A Splinter in your Mind

 

What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

—Morpheus in The Matrix 

What we know about the secret of The Secret we can’t explain, but we can feel it. We’ve felt it all along, that there’s something different about these mysteries. We don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in our mind, driving us mad. The odd wording and bizarre images capture the imagination and give the impression that Byron wove something extraordinary into these puzzles. 

Some think there’s a thirteenth casque that requires clues from all the puzzles to find. Though this hypothesis is plausible, I know of no evidence supporting it. Some think it’s a generic shortcut that can be applied to all of the puzzles. For example, one theory is that you can use a particular shadow on a particular day of the year, as in the books Masquerade and The Hobbit.

Regarding the theory that the secret of The Secret is a shortcut: Imagine that you are in the business of making safes, thick-walled, high-end, with very long, complex combinations, almost impossible to crack. You plan to build twelve of them. Would you at some point in the design process decide that what these safes really need is a back door with a small four-digit padlock securing it—and let’s make all of the combinations the same. The idea that Byron would spend all that time and resources creating these complex puzzles just to provide a simple way to circumvent all that work, is patently ridiculous. If you’re going to build a sophisticated safe, there’s going to be only one way in, the hard way. Let us never speak of this again. 

Here’s a crazy thought—a wacky, zany, cockamamie, hairbrained, preposterous, ridiculous, ludicrous, bizarro idea—Ya know how the majority of the book, The Secret: A Treasure Hunt, is just a façade, an elaborate framework with which to present twelve challenging puzzles? What if these incredibly complex puzzles are also just façades, each a framework with which to present another puzzle, even more complex, a puzzle within a puzzle repeated twelve times. As crazy as this sounds, there is something compelling about this idea. Could this be The Secret of The Secret? 

Gotcha! Just joking! Of course not! That would be crazy, too challenging, an even harder secret puzzle within each of the twelve already ridiculously complex puzzles? No way. That would be absurd!