All last week, in every country on the planet, people of all ages, astrological signs and income levels spent their leisure time stabbing each other, screaming at their kids, resenting their bosses, throwing gum wrappers on the ground, sucking on shotguns, beating their aging parents, taking too much pride in their mastery of advanced yoga poses. But that’s because we’re only eight weeks into Oprah’s effort to awaken humanity and achieve a new level of collective consciousness. A couple of weeks from now, when her series of online seminars with the enigmatic Eckhart Tolle, a soft-spoken but long-winded vessel of enlightenment, is complete, things should be a whole lot better.
And if they’re not, well, the world is filled with gurus eager to give Oprah’s army of metaphysically frumpy housewives a spiritual makeover. And the otherwise savvy billionaire seems forever ready to swallow whatever they’re selling. In her darkest days of binge-eating, Oprah once confessed, she ate a package of hot dog buns generously lathered with maple syrup, but her appetite for dubious alterna-sages is even less discriminating than that! First there was hard-boiled fabulist James Frey, then there was the dream team of New Age charlatans peddling The Secret, and now there’s Eckhart Tolle, whose last name reportedly rhymes with “holy,” not “folly.”
In 2000, Oprah helped turn Tolle’s first book, The Power of Now, into a best-seller after Meg Ryan recommended it to her. This year, she started promoting his 2005 follow-up, A New Earth, in which Tolle reports that humanity is in the midst of a “radical crisis that threatens our very survival,” and that we must “evolve or die.” To help accelerate this evolutionary process and ensure the future of mankind, Oprah has been conducting a series of 10 online seminars with Tolle, in which they talk about Tolle’s teachings and take questions from viewers around the world.
In general, Tolle blends the somewhat esoteric principles of Zen Buddhism with the more grounded inquiry of the tough-minded philosopher-sailor Popeye. “Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am, in the background of my life at all times?” he asks in A New Earth. “To be more accurate, can I sense the I Am that I Am at this moment? Can I sense my essential identity as consciousness itself?”
In his appearances with Oprah, he does little to punch up such New Age platitudes. More Elmer Fudd than Elmer Gantry, he simply speaks with quiet, plodding conviction about letting go of the egoic mind and its attachments to thoughts and things, unhitching oneself from the troublesome freight of the past and future and living only in the present, cultivating detachment. If we can shed negativity, envy, resentment, pride, anger—which is to say, much of what makes humans unique—a “flowering” will commence, Tolle promises, and we newly awakened beings will become like “crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness.”
At this point, we’re used to celebrities advising us on the Darfur situation, or teaching us the best ways to go carbon-neutral. Oprah, however, is more ambitious than the average actorvist. She’s even more ambitious than the average president. For her, it’s not enough to end the war in Iraq or overhaul the Social Security system. Like her similarly ambitious pal Tom Cruise, she wants to overhaul humanity itself.
That’s a noble endeavor, and it’s awesome that Oprah has so much faith in us, and in herself, that she thinks she can alter the fate of humanity in just 10 weeks of chatting on the Internet! But it’d also be nice if she chose her spiritual mechanics a little more judiciously.
Indeed, one wonders if she’s bothered to imagine what the world would really be like if it were filled with millions of life forms as highly evolved as Tolle, their minds thrumming with the bland, egoless bliss that only rocks and rhododendrons and truly accomplished mystics experience, their days given over to sensing their essential Beingness? It would be oppressively serene. It would very hard to get a Big Mac or a taxi. In the end, one suspects, such enlightenment is best left to the Dalai Lama and Meg Ryan. The rest of us would be better served with the more tangible fruits of Oprah’s benevolence, like Pontiac sedans and Sony Handycams.