--- slug: secret-byrne type: lineage subsection: contemporary-scenes created: 2026-06-01 updated: 2026-06-25 summary: "Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book and film that carried New Thought's law of attraction to a global mass audience, selling tens of millions of copies after Oprah Winfrey amplified it." related: new-thought: relation: depends-on note: "The Secret repackages New Thought's core claim that thought is a creative force, drawing largely unattributed on Wattles, Hill, and Goddard." law-attraction: relation: produces note: "The Secret is the single work that made 'the law of attraction' a household phrase, supplying the term most readers now use for the belief." manifestation: relation: upstream-of note: "The contemporary manifestation mainstream descends directly from the audience The Secret created and the vocabulary it standardized." neville-goddard: relation: informed-by note: "The imaginal, feeling-first mechanism The Secret reaches for is substantially Neville Goddard's, though the book does not credit him." hay-house: relation: complements note: "Several of The Secret's featured teachers were Hay House authors, and the book rode the same mind-body-spirit distribution channel Louise Hay built." vibration-frequency: relation: produces note: "The Secret's framing of thoughts as broadcasts on a matching frequency helped fix the vibration-and-frequency vocabulary now standard in manifestation culture." manifestation-blame: relation: risks note: "By teaching that thought draws all circumstance, The Secret implies its dark corollary — that the sick and the poor brought their conditions on themselves." --- # The Secret > **Lineage** > > Transmission of ideas and practices through movements, teachers, works, and institutions. > "Your thoughts become things." > — Rhonda Byrne, *The Secret* *The 2006 book and film that took the oldest idea in American positive thinking, gave it a single name, the law of attraction, and sold it to tens of millions.* If you've ever heard that the universe is "always listening," that you should "ask, believe, receive," or that you draw whatever you focus on, you've already met *The Secret*. Rhonda Byrne's 2006 film and the book that followed it pulled a 19th-century doctrine out of the metaphysical bookshelf and onto daytime television, supermarket endcaps, and eventually every manifestation feed on the internet. Almost nothing in it was new. Its achievement was reach: it took ideas that had circulated for over a century among small audiences and delivered them, in a glossy and emotionally direct package, to the largest readership any work in this field has ever had. ## What The Secret is *The Secret* is a multimedia product, first a film and then a book, built around one claim it calls "the law of attraction": a person's dominant thoughts and feelings draw matching circumstances, people, and events into their life. Byrne, an Australian television producer, frames the law as a hidden truth known to the great figures of history and deliberately suppressed, then recovered by a handful of contemporary teachers. The presentation is part documentary, part testimonial, part self-help manual, structured around the formula "ask, believe, receive." As a transmission node, *The Secret* matters less for what it says than for how many people it reached. It's the widest single channel through which [New Thought](new-thought.md) ideas have traveled, and the point where "the law of attraction" stopped being a niche phrase and became common cultural vocabulary. The contemporary [manifestation](manifestation.md) world, with its enormous online audience and its assumption that intention shapes outcome, grows largely from the readership this one work created. ## Origin and historical development The origin story Byrne tells about herself has become part of the product. In 2004, grieving her father's death and facing professional and personal strain, she was given a copy of Wallace Wattles's *The Science of Getting Rich* (1910), the slim New Thought primer that teaches readers to think in a "Certain Way" to grow wealthy. She has described the book as a revelation that reorganized her understanding of how life works, and she set out to make a film that would carry the idea to a mass audience. The film *The Secret* was released direct to DVD and online in March 2006, assembling contemporary motivational and metaphysical teachers who narrate the law of attraction in turn. The book followed in November 2006 from Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, in partnership with Beyond Words. Television turned a modest self-published-style project into a global phenomenon. *The Secret* was featured on *The Oprah Winfrey Show* across two episodes in February 2007, and the endorsement sent sales upward. The book went to the top of the *New York Times* bestseller list and stayed there for more than three years. The combined film-and-book package has sold in the range of thirty million copies worldwide, translated into dozens of languages. Byrne extended the property into a franchise. Sequels followed: *The Power* (2010), *The Magic* (2012), *Hero* (2013), and *The Greatest Secret* (2020), along with a daily-affirmation app and a 2020 feature dramatization, *The Secret: Dare to Dream*. None matched the original's cultural impact, but together they established *The Secret* as a durable brand rather than a single book. ## Main figures The work has one author and many narrators. **Rhonda Byrne** conceived, produced, and assembled the project and wrote the book; she remains its public face and the owner of the brand. The film's distinctive contribution, though, was a cast of teachers whose individual followings the project gathered into one audience. Several were already established names in the field. **Bob Proctor**, a veteran prosperity teacher who traced his own lineage back through Earl Nightingale to Napoleon Hill's *Think and Grow Rich*, gave the film much of its grandfatherly authority. **Jack Canfield**, co-creator of the *Chicken Soup for the Soul* series, and **Joe Vitale**, a marketer and metaphysical author, supplied the self-help and entrepreneurial register. **Esther Hicks**, who with her late husband Jerry channeled a group of non-physical entities called **Abraham** and taught a detailed law-of-attraction system in *Ask and It Is Given* (2004), appeared in the original cut. By several accounts, she was central to its framing. She was removed from later editions after a contractual dispute over the Abraham material, a separation that points to one of the deeper currents the film drew on without always naming. ## Major works and institutions The franchise's core is the original 2006 pairing. The film *The Secret* established the visual and emotional grammar; the book *The Secret* (Atria/Beyond Words, 2006) carried the message to readers and remains the canonical text. The sequels (*The Power*, *The Magic*, *Hero*, and *The Greatest Secret*) extend the same doctrine into love, gratitude, calling, and a later turn toward nondual "awareness" teaching influenced by the spiritual writer **David R. Hawkins**. *The Secret* also rode an existing institution. Several of its featured teachers published through or alongside [Hay House](hay-house.md), the mind-body-spirit publisher Louise Hay founded in 1984, and the book moved through the same retail and media channels Hay House had spent two decades building for popular spirituality. Oprah supplied the spark, but the distribution infrastructure was already in place. ## Core teachings *The Secret* compresses the New Thought tradition into a few repeatable instructions, which is much of why it traveled so well. - **Like attracts like.