The Wilbur Smith Discussion Forums

I see this latest “craze” or “trend”; at least in the US has been mentioned somewhere else in the forum, so I decided to give it it’s own thread.

Let us know what you think, it is fact, fiction or a bunch of BS…

Here are my two cents… I haven’t read the book or seen the DVD but it’s just something that has been around forever, ‘Think and you’ll be given”, “The power of intention” and countless other books. “The Present” is probably a repackaged regurgitation of all those ideas. The difference is that the author was on Oprah, and sadly sometimes that’s all you need to become a best-seller.

On a most positive note I do believe in “The power of positive thinking”, not because some sort of supernatural force is going to help you achieve your goals but because positive thinking sets people into action; and action is what makes things happen.

Is "The Present" the same thing as "The Secret" as mentioned in Nefer's Egyptian thread "The Quest" Reader Diary [Spoilers]?
Or is this another mob flogging something similar?

Thanks for putting this up, Pen, I was gonna do the same!

The idea that my prof put to us was that this Truth is the same Secret that the Templars knew... and we all know what happened to them! I'm not a Templar person, so I don't know where he got this idea from.

The Secret, from what I know, if partly about setting goals and that part is knowing what you want in the first place. The slightly suspicious part is the talk about vibrational energy and the fake physics.

You know the feeling you get when you see something you really want - something that makes you happy? The Secret people believe that those feelings are a part of our vibrational energy which is reflected (?) into the universe somehow. I don't claim to be knowledgeable at all about this, but is what I know.

Oh god, not something else like this.. I mean we already have Scientologists believing in alien ancestors or something. As you can tell, I don't buy into this kind of stuff. At first, I thought this topic was about some self-help book.

Sorry Ada, I meant to talk about "The Secret", I don't know where I got "The Present" from. I have updated the name of the thread...

mob flogging???...

^ Penitent. Oops! A bit of Aussie slang (with British origins) snuck in there.

mob = as in the it's real meaning, i.e. large group of people; and

flogging = peddling (trying to sell something).

Thnaks for the clarification Ada, I feel better now...

Sorry for the slight off topic here...

Keep telling us what you thing of The Secret...

As I said in The Egyptian thread, I think these people are con artists. I think Oprah needs to do a bit more research before she has people like this on her show. In Australia, we had already seen a documentary type show re “The Secret”. When I realised what they were talking about, I stopped watching it. Same with the Oprah show. As Penitent said, we’ve seen all this hype before. How to become a millionaire – or should we say billionaire? Millionaires seem to be a dime a dozen now . I must say, how clever of them. As soon as some one mentions the word secret, everyone wants to know. The sad thing is that so many people are willing to pay $1,000 for a 2 day workshop. Oprah intimated, she had always known about the secret and thought that everyone knew about it.

Sheer determination and hard work plus a little luck in most cases (i.e. right time, right place etc.) are what I believe constitute “The Secret”. If you only want to work 8 hours per day, 5 days a week then you aren’t going to become super rich. However you can still have a happy life with a loving family as they don’t require money but they do require your time.