100 Quotes from "The Secret"

100 Quotes from "The Secret"

1. We all work with one infinite power

2. The Secret is the Law of Attraction (LOA)

3. Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting

4. We are like magnets - like attract like. You become AND attract what you think

5. Every thought has a frequency. Thoughts send out a magnetic energy

6. People think about what they don't want and attract more of the same

7. Thought = creation. If these thoughts are attached to powerful emotions (good or bad) that speeds the creation

8. You attract your dominant thoughts

9. Those who speak most of illness have illness, those who speak most of prosperity have it..etc..

10. It's not "wishful" thinking.

11. You can't have a universe without the mind entering into it

12. Choose your thoughts carefully .. you are a masterpiece of your life

13. It's OK that thoughts don't manifest into reality immediately (if we saw a picture of an elephant and it instantly appeared, that would be too soon)

14. EVERYTHING in your life you have attracted .. accept that fact .. it's true.

15. Your thoughts cause your feelings

16. We don't need to complicate all the "reasons" behind our emotions. It's much simpler than that. Two categories .. good feelings, bad feelings.

17. Thoughts that bring about good feelings mean you are on the right track. Thoughts that bring about bad feelings means you are not on the right track.

18. Whatever it is you are feeling is a perfect reflection of what is in the process of becoming

19. You get exactly what you are FEELING

20. Happy feelings will attract more happy circumstances

21. You can begin feeling whatever you want (even if it's not there).. the universe will correspond to the nature of your song

22. What you focus on with your thought and feeling is what you attract into your experience

23. What you think and what you feel and what actually manifests is ALWAYS a match - no exception

24. Shift your awareness

25. "You create your own universe as you go along" Winston Churchill

26. It's important to feel good ( ( ( (((good))) ) ) )

27. You can change your emotion immediately .. by thinking of something joyful, or singing a song, or remembering a happy experience

28. When you get the hang of this, before you know it you will KNOW you are the creator

29. Life can and should be phenomenal .. and it will be when you consciously apply the Law of Attraction

30. Universe will re-arrange itself accordingly

31. Start by using this sentence for all of your wants: "I'm so happy and grateful now that.... "

32. You don't need to know HOW the universe is going to rearrange itself

33. LOA is simply figuring out for yourself what will generate the positive feelings of having it NOW

34. You might get an inspired thought or idea to help you move towards what you want faster

35. The universe likes SPEED. Don't delay, don't second-guess, don't doubt..

36. When the opportunity or impulse is there .. ACT

37. You will attract everything you require - money, people, connections.. PAY ATTENTION to what's being set in front of you

38. You can start with nothing .. and out of nothing or no way - a WAY will be provided.

39. HOW LONG??? No rules on time .. the more aligned you are with positive feelings the quicker things happen

40. Size is nothing to the universe (unlimited abundance if that's what you wish) We make the rules on size and time

41. No rules according to the universe .. you provide the feelings of having it now and the universe will respond

42. Most people offer the majority of their thought in response to what they are observing (bills in the mail, being late, having bad luck...etc..)

43. You have to find a different approach to what is through a different vantage point

44. "All that we are is a result of what we have thought" - Buddha

45. What can you do right now to turn your life around?? Gratitude

46. Gratitude will bring more into our lives immediately

47. What we think about and THANK about is what we bring about

48. What are the things you are grateful for?? Feel the gratitude.. focus on what you have right now that you are grateful for

49. Play the picture in your mind - focus on the end result

50. VISUALIZE!!! Rehearse your future

51. VISUALIZE!!! See it, feel it! This is where action begins

52. Feel the joy .. feel the happiness)

53. An affirmative thought is 100 times more powerful than a negative one

54. "What this power is, I cannot say. All I know is that it exists." Alexander Graham Bell

55. Our job is not to worry about the "How". The "How" will show up out of the commitment and belief in the "what"

56. The Hows are the domain of the universe. It always knows the quickest, fastest, most harmonious way between you and your dream

