heart here? In an entire book putatively devoted to love, I don’t find a speck of compassion for other people, or for animals, or for the earth. Maybe that’s because “as far as the law of attraction is concerned, there is only one person in the world–you!” There’s no reciprocity here. No fellow feeling. You wouldn’t want to ruffle your magnificent positivity by troubling yourself with another person’s feelings.

Beware whenever Byrne uses the term “simple.” It seems to be code for disengaging our minds and our hearts. Regarding wealth, Byrne tells us: “It’s as simple as that.” As simple as what? Good feelings are how the majority of the world’s money ended up in the hands of ten percent of the people, she tells us. She writes that the only difference between wealthy people and everyone else is that the wealthy give more good feelings about money. This is not only ignorant of economics, history and politics, it diminishes the efforts of those who have earned their money through initiative and diligence–not attraction–and it deifies those who have obtained it through ruthless exploitation. Once again it’s a reduction, and it’s simple all right: there can be, after all, only two kinds of things in the world: positive/negative, wealthy/not wealthy, good-feeling/bad-feeling.

The worst simplification in The Power, though, has to do with the way Byrne intersperses selected quotations from writers, humanitarians and spiritual teachers throughout her narrative, as if to suggest that all along they were attesting to the hidden powers Byrne has now brought to light. An examination of just a few of the lives of the people she cites would demonstrate that this is not the case. To comment on just two of them, Jesus and Bonhoeffer, Byrne, by failing to consider the complete arc of their stories, trivializes them and cheapens their lives. Both were committed to love and justice. Both were executed for it. They weren’t trying to have, do or be anything they wanted, they were going up against the powers of their day. How do their deaths fit Byrne’s law of attraction? Was theirs a failure to think positive thoughts and feel good feelings? Bonhoeffer conspired against Hitler to try to defeat him. He took on the challenge of his time. He did not hide in a pristine universe dedicated to giving him what he wanted. He did not look away from the news, as Byrne advises. If people hadn’t dared to face terrible things in life head on at personal cost to themselves the world might have fallen to those such as Hitler. Each generation faces challenges. To choose to ignore them because “life is supposed to be fun” is to remain a perpetual child, and to fail the next generation. Byrne warns: “Taking things too seriously brings a life you have to take seriously.” Yes, and we are all indebted to those who took it seriously.

I do not feel bad about feeling bad about Byrne’s book. I feel grateful that I have a facility for critical thinking, or at least plain common sense, which is as essential to human endeavor as so called positive thinking. And thinking critically, I can discern that a woman who tells a story about attracting a skirt from Paris to Australia, just one, in her size, is not one who is engaged in the significant matters of our time, no matter how frequently she peppers her text with quotations from those who were. The way Byrne ends her book implies that she does consider herself a luminary in the spiritual pantheon despite having demonstrated little more in the book than how she attracted a skirt, a bouquet of flowers, and failed to search for a lost companion: “May The Power bring you love and joy for your entire existence. That is my intention for you, and for the world.” Rhonda Byrne, please spare me your intention. I do not want your small, self-involved universe. It’s not big enough for me. I am not a magnet. I, unlike your universe, have a heart and a mind. I’m a thinking, feeling human being, and grateful for it. And if my dog is lost, I’m going to search for her.

Rating:

And, I did this while lots of people spun their wheels in the background telling me what a fool I was, that I should give up — over and over and over again. I’ve faced ridiculous obstacles, and conquered them every time.

So, I guess I discovered “The Secret” before Rhonda Byrne made it popular. But, even Rhonda Byrne admits that it is not her invention at all! Dream. Focus on those dreams. Keep going, even when reality and so-called realists tell you that you are wasting your time.

I laugh when I read the one-star reviews for The Secret and The Power. Sooo many people have the answer, they think. It’s just that their answer is always “no.” No, you can’t have more money. No, you can’t have that career. No, you can’t get into that college. No, you can’t dance, can’t sing, can’t paint, can’t….. anything. And, for them, people who keep moving on are stupid, because we can’t see it their way.

Enjoy your negativity, folks. I can’t imagine what I might achieve next. But, I assure you it won’t be sitting on my rump insulting others who dare to dream, and dare to achieve.

The Power, by Rhonda Byrne is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it to anyone capable of thinking outside of narrow limitations.

Rating:

I used to “try” to be more loving, but when something went wrong, it was very easy to slip back into the excuse that the situation was too difficult to show love. Now, once I have read just half the book, it is actually easier for me to not react negatively and without “trying” any more. The author also tells you that you don’t need to read The Secret, her previous book, to understand this one, and she is correct–this one wraps everything up in one neat package. I get it now, and hope you will, too.

I always get my books from Amazon because they ship quickly even with regular shipping/super-saver shipping, and the prices are the best I have found.

Rating:

My father suffered a heart attack and I was spending endless hours at the hospital. One evening, I went to Walmart and I noticed this book on the shelf. I was instantly drawn to it. I spent the next couple of days reading this book as I sat in the hospital. It was a very anxious time but this book helped me gain a different perspective. The “power” in this book is the power of love. Your life is made up of only two kinds of things…positive things and negative things. This book explains how your attitude and way of thinking can make bad things seem better.

Most of the information in this book comes from the New Thought Movement of the early 1900s. These authors taught the principles of positive thinking and the law of attraction. Ms. Byrne quotes many of these authors in this book but she also describes how these principles can be used in everyday life to produce positive results in your life.

My favorite chapter in the book is “Keys To Power”. One of the topics in this chapter is the “key of gratitude.” Everytime I start feeling down, I think of things that I am thankful for. I am soon feeling much better. Ms. Byrne says, “No matter what negative situation you may find yourself in, you can always find something to be grateful for, and as you do, you harness the force of love that eliminates negativity.”

Positive thinking does not always come easy to me. I remember my mom telling me when I was a child, “All you ever do is grumble, gripe and complain.” Children tend to live up to spoken expectations so I tend to see the cup as half empty instead of half full. I like this book because it reminds me that changing your mind can change your life. I have a decision to make.