Health and wealth never made anyone happy. That goes for Rhonda Byrne, Oprah, Jack Canfield, and the rest of 'em.

They tell you otherwise because they, like so many of us, desperately want to believe happiness can come from things as ultimately meaningless as possessions, a large bank account, or a whole body.

They tell you otherwise because, like missionaries battling their own gnawing doubts, their belief receives cheap assurance the more nods they can get from people poorer and sicker than them.

They will tell you their rags to riches life stories, leaving out all the details except that they were poor, they applied the snake oil they are now trying to sell you, and got rich.

They will tell you how to brew the snake oil for yourself. They will hold snake oil seminars just in case you couldn't figure things out or motivate yourself enough from reading their books.

They will even tell you that you can scientifically test their oil, because by the time you do they will have long since cashed your check (and realized they are no more happy, and perhaps a bit more unhappy, than they were before they conned a few million people) and you will have long since sold their book on E-bay for twenty-nine cents.

And just who are they, really? Through the annals of history, they have always been with us. They are not merely the authors of The Secret. "They" is another word for graft. Graft used to be the monopoly of monarchs and organized religions. Now, all graft masters bow to commercialism.

They will tell you that happiness comes from belonging, just don't be too critical of the beliefs of the narrow clique to which they want you to belong.

They will tell you that happiness comes from giving your power away, from idolizing people. Masses and conferences will be instituted to give you a chance to meet your idol. And just when you were sure there's no chance you'll ever become an idol yourself, they'll institute American Idol.

They will describe in detail how to disempower yourself, all the while calling their lesson self-empowerment.

They will teach you how not to look within and call it meditation, how not to think and call it mindfulness, and how to be as miserable as you possibly can be and call it joy.

They will instruct in an irrational sense of personal responsibility because it places an unreasonable burden on the individual and frees their conscience of their own irresponsibility to others. They will never speak a peep about shared responsibility, because that would mean sacrificing all of their excess wealth (of which there's billions).

And all they absolutely must not do, if they want to continue being liked, is challenge our sense of self.

Graft we have seen, but even Judeo-Christian graft masters never called their mythic saviors and heroes wealthy or wealth-seekers. The churches of the world certainly sought wealth, but they were far too discreet to say that serving God was about getting rich.

But today's graft masters don't bother with a modicum of shame or modesty. They are deadly honesty. L. Ron Hubbard was an early pioneer of shamelessness, but not to be outdone The Secret author, in one stroke of her pen, equates herself with the founders of Western religion, whom she calls "prosperity teachers."

Notice how there were no female prosperity teachers back then, though there was a lot of female property? Too bad Abraham never taught his servants the secret. Anyway, when was the last time you counted a man's happiness, not to mention godliness, in his heads of cattle, wives, sons, and slaves and concubines? Being hungry and thirsty is no fun, but not being hungry and thirsty is just being at zero. It's not a fountain of bliss; it's just the negative release from a kind of discomfort that gets worse with time. Thus poverty, while being a negative, does not mean wealth is a positive. Saying otherwise is The Lie.

The Hebrew patriarchs, if they even existed, did not have running water, electricity, or pumps to get water out of the parched earth. They didn't even have shovels, and they certainly didn't have millions of adoring fans. Not one of the "dream team" behind The Secret would trade places with any of them.

Especially because, last I checked, Abraham's godliness was measured in what he was willing to sacrifice, not horde. As for Moses and Jesus being millionaires... sigh.

Did you ever hear the story of the Mumbai family that lived in a shanty village? I've been to Mumbai in the summer and smelled the reek of shanty villages. They are crowded, rat infested slums that make St. Louis city look like a pleasure cruise. The head of this particular family got a job and was able to move his family to an apartment building. A few months later, he moved his family back into their leaking shanty because his wife missed the community support and kinship. Anyone could just walk into her shanty home, and she loved and missed it.

One apparent secret is that the happiest people in the world are largely the people who, by the standards of a Western lifestyle, had little to be happy about. The rest of the happy people that happened to have some money were smart enough to look for their happiness in their self-knowledge -- a self that identifies with others and knows itself in everyone and everything. It's the one place to find happiness that we all already know about, which is why we have to repeatedly pay people to help us forget it.

And now we come to the real secret: the only secret is the truth we want to forget.

Meanwhile, population increase mathematically means less wealth for everyone, no matter how many lies you affirm to yourself. It also means more war, more global warming, and sadly, more popularity for books that help us forget our responsibility for whatever disaster awaits us.

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Sankara Saranam is the author of the
multi-award winning title God Without Religion