Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: The Human Potential Movement Can Suck My Ass16

by Brad Warner

A couple weeks ago when I was in Durham, my friend Catie showed me an episode of the TV show Family Guy called “Brian Writes a Bestseller.” Hulu has the full episode up so you can take a look for yourself by clicking on the link at the very end of this article.

Here’s a synopsis of the episode from the fan-created Family Guy Wiki:

“Feeling discouraged when his publisher returns all of the unsold copies of his book, ‘Faster Than the Speed of Love,’ Brian (the Griffin family’s talking dog) decides to give up on writing. When he moans about the drivel that is selling, Stewie (the Griffin family’s talking baby) challenges him to write his own dreck. Brian cranks out a new book, ‘Wish It, Want It, Do It’ in under four hours and through Stewie’s contacts, the book becomes a success. Brian hires Stewie to become his publicist, but when the fame goes to his head, Brian becomes over-bearing and fires Stewie. On the TV talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, Brian starts talking down to the guest panelists until he gets a wake-up call from Bill Maher and admits his book is crap. Embarrassed, Brian halfheartedly apologizes to Stewie, continuing to blame him for what went wrong.”

If you don’t know Family Guy TV show and its characters, you might not get all that. But I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to explain the show here. In any case, basically, the book that Brian the dog writes is a thinly veiled parody of The Secret, which, unfortunately is a real book and not written by a talking dog from a cartoon, though it certainly could have been. If you’ve been hiding in a cave in the Afghan mountains for the past few years and don’t know what The Secret is, you’re in luck because I did an article about it for my column on the Suicide Girls website three years ago. You can find that article at this link. Apparently formatting changes in the SG website have rendered some of the punctuation weird, but you can still read the piece.

I was really happy to see the producers of Family Guy as well as Bill Maher calling out The Secret and books of its ilk for what they really are. Like those guys, I find these supposedly “spiritual” books to be not just trivial, but potentially dangerous. They encourage a kind of lazy wishfulness that leaves people dull and ill-equipped to cope with reality. They’re precisely the opposite of actual spirituality.

The connection between The Secret and Buddhism may not be altogether clear, but it’s there. I have a fiend who works a large Buddhist bookshop in Los Angeles. A couple years ago she told me that The Secret basically kept the store afloat. The store’s impressive stock of just about every Buddhist book currently in print wasn’t selling for sour beans, but copies of The Secret were flying out the doors so fast they could barely keep it in stock.

The authors of The Secret draw upon the general public’s vague understanding of the Hindu/Buddhist concept of karma, couple that with a few mystical sounding pseudo-spiritual superstitions and latch it all on to that perennial best-seller greed. The result is a vaguely Eastern sounding philosophy that says just wish for something real hard and it’ll come to you. If you want that BMW bad enough, picture it in your mind’s eye and you’ll get it.

In the Family Guy episode Brian watches as his novel tanks while books about this kind of soft-soap spirituality sell by the truckload. So he cynically puts together his own version of the same thing and it’s a big hit. Sadly, this is not so far removed from what’s really happening.

While serious and scholarly Buddhists were not very much affected by The Secret, a whole crop of entrepreneurs have seized upon its success and have used its audience to launch their own variations on the theme of playing upon spiritual greed.

Out in California there’s a little group of folks who apparently refer to themselves as the “Human Potential Movement.” Jack Canfield, author of the mega-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul books gives a rundown of a few of the who’s who of the group in this video about a typical spiritual-flavored rip-off called the Sedona Method. These guys network together to endorse each other’s products and seem to have an agreement not to rock the boat by saying anything bad about another member of the group.

It’s extremely unfortunate that while people like Bill Maher and Seth MacFarlane will openly criticize garbage like The Secret and expose it for what it really is, guys like the Human Potential Movement, who are presented to the public as leaders in the field of spiritual practice, all band together to defend such nonsense because they understand how the economics of the deal work.

The problem with people like the Human Potential Movement is that while they milk the gullible for all they can get, they also make any intelligent person out there believe that things are truly hopeless as far as spirituality is concerned. Books by authors talking sensibly about meditation are usually shelved right there next to The Secret and Chicken Soup of the Soul and all the rest of them. Any person with half a brain will avoid that section of the bookstore like the plague.

It’s easy to get cynical and lump all forms of meditation in with the scamsters. I’ve met a lot of intelligent people who reject all Eastern philosophy out of hand because of these guys. Hell, if I were just now starting to get interested in finding the deeper truths of life, I would avoid the Eastern Religions section of the bookstores myself!

I wish I could tell the folks who’ve been turned off by all this crap that there really is actual Buddhist practice that is totally unlike what these scammers are selling. All these scammers have done is co-opted the language and clothing of Buddhists. They have no clue what Buddhism is actually all about.

I think Americans have the kind of realistic attitude necessary for Buddhist practice. We’re a very practical nation and we value doing things ourselves. But unfortunately we’re also addicted to convenience. We feel like we’re entitled to experience everything. We want results and we want them quick.

When we hear about Buddhist practice we feel like we deserve an improved version that gets us to the goal faster and easier than those silly people in ancient India, China and Japan. Maybe our poor ancestors had to go kill a wooly mammoth and butcher it if they wanted some meat. But we’re way more advanced so we just go to the drive-thru at Wendy’s and order the Triple with bacon. Therefore we think everything ought to be that way including spiritual practice. Wish it, want it, be it, as Brian the talking dog says.

When one of our own pretends to have invented a fast track method to enlightenment, we’re right there ready to spend our money. Cuz that’s how we Americans get things. We don’t want to invest our time, effort and energy. We just wanna whip out our debit cards and buy it right now, read-made and pre-packaged, so all we have to do is stick it in the microwave for three minutes and it’s done.

Buddhist practice isn’t like that and never will be. The entire point of the practice is that it’s not fast, easy and convenient. But then, nothing worthwhile ever is.

Find “Brian Writes a Bestseller” on Hulu here.

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!

Brad Warner’s hardcore band Zero Defex is playing a gig on February 9th at the Matinee in Akron, Ohio.

Brad is also on a book tour right now and may be in your area! To see where Brad will be speaking next visit his blog.