57. If you turn it over to the universe, you will be surprised and dazzled by what is delivered .. this is where magic and miracles happen

58. Turn it over to the universe daily.. but it should never be a chore.

59. Feel exhilarated by the whole process .. high, happy, in tune

60. The only difference between people who are really living this way is they have habituated ways of being.

61. They remember to do it all the time

62. Create a Vision Board .. pictures of what you want to attract .. every day look at it and get into the feeling state of already having acquired these wants

63. "Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions." Albert Einstein

64. Decide what you want .. believe you can have it, believe you deserve it, believe it's possible for you

65. Close your eyes and visualize having what you already want - and the feeling of having it already.

66. Focus on being grateful for what you have already .. enjoy it!! Then release into the universe. The universe will manifest it.

67. "Whatever the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve" W. Clement Stone

68. Set a goal so big that if you achieved it, it would blow your mind.

69. When you have an inspired thought, you must trust it and act on it.

70. How can you become more prosperous?? INTEND IT!!

71. 'Checks are coming in the mail regularly'... or change your bank statement to whatever balance you want in there... and get behind the feeling of having it.

72. Life is meant to be abundant in ALL areas...

73. Go for the sense of inner joy and peace then all outside things appear

74. We are the creators of our universe

75. Relationships: Treat yourself the way you want to be treated by others .. love yourself and you will be loved

76. Healthy respect for yourself

77. For those you work with or interact with regularly .. get a notebook and write down positive aspects of each of those people.

78. Write down the things you like most about them (don't expect change from them). Law of attraction will not put you in the same space together if you frequencies don't match

79. When you realize your potential to feel good, you will ask no one to be different in order for you to feel good.

80. You will free yourself from the cumbersome impossibilities of needing to control the world, your friends, your mate, your children....

81. You are the only one that creates your reality

82. No one else can think or feel for you .. its YOU .. ONLY YOU.

83. Health: thank the universe for your own healing. Laugh, stress free happiness will keep you healthy.

84. Immune system will heal itself

85. Parts of our bodies are replace every day, every week..etc... Within a few years we have a brand new body

86. See yourself living in a new body. Hopeful = recovery. Happy = happier biochemistry. Stress degrades the bod.

87. Remove stress from the body and the body regenerates itself. You can heal yourself

88. Learn to become still .. and take your attention away from what you don't want, and place your attention on what you wish to experience

89. When the voice and vision on the inside become more profound and clear than the opinions on the outside, then you have mastered your life

90. You are not here to try to get the world to be just as you want it. You are here to create the world around you that you choose.

91. And allow the world as others choose to see it, exist as well

92. People think that if everyone knows the power of the LOA there won't be enough to go around .. This is a lie that's been ingrained in us and makes so many greedy.

93. The truth is there is more than enough love, creative ideas, power, joy, happiness to go around.

94. All of this abundance begins to shine through a mind that is aware of it's own infinite nature. There's enough for everyone. See it. Believe it. it will show up for you.

95. So let the variety of your reality thrill you as you choose all the things you want.. get behind the good feelings of all your wants.

96. Write your script. When you see things you don't want, don't think about them, write about them, talk about them, push against them, or join groups that focus on the don't wants... remove your attention from don't wants.. and place them on do wants

97. We are mass energy. Everything is energy. EVERYTHING.

98. Don't define yourself by your body .. it's the infinite being that's connected to everything in the universe.

99. One energy field. Our bodies have distracted us from our energy. We are the infinite field of unfolding possibilities. The creative force.

100. Are your thoughts worthy of you? If not - NOW is the time to change them. You can begin right were you are right now. Nothing matters but this moment and what you are focusing your attention on.

