The problem with the existing literature
If you walk into a Barnes & Noble in 2026 and head to the self-help section, you will find — between the journals and the planners — somewhere between fifty and a hundred books on "manifestation," "the Law of Attraction," and "the Law of Assumption." A handful are recent. Most are repackagings of older material. Almost none of them name their sources.
This is a problem, because the actual sources are a small group of identifiable people — most of whom died before 1972, almost all of whose books are now in the public domain — and almost everything in the modern literature traces back to them.
The Great Secret Press exists to correct this. The booklet we publish — The Great Secret of Life — is the synthesis the existing literature should have been, and isn't.
Editorial principles
Three principles guide what we publish:
Primary sources, always. Every chapter on every teacher in our booklet was researched against the actual books and lectures that teacher published or recorded. We do not work from secondary summaries. Where a quotation appears in the book, the source can be traced.
Honest treatment of biography. Napoleon Hill's biographical claims do not survive serious historical scrutiny; we say so, and we treat his teachings on their merits rather than on his myth. Wallace Wattles claimed his health system would prevent disease, and then died of natural causes at 50; we say so. Neville Goddard's late-period claim that the human imagination is God is a serious metaphysical commitment; we report it as such, without softening.
No softening of the techniques. The original teachings in this tradition are demanding. The modern repackagings tend to make them feel-good. We do not. If Neville required three weeks of unbroken assumption to get a steamship ticket from Manhattan to Barbados, we report what he actually did rather than the easier version most modern accounts substitute.
Who this booklet is for
The booklet is written for one kind of reader: someone who has encountered the modern "manifestation" content, found parts of it interesting and parts of it embarrassing, and wants to know what the actual source material looks like. Someone who wants the philosophical rigor and the practical method without the Instagram aesthetic.
If you have watched The Secret and felt something was missing — yes. If you have read a Neville Goddard PDF you found on the internet and wanted the broader context — yes. If you are skeptical of "manifestation" as a genre but curious about what the originals actually taught — also yes.
If you want a glittery vision-board workbook with affirmation prompts — there are better products for that. This isn't one of them.
About the publisher
The Great Secret Press is an independent publisher. We sell direct to readers, without intermediaries, at thegreatsecret.co. There is one booklet for sale at any given time. There is no email list to sign up for (yet), no subscription to renew, no upsell, no add-on, no course, no coaching. You pay once. You own the file.
Refunds are unconditional within 30 days. Write to hello@thegreatsecret.co and we will refund every cent without question.
About the source authors
The booklet covers six teachers. We have published individual pages on three of them:
- Neville Goddard — 1905–1972. The Barbadian mystic.
- Abdullah — dates uncertain. The Manhattan teacher who trained both Neville and Joseph Murphy.
- Wallace Wattles — 1860–1911. Author of The Science of Getting Rich, the book The Secret was based on. (Page coming soon.)
The full treatment of all six — including Joseph Murphy, Napoleon Hill, and Ernest Holmes — is in the booklet.