I'm going to come right out and say this, even though I know that making it public will erase whatever shred of credibility I might still possess in polite society: it's my opinion that Noel Edmonds' bestselling self-help book, Positively Happy: Cosmic Ways To Change Your Life, is not an abject farrago of nonsense from beginning to end.

Nobody's going to confuse it with a peer-reviewed paper in the journal of the British Psychological Society, but parts of it are disconcertingly wise, especially coming from the man who invented the gunk tank. The reason for the mockery, however, has been the pages Edmonds devotes to "cosmic ordering", the comical new age belief that you can get what you want by "placing an order with the cosmos" for it. And it was this that I decided to investigate.

I want you to understand how much pain I went through for this. There are, it turns out, several books devoted to the subject, including the one that inspired Edmonds, The Cosmic Ordering Service, by Barbel Mohr, and The Secret, an underground hit accompanied by a well-produced - if nutty - online movie (thesecret.tv). But to find them, you have to make an alarming bookstore transition, from the section called Popular Psychology, where by now I'm completely at home, to the section called Mind/Body/Spirit, where I'm really not: apart from anything else, there's always the danger of tripping over a goth, crouched on the floor reading books on spells or dream analysis. Then there was that befuddling conversation with an American on the Eurostar (she was reading The Secret), from which I learned that Newton and Plato owed their success to cosmic ordering, too.

There seem to be a variety of ways of ordering things from the cosmos, involving visualisation, or writing down your wildest dreams as if you'd already achieved them. This is inevitably followed by a reference to Jim Carrey, who apparently wrote himself a cheque for $10m when he was still unknown, then carried it around in his pocket until, one day, he landed a movie deal ... for $10m. Soon after, he made Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, proof that the cosmos is, after all, fundamentally malevolent.

It's barely worth pointing out the holes in this notion (Edmonds claims he got the contract to present Deal Or No Deal thanks to cosmic ordering, but he's surely suffering from "confirmation bias": presumably he asked for lots of other things that he didn't get, but doesn't take that as evidence against his theory). Several very strange books later, though, it hit me: the problem isn't that the new agers are proposing some arcane, unprovable theory; it's the opposite. There is no secret. Of course you're far more likely to get things you want if you focus your mind on them daily.

The simple test always comes (and it comes, eventually, in all these books) when the author addresses the question of whether you can "order" what you want, then just sit back and do nothing. Of course, they each find reasons for concluding that you can't: you have to act, too. It's not magic, even if it is on the shelves next to books of spells.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com