So I read last week in a magazine that the top-selling book in Canada in 2007 was The Secret. Excuse me? Is there really any hope for humanity? To come clean – I haven’t read the book, and doubt I would be able to. I tried watching the DVD once, but its polished appeal to those paragons of human virtue, fear and greed, was too much for me to bear. I was in danger of grinding my teeth to nubs, and had to turn it off as an act of self-preservation. It seems that people will pay you any amount of money if you can convince them that you have The Solution. And that only confirms how eager people are to collude in their own self-delusion. The Solution? Forget it. Doesn’t exist. Never has, never will. There is no instruction manual for life. It has neither predictable outcomes nor objective meaning. What it does have is beauty, wonder, destruction and constant renewal. Objective meaning is abstract and dead. In the meantime, meaningfulness abounds, if only we can open to our own experience of the fathomless miracle in which we participate, and which we express – unwittingly and otherwise – with every breath. THE SECRET, the true secret, lies in the liberation of body, soul and mind from the prison of self-absorption. The whole world waits for that to happen, just as every blade of grass and sailing cloud waits to be discovered by us. We become whole once we sense the whole to which we belong. Not the whole as in “the sum of all parts”; the whole as in the infinitely sensitive unity that breathes together with us. Sensing that whole, though, means transcending the corrals of our own fear and greed – something which Canada’s best-selling book of 2007 works strenuously to keep us from.