Aha! Moments that Blow Oprah off the Screen
Oprah has made a minor franchise out of what she calls an “Aha Moment.” In Oprah’s world, they’re the “unforgettable, connect-the-dots moments, when everything suddenly, somehow changed.”
If the phrase sounds like a cliché, that’s because it is. Oprah cribbed it from the German psychiatrist Karl Bühler, who actually coined the term 100 years ago. Oh!
Here are *real* Aha! Moments — from Ramana Maharshi to Byron Katie — that blow Oprah off the screen.
To Karl Bühler an Aha experience was “a peculiar, pleasure-oriented experience within the course of thought that pops up with the sudden insight into a previously intransparent context.”
A half century later, Abraham Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology, refined the idea with his definition of a peak experience:
Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placement in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened even in his daily life by such experiences.
Maslow noted that peak experiences are rare, and even when people have them they fail to hold the elevated state — and revert to old patterns.
But some peak experiences stay permanent. They’re called enlightenment, or genius.
Compare our examples to what passes for an Aha! Moment in Oprah’s magazine:
Donald Trump wanting to hit on his 3rd wife when they first met because she “she had an aristocratic, reserved air without being at all haughty.” The Donald’s apparent realization was “that even after you’ve done a lot of living, you can still be amazed by what can turn up in life.”
Despite my sudden shyness, I managed to give Melania every single one of my phone numbers. She seemed suspicious, which made me realize she was not only an incredible-looking woman but an intelligent one as well. She questioned me about each phone number: Business or personal? Limousine or bodyguard? I could tell she knew her stuff. I could also surmise that she knew who I was, and I remember deciding, Well, depending on her sources, that could work either for me or against me.
Or here’s Hillary Clinton claiming that it was a little girl’s voice (as opposed to, say, a hard-wired, life-long ambition) that convinced her to run for the U.S. Senate in 2000
It was an incredibly difficult decision, and I needed a push. Fortunately, I got one. In March of that year, I went to New York City to join Billie Jean King at an event . . . We gathered at a local school, joined by dozens of young women athletes, all of us assembled on a stage beneath a giant banner that read dare to compete, the title of the film. A young woman named Sofia Totti, the captain of the girls’ basketball team at the school, introduced me.
And then something unexpected happened. As I approached the microphone to say a few words about the importance of giving girls every opportunity to grow and reach their potential, Sofia grabbed my hand and whispered in my ear: “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton,” she said. “Dare to compete.”
This is what stand-up comedians would call “great material.” They make jokes about whispering girls and Clintons. But we won’t 
Aha Moment: Byron Katie, 1986
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on 12 Mar 2008 at 8:43 am 1.Saturday Night Live, from Marin County, CA . . . It’s Eckhart Tolle! | Soul's Code: Everyone's a Guru said …
[...] is a barometer of our spiritual starvation as much as it’s a measure of his status as the Grandmaster Flash of self-help teachers. (Read about Tolle’s reported overnight enlightenment in our series about peak experiences that made history.) [...]
on 31 Mar 2008 at 8:48 pm 2.SoulsCode: Everyone's a guru said …
[...] Credit where credit is due. Still, we at Soul’s Code have no intention of giving up our tease-Oprah crusade [...]
on 30 Apr 2008 at 6:50 am 3.SoulsCode: Everyone's a guru said …
[...] The notion of having — and sharing — psychological realizations and mind-body breakthroughs is kinda the whole point of Soul’s Code. It’s one reason we’re called to have fun with Oprah’s “Aha! Moment” franchise — a cliche lifted from a long-dead German psychiatrist named Karl Buhler. [...]
on 03 May 2008 at 8:00 am 4.SoulsCode: Everyone's a guru said …
[...] To me, it is this summons that is the key. Unless insight produces action it is useless — or at best, self-serving — because it only serves to make us feel better. As others here have pointed out, to speak of “A-Ha” moments in the same context that we speak of…. [...]
on 23 May 2008 at 6:08 am 5.SoulsCode: Everyone's a guru said …
[...] Byron Katie explains the phrase at book-length in a practically-unknown title called, Losing the Moon. [...]
on 31 May 2008 at 11:02 pm 6.SoulsCode: Everyone's a guru said …
[...] Here’s one example. You’ll never read this in the New York Times, or Time, or any other large circ, New York publication: testimonials from some of history’s greatest masters of mindfulness in their own words. [...]
on 31 May 2008 at 11:30 pm 7.Vicki Woodyard said …
Not knowing is an aha moment, too. I am not sure about Katie. She calls what she does The Work. That descriptive phrase belongs to Gurdjieff if you ask me. He shoulda trademarked it. Life is only real when I am, he said,and I am paraphrasing him a tad.
Let’s face it. People begin as genuinely as they can and if they stay at it long enough, they become genuine fakes, a la Alan Watts. I watch O for the entertainment value. True inner work is not done by buying a bestseller, a pack of Postit notes and a highlighter (that according to a wisecracking friend of mine). Or by watching YouTubes of the masters. Oy.
on 08 Jun 2008 at 9:41 am 8.SoulsCode: Everyone's a guru said …
[...] another, Ojai was the North American base of the great Indian mystic, J. Krishnamurti. He underwent one of the most famous enlightenments in history at Ojai in 1922. Krishnamurti made an estate there, granted to his foundation by patrons, a part-time home for the [...]
on 06 Aug 2008 at 3:51 pm 9.Soul’s Code: Everyone’s a Guru said …
[...] was the great spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti who once said, “If you think that meditation is sitting in a corner of your room for fifteen [...]
on 18 Mar 2009 at 5:23 pm 10.Soul's Code » SPIRITUAL SURF: New Age ‘Botox’, Marianne Williamson and the New York Times meets Soul’s Code said …
[...] frequent guest, Marianne Williamson, has based her career on the modern-day bible of mysticism, A Course in Miracles. Williamson’s books are the Cliff Notes version of the dense tome (her words, not [...]