Inspirational book that combines "The Secret" with a personal art project., March 24, 2009
What you ultimately think of this book may heavily depend on whether you think the book The Secret and the concept of the "Law of Attraction" is a highly credible law of nature, a harmless self-help approach, or a bunch of New Age smoke-and-mirrors sleight-of-hand mind-bending distortions of reality.
The "Law of Attraction" states that if you intentionally and consciously work to attract more of the things you want out of life and less of the things that you do not want, you can co-create your own reality.
By envisioning your own personal vision of your life and creating a vision board as a visual aid, you help to add to the "good vibes" in your life and expel the "bad vibes" that you have been thinking and attracting. And then, over time, both good vibrations and bad vibrations become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Others have talked about this concept over the past centuries. Sometimes, it is referred to as fate, serendipity, karma. In Deepak Chopra's book, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence, he writes about synchronicities in life, how to have them work in your favor, and how vibration energy in one's body ties into quantum physics.
And prior to Deepak, there was Zig Ziglar's book See You at the Top: 25th Anniversary Edition, where he espouses weeding out one's own "Stinkin Thinkin" so that one can co-create one's own successes in life.
And before Zig was the whole Positive Mental Attitude craze and its endlessly marketed variations of that one concept.
Perhaps one of the earliest versions of this "ask and you shall receive" concept (of which the Law of Attraction is one of hundreds of corollaries) is a comment the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, pioneer of the germ theory of disease, once made: "In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind." (Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.) I purposely adapted, with a generous dollop of artistic license, Louis' quote in its interpretation of "chance favors the prepared mind", just as many people have also interpreted the "ask and you shall receive" concept in countless ways.
Except for Pasteur's quote, which was made in a purely scientific context, I see all of these as one long and varied continuum of interpretations that basically says that one must live life with goals, with vision, with defined values, with hope, with action, and intent. Otherwise, so many of us sleepwalk through large chunks of our lives.
This books helps to inspire, motivate, and instruct the reader in creating their own personal vision board.
As someone who has dozens of books that help me and inspire me to become better at oil/acrylic painting, stained/fused glass, and photography, when I first flipped through this book before proceeding to read it, it reminded me far more of an art instruction book.
In fact, the quality of the book's construction and richly colored photography of both amateur (made by non-artistic types) and professional (made by an artist) vision boards makes it as beautiful as some of my art instruction books.
Because not everyone can be artistically inclined to create their own vision board by drawing, painting, or rendering their vision using graphics software, the book guides the reader in cutting out words and pictures from magazines to create a vision board that is basically an assemblage of collage, decoupage, and scrapbooking techniques.
Most of the book focuses on what to include in your vision collage.
My one main complaint with the book is that some of the concepts are overhyped. To me, the book's subtitle of "The Secret To An Extraordinary Life", and the front-cover testimonial by Jack Canfield (also an author on the Law of Attraction) that "This book will change your life." present the material as something far more earthshakingly unique than I am willing to give it credit for.
In my opinion, hundreds of self-help books out there have helped countless numbers of readers just as much as they have been useless to other readers. Also, even though some people like the use of a visual aid to focus their thoughts, I prefer my visions, affirmations, and goals to be mainly in written form, in the format of a personal journal ....continued on www.amazon.com