How to reposition your boner (and other forbidden secrets)

“Zig Ziglar may be the master motivator, Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the Soul, the master story tellers; Anthony Robbins may be the guru of personal development, but Bob Proctor is the master thinker. When it comes to systemizing life, no one can touch him.”

~ Attributed (by Bob Proctor) to Doug Wead, former Special Assistant to the President of the United States

I've known for a long time that Scientist Bob Proctor is a deep thinker, but reading the above quotation from author, philanthropist and former Diamond-level Amway salesman Doug Wead just confirms it. "Well, gee, Cosmic Connie, is Wead really a reliable source?" you may be asking. To which I can only respond, "If you can't trust a person who betrayed the trust of a future President of the US by secretly recording conversations and then publishing them, whom can you trust?"

But this isn't about Doug Wead. It's about Scientist Bob, noted quantum physics expert, philosopher and (as you'll see in a moment) also an economist and even apparently an expert on human sexuality.

The first thing you need to know is that Scientist Bob recently dropped a really big bombshell. I hope you're sitting down.

Are you ready?

It turns out that The Secret was just fluff. Listen to what Scientist Bob, who is of course one of the stars of The Secret (and whom The Secret arguably propelled to new levels of fame) has to say:

The Movie Based on the Law Of Attraction is Pop Culture Fluff!

And we have the entire industry to blame for this.

Being true to their sensational nature, they take an amazing truth and they just amplify the “sexy”, less vital bits and leave out all the rest.

As a result, the Law of Attraction brand that you get today is a really watered down version of the real thing.

Needless to say, when you use the Law of Attraction in reduced media-friendly form, you only scrap [sic] the tiniest tip of the iceberg when it comes to its immense potential.

Now, I know some of you might be saying, "Why, Cosmic Connie, that sounds amazingly close to some of the things you have been saying on this very blog regarding the New-Wage/selfish-help industry! At least the headline and the first paragraph sound like you! The rest, not so much!"

So what does Scientist Bob have against The Secret? Simply this: it only touched on one Universal Law, the Law Of Attraction, and it didn't even do such a hot job of that. In fact, it may have made things worse, or at least failed to make them better, as Bob points out:

Barely 3 Years After The Revolutionary Film "The Secret", America & The World Faces Its [sic] Worst Financial Crisis in Decades

Is the Law of Attraction Just Hype?

Why – if the Law of Attraction is being used by millions – did America just face its worst job crisis since 1974, with 602,000 people losing their jobs?

Some of you might be under the mistaken impression that the economic crisis is a result of a whole clusterf--k of economic, social and political factors, but Scientist Bob, aka Economist Bob, knows better. Turns out the LOA just won't work properly unless you pay Bob to teach you about eleven other forgotten Laws.

Here are some of the astounding things that Bob will reveal to you if you fork over $97 (a $200 savings over the regular price of $297!):

• 1,000 year-old ancient Talmud secret that can steer you clear of materialism and set you on the path to true riches. (Find it in the Law of Thinking)
• Read the newspapers and DIE. A fatal way to mess up your dreams—and how to avoid it. (The Law of Attraction)
• Get the Golden Touch—by making bone-headed mistakes? Directions for repositioning boners and transforming them into bounty. (learn in the Law of Receiving)
• “His sight was getting poor, but his vision has never been better”. The step-by-step blueprint to set crystal-clear goals and achieve them. (Go to the Law of Thinking)
• A simple yet powerful method to create effectual employees and agreeable colleagues. (Grab it from the Law of Increase)
• The magic golden key to realizing all the dreams you ever had. PLUS: It also works to boost self-esteem, emotional freedom, and spiritual fufillment [sic], (The Law of Compensation teach you that!)
• Is guilt corroding your insides like acid? Here’s a mental substance that acts like alkali and washes you clean. (Law of Forgiveness)*
• And much more!

Naturally, my little cadre of email pen pals and I were most interested in that bit about "repositioning boners." I confess that we snarked about it quite a bit. But then I began to wonder if perhaps we were being too hard on Scientist Bob. After all, he is Canadian, and it's possible that "boner" doesn't have the same meaning in Canadian as it currently does in American. While it's true that the word was used in the past as a slang term for "mistake," that is emphatically not its most common usage these days. So maybe Canada didn't get the memo, eh?

Judging by some of the comments on a recent thread on the Powerful Intentions forum, it seems that at least some Secret fans are a little uncomfortable about Scientist Bob having thrown one of his major fame tickets under the bus. But hey, let's face it: Bob was on the New-Wage scene decades before The Secret was a gleam in Rhonda Byrne's imitation third eye. And he's far from the only "star" of the world's most famous New-Wage moviemercial to use it as stepping stone to further fame and riches.

So let's all cut the guy some slack, okay? And if your boner needs repositioning, or your insides are too acidic and those Tums just aren't working, or you would just like to increase your spiritual "fufillment," hop on over to Master Thinker Bob's new site and avail yourself of his timeless wisdom.

Or at least take a gander at that ad copy. Surely there are lessons to be learned in that alone.

PS added Dec. 22: In the interests of fairness and presenting "the other side," I want to share the remarks of a person commenting on a September 2007 blog post in which I snarked about Scientist Bob. (The comment just came in very recently.) This person, who uses the handle "Navs South Africa," says he owes all of his astounding success to The Secret and to Bob Proctor and his team. He also says, "Skepticism is the deadly enemy of progress & self development." Here's the link to his comment and my response, and then his response to me.

PPS added on 19 April, 2009: While Googling something else, I came across an April 2007 interview in which Scientist Bob praised The Secret up, down and sideways.

Here's the relevant part, in which the interviewer is asking Proctor about the filming of The Secret. It leads into his comments about his reaction when he first watched the stunning final product:

PR.com: Did they shoot you all at one time, and they just cut it up?

Bob Proctor: Yes. The amazing part of this… no one had a script… no one! It was a little hotel room that they were shooting in. Of course there's camera equipment everywhere and lights, shadowing for lights and you had to watch or you'd trip over something in the room, it was so small. They asked a couple of questions and I would answer them as if they weren't questions; just stating things. I talked to them for a couple hours, just explaining everything about the mind, the world that we live in and our relationship with why things happen the way they do. That was it, and I left. She said, "You'll hear from us." That was in June [of 2005] and then the following February of 2006, I got a DVD of The Secret, by Fed Ex. I didn't even put it on right away. Finally, I said to my wife, "Let's see what this is." Well, I just about fell off the sofa, I couldn't believe it!

PR.com: Because you were so moved by it?

Bob Proctor: I really was! I've been in this business and studying this since 1961, and I worked for five years with Nightingale-Conant in Chicago. Nightingale-Conant is the leader in personal development programs and products. I spent 5 years with them in the sixties and early seventies when this industry was really just in its rompers, and I'd never seen anything like [The Secret]. It is without question, the best production, and it gets the idea across better than anything I've ever seen.

Of course, that was two years ago. I guess he changed his mind after The Secret hysteria died down a bit and he had to scramble to find another cash cow.

* Apparently Scientist Bob is not only a quantum physics expert, but is also a chemist. Who knew?