It's a controversial self-help book (and DVD) that has reached phenomenon status — by purporting to know "the secret" to happiness.

Today the book (Atria/Beyond Words, $23.99) hits No. 1 on USA TODAY'S Best-Selling Books list.

Want a new job, a million dollars or a gorgeous girlfriend?

Author Rhonda Byrne says the secret is the law of attraction: If you think positively, you become a magnet that pulls everything you want toward you.

The book has been touted on TV by Oprah Winfrey (just last week), Larry King and Ellen DeGeneres. Word-of-mouth is helping sales as well.

"People are finding out about it from other people," says Beyond Words editor in chief Cynthia Black, who heard about The Secret DVD from a friend and then signed Byrne to a book contract.

The DVD ($29.95) was released last March and has sold 1.1 million copies. The book was published in November with a first printing of 200,000. There are now 1.2 million copies in print.

Byrne, an Australian reality-TV producer, says she discovered the ancient secret to getting everything you want through her study of religious and philosophical texts.

"Everyone has to have their own experience to believe," says Byrne, 55. "People should start with little things like deciding a cup of coffee will come to you or that you'll see a feather. There's no difference between attracting a feather and anything else you want. It's as easy to attract one dollar as it is $10,000."

It's no secret that Byrne has supporters and detractors.

Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, has seen the DVD and calls it "at best, silliness." It's "good old American snake-oil salesmanship," he says.

But Arlene Shapiro of Pacific Palisades, Calif., says she has used the tenets of The Secret to control her panic attacks and to double her acupuncture business.

Byrne and her supporters claim all kinds of rewards from the law of attraction, from finding prime parking spots to curing cancer and kidney disease.

Byrne says that she used it to improve her eyesight and no longer needs glasses.

Susan Folkman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, says she worries about The Secret's suggestion that "people can cure themselves and that if they don't, they are somehow to blame."

Byrne has attracted numerous celebrities to her cause. In the book and on the DVD, the law of attraction is touted by such self-help luminaries as Jack Canfield, co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series; John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; and financial and spiritual gurus.

As for skeptics, Byrne says: "I wanted to share this gift with every person. It's up to them to choose to believe."