Rhonda Byrne

Rhonda Byrne is an Australian television producer and New Age author. In 2006 she wrote and produced a feature length video titled The Secret, which served as the basis for her breakthrough international best selling book of the same title.http://www.thesecret.tv/synopsis.html In the film, she interviews entrepreneurs, investors, therapists, spiritual advisers and quantum physicists - presented as "living masters of the secret" - to make a case for the importance of "the law of attraction" for achieving success in life.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0846789/fullcredits#cast

Byrne claims in her books, interviews, and films that the secret to success is accepting that we create our own circumstances by the choices we make. Our choices, in turn, are motivated by our thought patterns. Therefore, our thoughts and feelings control our destiny. She formulates this insight as the law of attraction: positive thoughts bring good results; negative thoughts bring failure.http://www.oprah.com/spirit/_75

Prior to filming The Secret, Byrne produced documentary style films with psychic and paranormal themes for Australian television, such as Oz Encounter: UFOs in Australia (1997) and the true crime series Sensing Murder (2004).http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0846789/

In an interview broadcast on the January 1, 2006 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Byrne related the dramatic events that led to her discovery of "the Secret." During a low point in her life - when her physical, financial, and emotional health had deteriorated - she chanced upon the key that was to turn everything around. The final crisis was the death of her father. She initiated her recovery by applying the law of attraction to her own life. Her first triumph in her new lease on life was successfully completing the film in which she presented this esoteric wisdom to the world.http://www.oprah.com/spirit/_75

Byrne says she first learned the principle of the law of attraction from a 1910 book by Wallace Wattles titled The Science of Getting Rich. In two months of follow up research, she was able to trace the law of attraction back to the Buddha, Aristotle, and Plato. She also claims that many great men in history - including Sir Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alexander Graham Bell, Carl Jung, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Andrew Carnegie, Martin Luther King Jr., and Joseph Campbell - were keepers of the secret.http://www.thesecret.tv/making-of.html However, Wattles' modern fusion of self-help, motivational speaking, and New Age spirituality owes more to the early 20th century New Thought movement, which applied metaphysical ideas to modern life, than to ancient philosophy. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4096

"What we do is we attract into our lives the things we want, and that is based on what we're thinking and feeling."http://www.thesecret.tv/making-of.html

"A year ago, my life had collapsed around me. I'd worked myself into exhaustion. My father died suddenly, and my relationships were in turmoil. Little did I know at the time, out of my greatest despair was to come the greatest gift. I'd been given a glimpse of a great Secret"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0846789/quote

"Something inside of me had me turn the pages one by one, and I can still remember my tears hitting the pages as I was reading it. It gave me a glimpse of The Secret. It was like a flame inside of my heart. And with every day since, it's just become a raging fire of wanting to share all of this with the world."http://www.oprah.com/spirit/_75

• 2006: The Secrethttp://www.thesecret.tv/thesecretbook/
• 2010: The Powerhttp://www.thesecret.tv/thepower/