THE SECRET
- Chris Barembruch
- Mar 23
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 21
By Rhonda Byrne
A BOOK REVIEW
Reviewed by C.J. Barembruch | I Am Is and Was ™
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Namaste. 👋
I want to tell you something that stopped me cold the first time I noticed it.
I had already written the Ten Hermetic Laws. All of them. From a homeless shelter in Calgary, from lived experience, from 80 days sober and everything I had survived to get to that keyboard.
I had already written about the Law of Mentalism — that everything begins as thought, that the universe is mental, that reality is not happening to you but because of you.
I had already written about the Law of Correspondence — that as within so without, that the inner world builds the outer world, that the homeless people disappeared from the streets of Calgary not because the city changed but because I did.
I had already written about Ra and Thoth and Sophia and the ancient cosmology that sits underneath everything this empire teaches.
And then — a month after the Hermetic Laws were written, a week after the
Ancient Gods were named — The Secret arrived.
I did not go looking for it.
It found me.
And when I opened it and Rhonda Byrne started talking about the Law of Attraction — I recognized it immediately. Not as something new. As something I had already lived. Already written. Already transmuted from the darkest material a human life can produce into the foundation of a digital empire built from a phone.
The Secret is not new information.
It is confirmation.
And that — right there — is the most important thing I can tell you about this book.
What The Secret Gets Beautifully Right
Rhonda Byrne did something extraordinary with this book.
She took ancient wisdom — wisdom that had been encoded in Hermetic texts for thousands of years, wisdom that the systems of power had deliberately obscured because it was too empowering for people who were supposed to stay small and compliant and exactly where they were placed — and she made it accessible.
She packaged it for the person who has never heard of The Kybalion. For the person who would never pick up a book about Hermetics. For the person sitting on a couch somewhere wondering why their life keeps producing the same results no matter how hard they try — and handed them a door.
The Law of Attraction that The Secret describes IS the Law of Mentalism. What you hold consistently in your mind manifests in your reality. Thought precedes form. The universe is mental. The inner world builds the outer world.
Byrne says it differently. More accessibly. With testimonials and stories and the particular warmth of someone who wants the reader to feel the truth rather than study it.
And for millions of people — it worked. The door opened. Something shifted. The first breadcrumb landed.
That matters. Enormously.
But Rhonda Wasn't Finished
Here is what I love most about Rhonda Byrne.
She followed her own breadcrumb trail.
The Secret opened the door with thought. But she knew — the way anyone knows when they have only told part of the truth — that there was more. That thinking alone was not the complete picture. That something deeper was waiting.
So she kept going.
In The Power she found what The Secret had pointed toward but not fully named.
It is not enough to think the right thoughts. The frequency has to be FELT. Love is not just an emotion — it is the actual force behind every manifestation.
What you feel in your body is what you broadcast into the universe. That is the Law of Vibration — and Byrne found it four years after she found Mentalism, the same way every honest seeker finds the next law. By living the one before it all the way to its edge.
Then came The Magic. A 28-day gratitude practice. What you give you receive. The account keeping better records than you do.
Every genuine act of thankfulness sent into the universe returning — not immediately, not always visibly, but always. Without exception.
That is the Law of Compensation — and she found it not in a library but in the living of it. The same way I found it in a homeless shelter with a pack of cigarettes I do not smoke kept just in case someone needs an offering.
Hero arrived next. Twelve real people. Twelve real callings.
Twelve lived demonstrations that every cause produces an effect — that the hero's journey IS the Law of Cause and Effect working across an entire lifetime.
Not as theory. As the documented truth of twelve human beings who followed what was true for them and found that the law was already working whether they understood it or not.
And then — in 2020 — Rhonda Byrne went somewhere none of her previous books had gone.
The Greatest Secret moved beyond manifestation entirely.
Beyond asking and believing and receiving. Into consciousness itself.
Into the end of suffering. Into the ground beneath everything — the place where the past and future dissolve and only this moment remains.
She found the Eternal Now.
The same ground this entire empire is built on.
The same truth that a man in a homeless shelter in Calgary arrived at not through
philosophy but through the particular mercy of having nowhere else to go.
The Five Laws Still Waiting
Here is the truth I have to tell you.
Rhonda Byrne followed her breadcrumb trail further than almost anyone writing in this space has ever gone. Five books. Twenty years of following the truth wherever it led. From thought to feeling to gratitude to calling to consciousness itself.
