Is it possible that the TV icon somehow succeeded where God and psychotherapy had failed?

BY TIPPI STRACHAN — I don’t watch Oprah. I have no real justification for this, but whether it’s her mega-sprayed hair or the adoring throngs of “go-girl” women in her audience, the show brings a lump of bile in my gut.

How do I know? It’s always on whenever I visit my mom. The same mom who raised us to watch minimal TV now quotes Oprah like the Bible, and brings her up in every conversation. But I put up with this because — and I genuinely believe it to be true — Oprah fixed my mom.

Victim to martyr

Mom had an awful, abusive childhood at the hands of sociopathic parents. Amazingly she overcame, but overcompensated, as an adult determined to do things right. She was affectionate and ultra-responsible, pinched pennies as a housewife and kept us well-fed, well-groomed, clothed, sheltered, socialized, educated and safe.

She did her utmost to protect us from darker forces in our home (her three bad marriages) and lost herself in the process. She was isolated and missed out on decades of friendships, fun and popular culture.

During a period of depression she tried therapy, but soon quit because she came to the conclusion that there was no need to work on herself. It was a cry not for help, but sympathy.

Out of habit she prayed, but had little hope of gaining a better life through those intercessory petitions. Unfortunately, when her children grew into independent adults with their own life plans and loves, she totally lost it.

And when Mom no longer felt needed, she turned nasty.

I was off enjoying adulthood, and wanted nothing more than to build memories with her. I wanted us to visit each other often, take weekend trips together. I wanted my husband and I to make wonderful meals for my mom in our new home.

But she rarely made the 15-minute drive to see us. She had no time for fun. When we talked, she wanted to hear that I was struggling and had made the wrong choices. She wanted me to cry in her arms.

And when I didn’t cry, she did. Often. She cried with my brothers, too, and with all three of her siblings. If ever a kind stranger at a party approached her, she took advantage of the listening ear by describing all of her life’s hardships.

When she still felt unloved or neglected, she would spread gossip and sabotage our happiness. Mom was a drag.

Then one day my brother did something I will forever both curse and thank him for. He suggested mom start watching Oprah.

From martyr to mother

Gradually, Mom steeped herself in self-help and spiritual-actualization books. She would spout bits of wisdom she had never wanted to hear from a therapist, or any of us. She was suddenly up on current events and Hollywood celebrities — and felt like she belonged to the world-at-large.

Best of all, Mom stopped scaring everyone away with her sob stories. Maybe hearing so many other sob stories on TV drew her out of her own, and aroused a larger sense of compassion.

She learned to love herself, and to laugh. She made friends. A 60-something woman, she is finally one of the girls. For the first time in my life, she is funny! We visit each other often. We travel together. She feasts with my husband and me.

The transformation has taken years, but I remember seeing the first signs after my brother’s TV tip. I have the mom of my dreams, and I credit Oprah. The hairsprayed TV diva’s mega-hold on my mom may be annoying but I am reluctantly, somewhat queasily, eternally grateful.

SPIRITUAL IQ QUIZ — He’s big. He’s hairy. He’s said to tear through the night sky accompanied by magical reindeer. Santa Claus makes a truly weird symbol of conspicuous consumption. Maybe that’s because he’s a figure whose spiritual roots sit deeper than today’s commercial culture.

Santa as we know him today symbolizes holiday cheer, Christian charity, and, yes, maybe more than just a little bit of pagan wildness. Little wonder this mischievous elf has been shunned by Christians, banned by secularists, and viewed with suspicion by purists of all sorts.

As he keeps sliding down the chimney into our culture, click on the radio buttons below to see how much you know about the global poster-boy for Christmas.

BY PAUL KAIHLA — In her short, unintentional life, Paris Hilton has performed at least one spiritual good deed: In 2007, after being sentenced to 45 days in jail for . . . whatever, she exited her L.A. home carrying a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s, The Power of Now.

That single act, and famous photo, gave Tolle’s best-selling book of spiritual haiku a second life. It zoomed up Amazon.

The take on Paris among the Soul’s Code community of helping-professionals goes something like this: she’s a harmless person who puts herself out there — but not “in” there — as in, herself. Or what Carl Jung called “the Self,” free of an excessive degree of self-concern.

When she was sentenced, we publicly prayed for Paris’ new inner life — or at least that she’d undergo what another American icon, Dwight Eisenhower, called “an agonizing reappraisal.”

It didn’t work.

Paris now has a new reality show — this time on a cable network called Oxygen.

It has the generous, self-effacing title, The World According to Paris.

Here’s a segment:

Paris says on camera without a hint of irony:

“My friends and I call people who crave attention, hungry tigers — and believe me, Kristin is the hungriest of them all.”

If any of us who aren’t on reality TV ever said that about anyone in our social orbit . . . um, I think that our family, friends, priest, psych or mentalist would call us out for our projections. But when a media parasite like Paris — who isn’t a Hilton Hotel heiress by any business measure, by the way — recites those lines, it’s only moreso.

A spiritual teacher named David Richo has a brilliant take on the ego. Richo came by it honestly: He was a Catholic priest who resigned his office to become a psychotherapist, and then blended the model of Christ with Buddhism for his personal practice.

Your identity is fragile, cracked easily, and bereft of power, says Richo. The more devoted you are to your self-image, the more easily and often you react.

