Positive thinking is still the key to happiness

Michael Bernard Beckwith, of the move ‘The Secret’, has a reassuring message for an economically uncertain Ireland, says Lisa Jewell

MICHAEL Bernard Beckwith’s calm demeanour and reassuring, soft tone make you feel all will be okay.

It’s a message Irish people need and the main reason the American recently came here to deliver a motivational seminar.

Beckwith is best known as one of the mentors in the film The Secret, which focused on the ‘law of attraction’ and became a worldwide phenomenon.. The book version, by Rhonda Byrne, has sold 20m copies and been translated into 40 languages.

Five years ago, Beckwith appeared on the first of two Oprah shows dedicated to The Secret. “I get emails from all around the world from people who’ve just watched it for the first time and really got something out of it,” he says.

“Some people were critical of it — they thought it was too materialistic or something, but it was just an entry-level movie. It was to help people just begin to think, ‘Oh, I can change my life, I can change my thinking, I can change my perception, I can change my experience’.”

Beckwith’s seminar in Ireland is ‘The Answer is You’, organised by Vision Seminars, who’ve previously brought over other participants in The Secret. How did Beckwith relate his lesson to Irish society, with the ever-present economic woes? “Well, the song being sung throughout the world is that there’s not enough — there’s scarcity, lack, limitation, fear, worry and projection of anxiety onto the future,” he says.

“Ireland doesn’t have a monopoly on that — you know, you have the same thing in the United States. Young folk can’t find jobs, the unemployment rate is high. You hear this everywhere — it’s kind of a world song now.

“The world believes that there’s not enough to go around. And so they are proving it with a lack of circulation. So, I think what I have to say is relevant to that. Because, whenever there’s a recession, it’s time for us to renew our spirits, so to speak — become more innovative, more creative, more entrepreneurial, and to really begin to have an awareness that everything we can do and want and desire is generated from within and the field of ideas.”

That sounds simple but how do people find the answers within themselves when there is so much that seems to be outside their control? “One of the things that I teach is that the average person lives circumstantially — that is, they get their cues from life, from circumstances, and their happiness comes from situations.

“So, I assist them in living life not from the condition, but the inner feeling outwards as this generates more conditions. So, the beginning stage of this is learning a life-visioning process, which is a meditative practice of asking the right questions and receiving the answers from the universe.

“There are people right now that are in the same conditions as everyone else is but that are prospering — that are healthy, that are happy — and they’re not special people.

“They’re just using the laws differently — instead of using them backwards and blaming and complaining, which is a misuse of the laws, they’re beginning to ask different questions that are expanding their point of view.”

Beckwith says that people need to get in touch with their inner resourcefulness and realise how strong they are, even if they have negative voices telling them otherwise.

“We have to learn to what’s called ‘bracket’ those voices — we’re aware that they’re there, but we put them to one side so that we don’t resist them but we’re aware that they’re just passing through. They’re not our voice — they’re the voices of society’s fear and worry,” he says.

Beckwith embarked on his own spiritual journey in the 1970s.

He had left the Methodist church in his teens and had what he calls “a revolutionary zeal to change the world and change society.” But groups that he became involved in were ineffective and he became disillusioned.

Around this time, Beckwith had a period of supporting himself by selling pot, but later enrolled in college and was set to become a doctor.

Then, he had what he calls a series of awakenings in his dreams.

“I began to have these experiences that opened me up to the only way the world is going to be different is if people become different and that’s an evolution, that’s an unfolding of unconsciousness, that’s an awakening to the power within us, which has compassion and love and beauty and excellence and intelligence.

“And all that’s already innate. And unless we wake up to that, we can’t change — we can move the chairs around on the deck of the Titanic all we want, but it’s going down,” he says.

Beckwith founded a trans-denominational church, the Agape International Spiritual Center in California. He runs it with his singer-songwriter wife, Rickie, with whom he has four children and six grandchildren. It also focuses heavily on outreach programmes in the community.

Beckwith’s achieved much in his life, but when I ask him his age at the end of the chat, he dodges the question and lightheartedly asks how old he looks.

Judging by his biography and his appearance, the guess of early 50s is given. He smiles. “Sounds good to me,” he says.