American Beauty, David Frankel (Keith Haring)

American Beauty

David Frankel

“A lot of girls fell in love with Keith, and that’s because he represented a sort of archetypal male. He had those heroic qualities of pushing for what’s good and true and fair. And he was a real boy!”
-Carmel Schmidt¹

I suspect that Keith Haring’s friend Carmel Schmidt, in remembering the man so sweetly, has also touched on the powerful communicative forces in his work: first, its eroticism, not necessarily explicit (though it was that at times), but always at least tacitly sensuous though the energy of that fluid line, over which Haring had such dazzling control, and second, his sense of justice. The sensual energy was innate, a function of Haring’s personality, and also of his process: this was an artist who worked with his whole body as well as mind, who wanted, he said as a student, to move “toward a work of art that encompasses music, performance, movement, concept, craft and a reality record of the event in the form on a painting.”² And that was what he would do. His fairness too must have been a personal reflex, but it was marked, I think, by his upbringing in small-town America, and by his sense, as a gay man and an artist, of being an outsider to what he saw as the country’s mainstream. It was also in part inherited from the popular values of the years when he was a child in the sixties.

Energy must have been a primary value for Haring: the word hums through his writings and speech like the chorus of a song. From his journals, in October 1978, when he was twenty: “Every second from birth is spent experiencing; different sensations, different interjections, different directional vectors of force/energy constantly composing and recomposing themselves around you.”³ On the black popular culture of his years in New York: “There was this incredibly raw energy in the air…and the energy was called Hip-Hop.”⁴ On one of his best-known motifs: “The crawling babies signify life, energy, happiness, and the positive side of humanity.”⁵ On another often-used form: “The pyramid is connected with an unknown force…maybe people once thought they could store their own energy in that kind of building.”⁶ On a party he threw in 1984: “There is so much energy- it’s electric!”⁷ On his own self: “This energy, sexual energy, may be the single strongest impulse I feel.”⁸

If Haring’s life embodied energy- he worked ceaselessly- his art pictured it, through the cartoon motion-marks that he spaced strategically around his running men, say, or though the short straight lines around his dogs’ mouths that told us they were barking- aural vibration made visible. There is erotic energy in the polymorphous perversity of his figures, acrobatic, mutating, always in motion. In 1980, when Haring returned to drawing after a period of working in other media, the images that emerged- they were not, he said, “a conscious thing”- included flying saucers “zapping things with an energy ray.” Not solely transmitting to passive targets, this ray would hand its energy on, so that the “zapped things or people or animals would have these rays coming out all around them,” becoming transmitters themselves.⁹

Pure drive, energy is amoral, making the meaning of Haring’s glowing figures necessarily ambiguous. For Wim Beeren of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Haring was a paradoxical sounding phenomenon: “a great young artist of the age of nuclear energy.”¹⁰ For New York poet Rene Ricard, who looked at Haring early, the rays around the artist’s crawling baby must have pictured light-hence the title of his prescient 1981 Artforum article, “The Radiant Child”; yet Ricard also wrote that Haring’s “poor little characters wigging out from the radioactive communications they are bombarded with are superslick icons of turmoil and confusion.”¹¹ A later writer, Jeffrey Deitch, would play on Ricard’s title by naming an essay of his own “The Radioactive Child,” and would notice that Haring’s Pennsylvania hometown was just fifty miles from the contaminated nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island.¹² The artist himself, contemplating a world of “telephones and radio, computers and airplanes, world news and video tape, satellites and automobiles,” all powered by the invisible energies of electricity and oil, would add, “I am scared to death.”¹³

Overall, though, energy is vital in every sense, and not to be sneezed at. If Haring saw the glowing wands held by some of his figures as symbols of physical and political power, that doesn’t mean Deitch is wrong to liken these “energized rods” to Haring’s own brushes.¹⁴ Besides, Haring had his own sense of morality to layer into his art.

“We’re going to see the Grateful Dead!”
-Keith Haring, journal entry, April 1977¹⁵

As the eighties recede in time, and the periodizing of the decade proceeds, energy is one current in the mix of nostalgia and resentment that hovers in the art world conversations about those years.¹⁶ People are thinking partly of the energy of money, which is remembered as being everywhere back then, the blood or gasoline that powered the growling art-world machine in the era B.C.-Before the Crash. Actually, in the eighties, as ever, it was a small minority of artists who had money worth boasting of; but some did have earning power, and Haring was one of those. In his journals, the subway, site of his early work, is phased out, in frequency of mention, by the Concorde; and his discussions of the practical side of the art business become increasingly hardheaded and knowing.

