The Secret of the Universe by Nathan R. Wood [1932]

Many New Thought books leave one wanting a bit more. They claim that there is a deeper secret of life, but refrain from explaining it. Nathan R. Woods, who apparently wrote this during the 1920s, finally publishing it in 1932, pulls no punches. He attempts to get to the heart of the issue by addressing the question: what is The Secret of the Universe? It's all here, in a couple of hundred pages.

This is where science (justifiably) fears to tread; nothing can be experimented with in this field of inquiry, so it is powerless. [Spoiler Alert] I quote Mr. Wood: "The Triunity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit reflected and expressed in the triunities of space, matter, time and man is the secret of the universe." That's it, that's the entire secret.

He means the Christian Triunity, er, Trinity, by the way,—he downplays other religions' trinities (p. 89), and the loss is his (he could have padded the book to five hundred pages, easily). He is incorrect when he states that the concept of a Trinity in Hinduism was introduced by Christianity. As usual, the Hindu trinity is not a one-to-one match with the Christian. However, the association between A-U-M, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, and all kinds of triple phenomena can easily be found in the Upanishads, which predate the Christian era by over five centuries. So this idea of an all-pervading triple principle in the Universe is not exactly new, nor is it specifically Christian in origin. Mr. Wood is playing a very old game here, and not something he discovered.

His physics is ill-construed. He pooh-poohs the concept of Time as the Fourth Dimension (doesn't fit into a trinity). He inserts a page of math in the middle of the book—surely a book with this title would be chock full of math,—but it is clear that he doesn't seem to understand basic Algebra, let alone the essential relationship between space, time and mass. This book is engagingly written, and had a whole dust-jacket of testimonials, mostly from clergy. Whether The Secret is in this book, I will leave to your judgment. —J.B. Hare, June 13, 2008

Part I. The Pattern of the Universe

Part II. The Problems of the Universe