I would consider it relying on God, but without the nuances of typical prayer. I have not read the book "The Secret" but in the movie, they shy away from calling it God and instead appeal to the universe. I know many scriptures say we must fix our minds on good, holy, positive things, so I believe there is at least some biblical support for positive thinking. I am just trying to figure out if this is just a different way do describe prayer. It differs from prayer in that you spend your time visualizing the intended outcome. You make it as real in your mind as you possibly can. And that's it. No appeal to God, no consideration of praise or worship. Yet God sees in our hearts and knows our desires before we ever open our mouthes to pray.
The problem with the so-called Law Of Attraction is that it takes something with some truth and then pushes it long past the point at which it breaks.
If you take the Law Of Attraction to its conclusions you end up blaming the victim of a gang-rape because she must have been thinking about the wrong things and therefore drew them to herself. The starving children in Africa only have themselves to blame because they aren't thinking of better things and drawing better things to themselves.
There is a degree of truth in the idea that positive thoughts produce positive outcomes. Unless you have the belief to start a business you'll never be a business owner. It's perfectly true that the belief results in the altered reality, even if only because the person who lacks the belief never actually takes the steps required to start the business and realise the reality of their dreams. But to believe that we can merely think positive things into being and the universe will conveniently hand them over, as if on a silver plate, without us having to do anything at all, doesn't seem to work too well. Just look at the people who stood in line for a Powerball ticket willing themselves to win only to find they still had to show up to work on Thursday morning.
Part of the truth in "The Secret" is that we have a natural tendency to confirm our own worldview. So to take a trivial example, let's look at a simple case of me walking through a crowded marketplace and looking at who yields to someone coming the other way if there isn't room for two people to pass at the same time. If my worldview is "nobody respects me enough to let me through" them every time someone comes through expecting me to yield my worldview is confirmed, and if someone does stand aside for me I probably won't even notice. If my worldview is one of more self-respect and that people will yield to me then every time someone yields to me my worldview is confirmed and on the times I yield to someone else I don't regard it as significant. The crucial thing here is that the external, objectively measurable, experience is the same in both cases but the way I process it internally is a world apart.
God knows what we need before we start to pray but God isn't under any obligation to satisfy the things we want. Jesus did say that if we ask anything in his name he would do it, but that means so much more than merely adding "in Jesus' name" before the "Amen" of our prayers. What I want (speaking as a fleshly human) is a gleaming black Lamborghini Aventador Roadster parked in my driveway. God knows that I'd really rather like a Lamborghini but I don't imagine he's going to magic one up for me any time soon. If the King of Kings who had every right to require the kings of the earth to carry him into Jerusalem in a chariot of solid gold decided instead to ride on a borrowed colt, I can certainly get by with transportation more modest than an Italian supercar.
There's also a huge difference between thinking about things that are positive in a Biblical sense (things that are good, holy, righteous etc) and "positive thinking" as presented by the world. If I'm thinking about the riches I want, or the job I want, or the car I want, it's all about me me me. That's not the same as thinking about holy things, and so I believe The Secret is nothing more than a corruption of what the Bible tells us, but worded in a way that it can be presented as kinda-sorta-aligning with Scripture. Sadly I think it gets worse than that, because trying to use any form of cosmic forces to bend reality to our own will is little more than sorcery.
Whatever we might want, we'd do well to look at what Jesus said as he prayed before his crucifixion - "not my will but yours be done".
