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Her father died in 2004. Then, the production of her true crime
television series was beset with much difficulty. Her accountant
told her that with the expected losses she would go broke in a
month’s time and may not be able to complete the two films which
she was set to produce.
She would then receive calls one after another
from friends and her production team expressing how much her
relationship with them suffered because of her need to cope up with
all her predicaments. To top it all, her mother seemed to have lost
all her appetite to live without her father. And the thought of
losing her mother at that time was unbearable.
All these left her deeply depressed and she knew
that her life was slowly falling apart.
One day, her daughter gave her a photocopy of a
1910 book written by Wallace Wattles entitled “The Science of
Getting Rich” and urged her to read it.
She was intrigued with the prescription of
Wattles in his book that people could shape their thoughts and use
the law of attraction to turn their lives around. Like a magnet, bad
thoughts create bad situations as good thoughts create prosperity.
She then spent two and a half weeks tracing the
roots of Wattles’ idea and discovered that it is an ancient old
wisdom. She said that the law of attraction “lit a fire in her.”
She decided to make a television show about it
and went to the United States to interview more than fifty teachers
and philosophers who shared the same view on the power of thoughts
and visualization—the law of attraction.
In 2006, a film entitled The Secret distributed
widely through DVD and on line through video streaming consisting of
series of interviews and dramatizations related to the law of
attraction gained global attention. A book with the same title was
subsequently published and became a best seller.
More than two million DVDs were sold in a year
and four million books were sold in less than six months following
its publication. Prominent media personalities like Oprah Winfrey,
Ellen DeGeneres, and Larry King were attracted to her thoughts.
Although she had her own share of public
criticism and even a suit for copyright infringement, Australian
television writer and producer, Rhonda Byrne, was listed as among
Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the World in 2007.
What the mind can do to change individual
perspective is known to humanity ages ago. It is not exactly a
secret but rather an open book.
The power of the mind has been put in various
contexts from science to religion, from psychology to medicine, from
philosophy to economics.
Austrian physician Franz Mesmer, who gave the
world the term “mesmerize,” pioneered the study of the
subconscious mind and hypnosis in mental healing as early as the
eighteenth century. In the early twentieth century, the human mind
was already portrayed as a panacea, from pain relief to debt relief
by self-help authors like Wattles and Norman Vincent Peale. What
Byrne prescribes is really nothing new or a secret in the real
sense.
Unfortunately, the power of the human mind is
not self-fulfilling because the heart normally tempers it with all
the emotional trashes as if the heart was put above the brain in the
scheme of the human structure. And almost always, it is more
difficult to stop the heart from being affective than to dictate the
mind to think properly.
One must believe however that the power of the
mind works because it surely does. And Byrne and all those who
gained from this mindset would surely agree.
www.soriano-ph.com
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