Oprah + Eckhart Tolle = Mass Market Mind Tweak?
If you’ve surfed the Internet at all this month, you’ve been bombarded by incessant tangerine for Oprah’s latest endeavor: a free online course about her book club pick, Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth”.
Eckhart Tolle (for those of us who live under rocks where New Age booksellers can’t find us) is one of the big names in the spiritual publishing/workshop niche. Oprah, of course, is Oprah. (And no rock in the world is big enough to insulate us from Oprah!)
For several years, Oprah has been on a spiritual quest, and she’s been excitedly dragging her audience along with her… miss-steps and all. Last year, she promoted the psuedo-scientific mysticism of “The Secret” into a multimillion dollar international obsession. Ouch.
I came late to The Secret party (someone forgot to send me an invitation) and so my posts on the topic didn’t have the impact they could have. Still, I enjoyed my attempts at righteous indignation and skepticism, and they were among my most popular posts.
Determined not to miss the chance to blog about this years Really Big Spiritual Woo from Oprah, I ordered “A New Earth” from Amazon, and signed up for the course on Oprah.com.
A quick glance at Mr Tolle’s information online left me pleasantly surprised. At least on the surface, his views seem in synch with my own pseudo-shamanic bad-American-Buddhist approach. Nothing I read about him immediately made my teeth hurt, the way most over-promoted New Age Guru types do. In fact, he seems down to earth, quiet, shy, gentle, and happy to leave the promotion to his publishing company and Oprah. (Granted, I’m basing that only on first impressions. I liked Deepak Chopra at first glance, too. Hey, we all make mistakes.)
But never fear! Even if the book and teacher pass the MindTweaks muster, I’m sure there will be plenty of audience-gone-amok hype for me to take apart as blog fodder. On a personal note, the online course is a working example of an Interactive Learning Environment, something I’m hyped about building on my own, and exposure to a course built by Oprah’s brilliant marketing/publishing machine can only improve my own future offerings. Plus, and the whole thing has me thinking again about my own spiritual experiences, and how to best present them without the candy coated woo.
I’ve started a sort of mini-blog on Oprah’s site, where I can examine the book freely, without dragging my readership here through the muck. So if you don’t get enough of my insanity here, you can checkout http://www.oprah.com/community/blogs/deauxadear. Two cautions: you’ll need to sign up for an Oprah.com account to see it (boohiss!) and there is no RSS feed option (double boohiss!)
But back to the whole mind-tweakishness of it: Eckhart’s teachings seem to be all about enlightenment, in the Eastern sense of the term. In this context, enlightenment means a profound shift in view point and identification, a chage that reveals the core illusion in perceptions.
Enlightenment is mind-shattering and life=altering. And that’s where the mind-tweak comes in. Because to my un-eddycated mind, it seems clear this major sort of change in thought pattern *must* involve neurogenesis and the forging of new neural pathways, for good or ill.
“Mind tweak” is probably an understatement in this case. It’s more like a mind-explosion; a neurological Big Bang. Kaboom. I’m always a little nervous about mass marketed mental kabooms, for the record. It just doesn’t seem safe.
For now, I can’t really offer even the loosest opinions on Eckhart or his book. The paperback has just arrived today. The first webcast class on Monday didn’t go so well, and I haven’t seen it yet… Seems even Oprah’s Internet gurus couldn’t were overwhelmed by 500,000 simultaneous connections to live streaming media, and the thing crashed. I spent the time as any enlightened blog author would, dancing in a circle, laughing and singing “Oprah broke the intra-nets, Oprah broke the intra-nets!”
For now, all I can say is “Stay tuned” and “I don’t hate it yet” and “Where’s the cookies and Kool-Aid?”
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MindTweak:
How many New Agers does it take to change a light bulb?
None — they just hold a seminar on coping with the darkness!
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- Oprah + Eckhart Tolle = Mass Market Mind Tweak?
- Thoughts On "A New Earth": Does Enlightenment = Neurogenesis? (Part One)
- Thoughts On "A New Earth" (Part 1.5)
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Here’s my deal with the author and the book. I hopped on the bandwagon by buying the book to see what all the hype is about. I read to page 90 and tried to incorporate some of his teachings into my life for a day or two. By the second day my employees were telling me my ego had called me from home and “it” wanted me to pick it up and bring it back into work! After feeling beat, battered and raked over the coals for a day or two, I decided my ego has a lot to do with what I consider my passion, creativity, individuality and who I am in a nutshell. To Tolle and Oprah I say, “leggo my ego!”
I love the image of your ego calling from home. It made me laugh out loud, Lisa, thanks
Your experience echos some of my concerns whenever “real” enlightenment techniques hit the masses. There are good reasons traditional systems require teachers to oversee and guide the process.
Like you, my best creative work often comes out of the trials and tribulations of the ego. Moving ego out of the way without disrupting that source of passion ain’t easy, and the same goes for daily responsibilities - I used to joke that it’s very hard to eat your breakfast when you’re busy being One with the Cheerios
[...] 11th, 2008 by Tori Deaux «Previous In Series So. I’ve made it most of the way through Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth”, as [...]