The Secret seemed to trigger lots of resentment and anger in some people. It always makes me wonder what is going on there. If it were as inaccurate and unrealistic as they say, why not just dismiss it and move on? But those who are angered by it seem to give it more attention than those who believe in it!

Some people attack ‘The Secret’ for leaving out the ‘action’ part. But even though it was not overly emphasized, it was not left out of the movie–and is not left out of the teachings of those who were in the Secret. James Ray even says that if you expect to just sit on your couch and change your thoughts, without acting, they’ll come and repossess your furniture!

The Secret was a 90 minute movie. As I’ve said before, it was an introduction. How could they cover it all, in depth, in one movie?? It’s not possible. When I first learned about this information, long ago, I didn’t expect the first book I read to tell me the whole story. I read more and more and more, until I have a whole library of books on physics, metaphysics, religion, psychology as well as the more targetted “self-help” books that deal directly with this idea. I have to believe that the makers of The Secret intended people to follow this kind of process.

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Alignment is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Several books and seminars have brought up the topic and it started me thinking. It’s almost like when we incarnate, our spirit imprints a particular shape on the universe, which is our shape. Like a cookie cutter image. If we live “lined up” with this shape then the universal energy stream can flow through that cutout to us unimpeded, and through us to our projects and creations.

It’s like a person-shaped window in a solid wall, that the sun can shine through. If we stand in front of it, the sun can warm every part of us and we’ll feel great. If we are not in alignment, however– either don’t feel we deserve to stand fully in the sun, or allow others to pull us away from the window, or think that it’s not the right thing to just stand there– then we may have to go through all kinds of contortions and try to invent devices that will get the sun to reflect over to where we are.

Abraham talks about this as the “stream” and that we are in a canoe either going with the flow of the current, or fighting our way upstream, or so crosswise of the stream that we get flung against the boulders. Our training says that the hard way is the most rewarding and meritable, that it’s “too easy” to just let go the oars and go with the flow.

Whatever analogy we use, it seems to say that being in alignment is easy. It’s the path of least resistance in a positive sense. It may not be easy to find that place, we are so programmed against it that it can be right under our noses and we don’t even see it. But once we do find it I think the promise of a creative satisfying life is limitless.

So much of our effort goes into trying to gain happiness! All the struggle after money, relationships, career, shopping and on and on is really a struggle after things that we think will lead to our happiness. Whether we are trying to reconcile an unhappy past, or achieve a distant happier future, our attempts to gain happiness influence all our activities and actions in the present moment where we really live.

Don’t you find that at the bottom of all your desires there is the belief that the thing you are striving for will make you happy? Isn’t that why all of us want what we want? We’ve constructed a sequence of reasoning that says things like: “I’m not happy; I don’t have money or a relationship. If I got them, then I’d be happy.” That’s the future oriented way of struggling for happiness.On the other hand, we sometimes say: “I’m not happy. I had a terrible childhood (or a bad first marriage, or got fired from my first job, or had a bad accident); if I could just reconcile THAT, then I’d be happy.” That’s the past oriented way of struggling for happiness.Both of these ways put our attention outside the Present Moment. We are either focused on something that happened in the past that we need years of therapy to “work through”, or we are focused on something in the future that we need to acquire. Either way, our focus is outside the Present, which is the only time we really ever have. Just think about it: can we ever go back and get into any past moment with our direct perceptions? Can we project ourselves ahead and experience something from the future? No. Our entire experience is contained in this single Present Moment, the only moment of true experience we ever have. We carry this Moment with us through our lives, like a bubble of reality surrounded by a constantly changing sea of Past and Future. Within this Present Moment is our only real experience. When we spend our lives longing for or regretting the past, or striving for a future that never comes, we ignore the one point of personal power that is all we ever have: Right Now.

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Does that sound backwards? Does it seem like it ought to be stated that once you are happy you can feel grateful? Sometimes turning our assumptions upside down brings insight and discovery. Gratitude felt before the happiness, before the manifestation of something we want, before the fulfillment of our dreams is a surprising idea, but in the energetic sense it is the most logical thing we can do.

How grateful are you? In this sense, I don’t mean just saying thank you if somebody gives you a gift, or holds a door for you. That is just politeness, or social convention. Gratitude isn’t words, it’s emotion. It’s an openness of heart to experience that lets your spirit flow out in a particular way. If you think of emotions as indicators of how you are expressing your spirit, you can see that these emotions tell a lot about where you are headed in your life-towards something great that you’ll enjoy, or something not so good, that you won’t enjoy. Learning to focus on emotions and see what they are telling you about your energy is an important step in learning to create the life you want. And learning to nurture and magnify the emotions that serve you is an equally important step.

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