The Secret (beyond positive thinking)

Gotta love my mother. She burned me a copy of this audio book so I could listen to it while I walk. She is just sure this is the answer to all our problems (hers and mine).

I only made it twenty minutes into it before I had to stop, sit down in the middle of the dirt road I was on and laugh until I had no breath left. I kept imagining it being done by a bunch of Saturday Night Live Actors.

"Your feelings are affected by your thoughts. When you think bad things, you feel bad. So when you're feeling sad or upset or depressed or angry, your thoughts are what causes those emotions. Ask yourself what you're thinking when you feel bad, then think about something else and you will feel better. Your emotions are directly related to those thought patterns. Depression, anger, sadness-those are all negative emotions that make us feel bad."

And later on:

"We attract negative energy to ourselves when we have bad thoughts. So when you wake up in the morning and you stub your toe, it just sets the tone for the rest of the day. Consequently, bad things happen to you all day. So all you have to do is stop yourself from falling into a negative thought pattern in order to stop this chain of events. You can attract good things to yourself . . . "

Ooohhh . . . So my washing machine threw a belt because the cat threw up a hairball on my shoes this morning and I said a bad word and was upset about it? I'll be darned. So if I visualize the appliance repairman reparing it for free and feel really good about it, then it should happen right? (Actually my husband, who's gotten pretty good at this kind of thing, fixed it for the price of a couple of hose clamps and a cup of coffee).

This Godless philosophy reeks, and I mean reeks, of something put out by a sect of Evangelicals I have no use for, known as the "Name it and Claim it" method of prayer. However that's a subject of another blog.

Meanwhile, I've got to listen to enough of this six cd set to convince my mother that I listened to it. There will be a test. I wonder if there's Cliff Notes somewhere?