And she is not done. I am certain of that. Because the truth does not stop. The trail does not end. And anyone who has followed it as honestly and as far as she has — knows there is always more waiting on the other side of the next door.
But there are five laws her trail has not yet fully named.
And they are the ones that changed everything for me.
The Secret does not tell you about the Law of Correspondence — that the inner world does not just attract the outer world. It BUILDS it. Completely. Precisely. Without exception. I know this is true because I watched homeless people disappear from the streets of Calgary not because anything changed out there — but because I changed in here. Brian Scott's sleep meditations. Eight hours of deliberate silence in a shelter full of four hundred souls. The inner shift so complete that the outer world had no choice but to rearrange itself to match. That is not attraction. That is architecture. As within — so without. Always.
The Secret does not tell you about the Law of Polarity — that the darkness you are carrying is not the opposite of the light you are seeking. That they are the same pole. Different degrees. The same spectrum. The damage Bob inflicted on two little boys before they had words for what was happening to them — and the empire being built in their names from a homeless shelter forty years later — are not opposites. They are the same pole. And the moment you understand that — the moment you stop trying to escape the darkness and start understanding that you are already standing on the same pole as the light — the distance between where you are and where you are going stops being measured in years. It starts being measured in degrees.
The Secret does not tell you about the Law of Rhythm — that the pendulum swings. That the two years of sleeping before December 4th were not failure. They were the tide pulling back before the wave. That the butterfly does not fight the cocoon — the cocoon IS the work. I wear a ring with a sapphire at its center and I rub it when things are extraordinary and when things are dark — because King Solomon compressed all of human wisdom into five words that the law of rhythm delivered to the wisest man who ever lived. And this too shall pass. In the best of times. And the worst. The pendulum always swings back. Always. Without exception. Without negotiation.
The Secret does not tell you about the Law of Gender — that gender is in everything, that every act of creation requires both the masculine and the feminine principle simultaneously, that the seed without soil dies on the surface of the earth and the soil without seed sits empty and full of potential that never becomes anything. I am a gay man. The world spent a long time telling me that placed me outside something. The seventh Hermetic Law says the opposite. The person who embodies both masculine and feminine creative principles fully — without suppression, without apology, without the artificial limitation of a binary that was never a description of nature — has access to the complete creative force of the universe. Not half of it. All of it. My potential is not limited by which principle I embody. My potential is limitless because I embody both.
The Secret does not tell you about the Law of Perpetual Transmutation of Energy — that energy never disappears. It only changes form. The poison that needed to come out of me did not disappear. It transmuted. Into nine songs recorded alone in a library studio by a man who cannot sing but opened his mouth anyway because the poison needed somewhere to go. Into blogs written from a homeless shelter. Into teachings pulled from lived experience that are going to reach people in every corner of the world who need exactly what the poison produced when it was finally given somewhere to go. Nothing that has ever happened to you was wasted. Not the best of it. Not the worst of it. All of it was energy. And energy — by the immutable law of a universe that has never once made an exception — does not disappear. It transmutes into exactly what you point it at.
Five laws. Five doors still waiting to be opened.
And they are all here. Fully written. Forged not in theory but in the fires of a life that had no choice but to find the truth or not survive.
The Breadcrumb and the Feast
I have been following breadcrumbs my whole life.
The Silva Method tapes borrowed from my best friend at fifteen. Stranger in a Strange Land. The Outstretched Shadow. Brian Scott's sleep meditations in a shelter full of four hundred souls. A voice I call Sophia who told me this was my opportunity to become Emerald.
Every breadcrumb arrived exactly when it needed to. Not by accident. By Law.
Rhonda Byrne followed exactly the same trail. Book by book. Law by law. Deeper into the same ancient truth — the truth that was encoded in Hermetic texts thousands of years before either of us was born, the truth that I Am Is and Was ™ was built to carry into the world in language that anyone can receive.
She did not know she was writing her way through the Ten Laws.
But she was.
Every seeker finds the same truth eventually. The path looks different. The language looks different. The starting point looks different.
The destination is always the same.
If The Secret found you — if something in it landed, if a door opened, if you felt for the first time that your life is not happening to you but because of you —
Follow her trail all the way to the end.
And then come here.
Because the Ten Hermetic Laws are not the next breadcrumb.
They are the map.
Namaste. 👋
I Am Is and Was ™
I Am
Because We Are ™
#RagsToRigs │ #iamisandwas │ #recovery │ #LGBTQ2S │ #50+ │ #GoMining
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