I think The Secret has the right idea, but blown way out of proportion. Think about the placebo effect. A lot of people think it just means tricking yourself into the illusion of wellness. In many cases it is; however, it can also initiate some pretty powerfull healing as effective or more as any medicine. I remember one fellow who completely cured himself of a deadly cancer (I wish I could remember which one, but it's been years) that by all rights should have killed him. He overcame it, according to him, by intense and prolonged meditation aimed at the intention of getting better.
Another, probably better example, is in my psychology class when we learned how when a pack animal suddenly topples the pack leader and aserts his dominance, his muscle mass increases at unprecedented rates upward of 50, which they attribute to the mental projection of dominance.
I'm sure many of us have seen some taichi masters, little guys, who can take the biggest punch from the biggest guy and not be moved. Or in other cases have 5 men try to move him and be completely unable to.
There was a really neat video on Ebaumsworld I saw where an old chinese guy, some sort of martial arts master, could stand on his index finger alone.
None of these things I attribute to mystical waves eminating from our thoughts, altering our reality by perception, but by controlling the brain and the nervous system to such a degree that the human body and mind shouldn't normally be capable of. After all, when you look at the eastern philosophy of "chi", it really seems like a primitive (and in some ways more advanced) understanding of the nervous system.
When you get right down to the nuts and bolts, the energetic potential that forms our brains, bodies, and all other mass, are all made of the same thing carrying out different tasks to create the whole. As my best friend, who's a 3rd year physics major described, all matter is essentially made up of light. But you have to keep in mind that when you think of light, you're thinking of your perception of light, and that perception is merely the effect of light. The actual forces that form light are the same forces that form all the atoms in all matter, and the same forces that create an electrical neuron firing in your brain, central, and peripheral nervous systems.
And thus I do hold to the belief that through deep contemplation, meditation, and understanding through rigerous practice, the mind can be developed to strip down the illusionary barriers that separate "us" from the "external" existence. When we do that, we can have a great deal of control over what happens in our bodies, in our minds, how we affect our external reality, and how we let it affect us.
