Beware Of Limits To Be Limitless

An itinerant social psychologist was being forced to spend so much time at airports that she devised a little game to beat the boredom. She had to make inspired guesses about the sort of reading material people brought into the plane. The most frequently-sighted book turned out to be Rhonda Byrne's book, The Secret, which came out following a popular DVD and which was celebrating its one-and-a-halfyear anniversary at the top of best seller lists by then. 

What surprised the psychologist more was the manner in which her 'New Agey crunchy granola' friends gushed over the book as well as those who were 'ordinarily sceptical'.

Was it because The Secret openly scoffed at Horatio Alger hard work ethic? All you had to do was to believe in the law of attraction (which argued you can manifest or attract whatever your heart desires, from Gucci shoes to husbands who are pure armcandy). But why did so many otherwise intelligent people believe in the great attractor hypothesis? Was it because they found the prospect of subscribing to a more prosaic, read Godless, alternative even more frightening?

Sheer inertia may also have been responsible: People may strenuously convince themselves of the value of something with which they have forged an emotional bond. They also tend to selectively recall random successes more than routine failures. Behavioural economists have done Nobel Prize winning work on such positive biases of human decision-making.

More intriguing is the possibility of The Secret being 'just a giant placebo effect'. To say that however is not to trivialise the placebo effect. Even the most sceptical scientists have now been forced to concede that belief is extremely powerful medicine, even if the treatment is a complete sham.

New research had in fact shown that placebos can also benefit people who do not have faith in them! This highlights the almost totemic power of subconscious associations. Sometimes the jab of a needle or the doctor's white coat is enough to control bodily processes, such as immune responses and release of hormones, of which we are totally unaware.

This could explain why selfhelp gurus like Guy Finley exhort seekers to illuminate and liberate themselves from selflimiting thoughts and negativities. Paradoxically, the more conscious we become of what limits us, the more limitless becomes our life! 

Vithal C Nadkarni