Another eighties energy was party and club life, and here too Haring was expert. As far as possible, he used to schedule his trips abroad so that he could be in New York on Saturday nights- gay night at the Paradise Garage, “a disco that absolutely blew my mind.”¹⁷ The weight Haring gave this place, though, was something other than value of entertainment: “The ‘Garage,’” he wrote, “…changed or affected my life incredibly through various ‘re-imprinting’ experiences and transformations.”¹⁸“’Re-imprinting’ experiences,” presumably, would leave you a different person. And dance observed and participated in at places like the Paradise Garage also emerged in Haring’s work, in his figures’ stances (which have been eloquently decoded by Robert Farris Thompson).¹⁹ This was typical of Haring; he had a voracious visual appetite. And although both his work and his writings and interviews often demonstrate his attention to “high art” painters both present and past, he was absorbed by- made himself part of- vernacular, public culture, which provides many of the references for his images.

The terms in which Haring described the Paradise Garage also suggest a continuity with his childhood and adolescence in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and with an earlier decade than the eighties. The club was erotic, certainly, and multiracial (a crucial quality of New York for Haring),²⁰ but also, the artist said, “The whole experience was very communal, very spiritual.”²¹ In a letter to Timothy Leary- that theorist of pharmacology was a friend of his- he wrote, “I don’t know if you know how important the ‘Paradise Garage’ is, at least for me and the tribe of people who have shared many a collective spiritual experience there.”²²“Collective,” “communal,” “spiritual,” “tribe”- the language, like Leary himself, has a definite sixties ring. Talking to his biographer, John Gruen, Haring himself explicitly compared the dance house to another primal American experience rooted in the sixties: “It’s the closest thing,” he said, “to being at a Grateful Dead Concert.”²³ The comparison was more than incidental to him, for he had similarly told Leary, “I ‘discovered’ the Garage by divine ‘accident’ of course, like I ‘discovered’ the Grateful Dead in 1975.”²⁴

Haring understood something of his debt to sixties culture- its public and popular culture and thought, that is, as opposed to its art. On the latter front, he was selective: he adored Andy Warhol, but he was skeptical of the “overrationalization”²⁵ he found in Minimal and Conceptual art, and worked partly in reaction against it. Of the events and ideas that flowed through American everyday consciousness in the sixties, on the other hand, he wrote, in that same letter to Leary: “I was born in 1958, so while I was growing up I was only aware of the events in the early Sixties through a strange mixture of sources…television, Life magazine pictorial essays, and some associations with enlightened relatives. I was very absorbed and interested, however, and I think affected at a time when my personality and ideology were in their most ‘affectable’ or impressionable stages.”²⁶ As a teenager he had gone through a “Jesus freak” period and had worn long hair in a pigtail, listened to the Dead and had taken acid in the fields around Kutztown. (He told Leary that a drawing he had done during his first such trip, when he was fifteen, was “the seed for all of the work that followed.”)²⁷ Reading Leary in the mid-eighties, Haring felt “completely at one” with his ideas.²⁸

Haring’s politics, as revealed in his art, might also have been at home in sixties activism. In Haring’s world, a man who enslaves another with a rope may find that rope metamorphosing into a snake, the master’s tools turning on him. If a group of paintings from 1985 become grotesque, with the artist’s usually featureless figures developing cartoon wrinkles and Dalì-like corporeal distortion, or, in Michael Stewart: U.S.A. for Africa (pp.198-99), drowning in blood, it is because these works have “social-consciousness themes” (AIDS, racism) and Haring wants “to show the despair and hopelessness of those situations.”²⁹ The sense of imminent apocalypse that sometimes breathes through his work has many sixties antecedents, the issues for him, however, being nuclear power armaments, and, later, AIDS. In much of his art-the subway drawings, the street murals, the Pop Shop goods- his decisions on scale, site, and the work’s physical vehicles are informed by a populist desire for accessibility; the use of ink on tarpaulin in the early eighties came out of a related impulse, a resistance to the elitism he thought implicit in oil on canvas.³⁰ In an interview from 1984, Haring described a problem he posed himself, the problem of communicating the malign public influence of television, and its relationship with political power, in the months leading up to that year’s presidential election: “I did drawings today with a t.v. with dollar signs, and then a tube coming out of it that was going through someone’s head, and going back out the other side, and then turning into a hand that was pushing a ballot lever that said on it ‘Vote.’”³¹

