Reply #20: I was invited to watch "The Secret"

[balantz]

It was at a gathering at an upper middle class house of a pleasant (cough cough) couple without kids making about $150,000 to $200,000. It was a Nikken party, magnets and supplements and such for the health, sold in a heiarchical system where the sponsors get a piece of each of their underlings. Sort of like Amway I guess. All the people but three or four of us were a part of the Nikken group and were helping to sell the system. They were very upbeat and positive. It was all a marketing farce that could work if one is really into pumping a product with a self-improvement, get rich scheme driving the sales pitch. You really have to be well off with lots of social connections to have a social network with enough people under you financially who want what you have, and what you are striving for. Perhaps one could belong to a church and make it work within that structure.

So we first watched this movie, "The Secret", It was based on a probable truth that all of life is abundance coming from a common source and everything and everyone is connected to that source of abundance. The movie was presented well with a number of new age feel-good gurus in the movie pimping the philosophy. I'll admit that I was jazzed a bit after watching it.

The dangerous part was that all one has to do is believe that source will give you anything you need or desire, and all you have to do is be positive and expect that abundance to come to you. If you are negative and stay closed you will not attract abundance from the source. That's all good and well for the well off people at that meeting who were already accustomed to making wealth and already had many social connections. For someone like me it would have been much more difficult to find people to sell the product to, and so the philosophy behind "The Secret" may not work as well for a poor person like me.

The friend I went with was convinced to buy a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff and set up in business with the company, but hasn't made a penny because she is not an aggressive sales type person and doesn't have the social connections to sell much of those products. But she did have a credit card and added that couple thousand onto her already horrible debt.