** Thoughts are treated as having a frequency that the universe answers with matching circumstances. Dwell on what you want and you draw it near; dwell on what you fear and you draw that instead. - **Ask, believe, receive.** The working formula. Name the desire clearly, hold the unshakable feeling that it is already yours, and remain open to receive it without anxious striving. - **Feeling is the signal.** Emotion, not bare thought, is what the universe registers. The book ranks gratitude and joy highest because they are the feeling-tone of a wish already fulfilled, a move that, in substance, is [Neville Goddard's](neville-goddard.md). - **The universe is abundant and responsive.** There is no shortage to compete over and no judge to appease; reality is a benevolent system that returns to each person the quality of their own attention. Underneath the [vibration-and-frequency](vibration-frequency.md) vocabulary, this is the New Thought claim almost unchanged: mind is causal, conditions are effects, and the outer condition follows the inner cause. ## What it transmitted *The Secret* is less an origin than an amplifier, and what it amplified outlasted the book's own moment. Most directly, it fixed the term. Before 2006 "the law of attraction" was a phrase used inside New Thought and Abraham-Hicks circles; after 2006 it was the name the general public reached for, and it remains the standard label for the [law of attraction](law-attraction.md) today. It also created an audience. The tens of millions who encountered the law through Byrne's package became the readership that later went looking for deeper or older sources. Many found [Neville Goddard](neville-goddard.md), whose recorded lectures had recently entered the public domain. The contemporary online manifestation world, with its scripting, affirmations, and assumption that focused intention shapes circumstance, is in large part *The Secret's* audience grown up and moved on to its sources. The book is the gateway through which a generation entered the field. It standardized a vocabulary. Thoughts as broadcasts on a frequency, the universe as a responsive medium, "alignment" as the goal: this is the everyday language of [manifestation](manifestation.md) culture, and *The Secret* did more than any other single work to make it the default. ## Influence on the wider field The reach extended well past spirituality. *The Secret* arrived in the same cultural slot that positive-thinking self-help had occupied since Norman Vincent Peale, and it gave that tradition a metaphysical upgrade and a fresh generation of readers. Its vocabulary, from "abundance mindset" to "raising your vibration" to "limiting beliefs" to "what you focus on grows," saturated coaching, entrepreneurship, and influencer culture. Often the book's name disappeared while its terms kept circulating. The historian Mitch Horowitz, whose *The Miracle Club* (2018) situates the work in the long arc of American positive-mind metaphysics, treats *The Secret* as the popular culmination of a lineage that runs from Phineas Quimby through Wattles and Hill to the present. That framing is useful precisely because the book hides its own ancestry: an idea this widely absorbed stops looking like a doctrine with a history and starts looking like a fact about how the world works. ## Controversy and legacy *The Secret* drew heavy criticism almost from the moment Oprah amplified it, and the criticism clusters in two places. The first is attribution. The book presents the law of attraction as an ancient secret recovered by its teachers, while drawing its actual substance, largely without credit, from named and recent sources. Those sources include Wattles, whom Byrne acknowledges; Napoleon Hill; and Neville Goddard, whose feeling-first method underlies much of the framing and isn't named at all. Critics inside and outside the field have noted that a work built on a tradition of identifiable authors markets itself as having no author but the universe. The second is the doctrine's shadow, and it is the sharper charge. If thought draws all circumstance, then the law's logic runs in reverse as well: the sick attracted their illness, the poor manifested their poverty, and the people caught in disaster, in some sense, called it to themselves. The original film drew specific outrage for appearing to apply this reasoning to tragedy and large-scale suffering. This failure mode is not incidental to *The Secret* but built into the claim it sells, and it has its own home in [Manifestation Blame](manifestation-blame.md), the contemporary form in which the doctrine turns on the people it was meant to help. What endures is the audience and the vocabulary, not the book's standing as a text. *The Secret* is rarely cited today as an authority; serious practitioners have mostly moved past it to its sources. But the field it left behind is shaped by it at the root: the manifestation mainstream speaks in the words *The Secret* made ordinary, and most of its participants arrived through a door Rhonda Byrne built. ## Sources - Rhonda Byrne, [*The Secret*](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5719153W) (Atria Books / Beyond Words, 2006) — the canonical text of the franchise and the source of the epigraph and the "ask, believe, receive" formula. - Wallace D. Wattles, [*The Science of Getting Rich*](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15101279W) (Elizabeth Towne, 1910) — the New Thought primer Byrne credits as the work that launched the project, and a primary unacknowledged source for its content. - Esther and Jerry Hicks, [*Ask and It Is Given*](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3393460W) (Hay House, 2004) — the Abraham-Hicks law-of-attraction system that shaped the original film's framing before the Hicks material was withdrawn. - Mitch Horowitz, [*The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality*](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19815392W) (Inner Traditions, 2018) — situates *The Secret* within the long American positive-mind lineage from Quimby forward. - The Wikipedia entry on [*The Secret* (2006 film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_(2006_film)) supplies the production history, the Oprah broadcasts, the sales figures, and the record of the criticism the work drew. --- - [Next: Hay House](hay-house.md) - [Previous: Eckhart Tolle](eckhart-tolle.md)