The schematic nature of the explanation does not do justice to the visual inventiveness of the image. Like many of his eighties contemporaries, Haring consumed earlier visual forms, but he was less an appropriator than a terrific synthesist. It was not that he looked at the Paradise Garage instead of looking at Léger, Matisse, Arabic decoration, Pierre Alechinsky, Frank Stella, Stuart Davis, or Walt Disney (to name just a few of the connections one can make when looking through catalogues of his work), but that he looked at them all, then rephrased them through the syntax of that flowing and recombinant line. Enormously influenced by Warhol, he often returned in his journals to questions of high and low, artist and audience, art and commerce, and he clearly felt he was addressing the task of making the artist adequate to the contemporary world. (“I am continually amazed,” he once wrote, “at the number of artists who continue working as if the camera were never invented, as if Andy Warhol never existed, as if airplanes and computers and videotape were never heard of.”)³² Haring’s social views were not an extraneous addition to his art, not merely the subject matter to which a graphic talent addressed itself; they were thoroughly integrated not just into his work’s imagery but into its form and substance.

Those views place Haring in an American democratic and populist tradition going back virtually to the Pilgrims. But it was the sixties, as he told Leary, that taught that tradition to him. By the late seventies, however, he knew that the “hippie culture” of which he had once considered himself a member had “fizzled out.”³³ In 1979, he wrote in his journals of “sitting on TRAIN across from hippies. I feel sick. What did I find out since then?” Growing up after it was really viable to use long hair to create community, he knew that even when he had been emulating that generation, “it was too late.”³⁴ The challenge that he faced, and faced down, was to turn that too-late-ness to use- to fill that vacuum with energy.

“So we said to each other, ‘Do it yourself and make it.’”
-Keith Haring, 1986³⁵

“The only time I am happy is when I am working.”
-Keith Haring, journal entry, June 1987³⁶

The point in suggesting roots of Haring’s ethics in the values of the culture of his childhood is not to reclaim him somehow for the boomer generation; he knew quite well that he had left that generation behind. Though he may have found the same experience- “collective,” “communal,” “spiritual,” “tribal”- in both the Grateful Dead in the seventies and the Paradise Garage in the eighties, and though the value that he put on that experience surely shows the influence of Woodstock rhetoric, he also knew the difference- knew that the Garage “wasn’t this hippie thing, but taking place in a totally urban, contemporary setting.”³⁷ Haring’s strength for opportunity, and to work out a new way to bring a community together- through the international audience for his art.

The end of the sixties, which Haring had lived through during his adolescence, had been multiform and protracted, running well beyond the decade’s numerical finis. Among its signals were, in politics, Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War; in popular culture there was the eruption of punk rock in the mid- and late seventies. New York’s downtown music and young-artist scenes were closely aligned. Alongside punk, a wave of new art began to gather. When galleries and museums showed themselves unready for this work, it made other outlets for itself.

When we think of the eighties as the era of decadent expenditure, we are forgetting the decade’s “do it yourself” side, at least in its first part: the way art sprang up like a weed- resourceful, robust, impossible to get rid of, sometimes handsome and sometimes not- in New York subways and streets and in the East Village. Haring played an essential part here. If, since the eighties ended in economic bust and gallery-system crisis, art has staggered through a period of Slacker imitations and “abjection,” Keith Haring is surely one model of how to respond to such interregnums: with innovative energy and ceaseless work.