Paris possibly posed with the Power of Now for two reasons: she got a personal recommendation to read the book, and it was publicly useful.

The Power of Now was already a bestseller by Tolle, who lives in Vancouver, Canada.

On a suicidal night three decades ago, Tolle had an ‘enlightenment,’ or permanent shift into another state of mind.

Tolle’s realization is that the act of thinking itself is not the fundamental denizen of reality, or even a great tool to empirically measure reality. Thinking is a small slice of life, confined to the cognitive capacity of the machine parts that make up the brain.

How do you feel after you make love? (forget, Paris)

Euphoria. No thought. Your body, your being, is your ‘mind’, so to speak.

In fact, if you grok that the very act of reading these words is a narrowing state of mind — kind of like what physicists do when they collapse quantum particles into a fixed position by measuring them — then you get Tolle.

Paris picked up his book, and hung out with a Hollywood guru, but here we are.

America may have great leaders and creators but half of the society is the most parochial on the planet — next to Japan. (Full disclosure: I’m an American).

Half of this place is also a profoundly fearful nation. What happened the month of 9/11? Restaurant, retail and travel sales plummeted. These people aren’t Rambo’s. They “cocooned” in their homes, scared shit-less. True story.

What does this have to do with Paris Hilton?

The behavior reflects a collective unconscious informed by desperation and anxiety, or what Soul’s Code and Eckhart Tolle call “the pain-body.”

It is any wonder, then, that one of the most famous women in our culture is on an energetic frequency — or to put it in Oprah-speak, attracts into her life the following people and places via the Laws of Attraction:

• Allows herself to be recorded with a video camera having intercourse and oral sex with a freak named Rick Solomon, then signs a mutual release to earn royalties from the pornographic video — and then as late as June, 2011 presents herself as a victim of sexual exploitation
• has only two real friends, as she claims in The World According to Paris, and unconsciously hosted a reality series in *three* countries, My New BFF
• her current love interest was arrested for drunk driving, acts out with possessive and paranoid rage at Paris, and works as a club promoter in — of all  of the most glamorous and cultured cities of the world — Las Vegas.

Paris is now the subject of media and blogger ridicule because MTV booted her, and her Oxygen ratings suck. The only factor giving The World According to Paris any fumes at all is Brooke Mueller  — and by inference, Charlie Sheen.

Let’s get real, this is the first we’ve ever read in the whole history of the Internet that Paris Hilton even knew Brooke Mueller. Sheen’s ex was retained for the reality show to keep Paris alive as a reality TV actress, and parasitically ride off of Sheen’s notoriety and PageRank.

Talk about exploitation: It’s the Hilton brand.

They’re as desperate as the rest of us.

It’s the torments of the Ego — excessive self-concern, the constant making of comparisons and continuous seeking — that made Tolle’s Power of Now a hit in the first place.

We all want to escape the kind of neurotic-hell that Hilton has so poignantly portrayed in The World According to Paris.

And I for one will pray that Paris picks up the Power of Now again.

While wealthy stars may have allegedly inherited the earth, they are often as spiritually-impoverished as any of us.

Driven by their demons and DUI’s, public break-ups and private meltdowns, the rich and famous seek instant-karma in everything from crystal energy healing and kabbalah to talk therapy and tantric sex.

Or in Paris Hilton’s case, they parachute a Hollywood holy man into their entourage (Maxie Santillan).

We invite you to test your knowledge of celebs who may, or may not, have soul in a material world.

BY JOHN PTACEK – Why did a tsunami flood Japan? Why can’t politicians tell the truth? Why did it have to rain on my wedding day?

If humans really had power, CEOs would be immune to cancer, holy men wouldn’t sin and Michael Jackson would still be alive. But we don’t call the shots.

Reality baffles us.  We question it every day and keep waiting for people to be good, for governments to be just, for life to be fair.

What we really want is for reality to be fantasy, for it to live up to our lofty expectations.  With one foot planted in reality and the other in a dream world, our lives are rooted in compromise.  Life is a chore, a problem to be solved.  It is often painful, sometimes dreadfully so.

Resigned to this suffering, we find ways to justify it.  We decide that suffering is good, even noble.  A sign of virtue.  This saintly rationalization deadens the pain, but only briefly.  Soon we are wondering why our marriages aren’t happier, why our children aren’t saying no to drugs, and why a collapsing stock market sucked our savings dry.

What is it that we never learned about reality?

That is, what didn´t we get about life as it is, and that makes us so newly frazzled by it every day? Did we sleep through the philosophy class that taught us how to appreciate it? Or the psychology class that taught us how to adapt to it?

Or maybe it was a science class we slept through.

14 billion years ago nothingness exploded into something and, following a succession of progressively conscious life forms, that something included us.  We human beings are but a single expression of life in a vast, intimately connected universe.

Or so the story goes.  Clearly we’re not buying it.  Somewhere along the line we decided that being a bit player in a tediously long evolutionary story didn’t suit our ambitions.   We wanted to be masters of the universe.  Screw evolution, it was time for us to jump the track and take control of our destinies.

Taking charge is like believing we are driving a bus on which we are merely passengers

Soon, our upright gait acquired a certain swagger.  Life wasn’t about natural law, it was about attitude.  From our new vantage point at the center of the universe, we had a much better idea of how life should be proceeding – our way.  If we wanted something badly enough, we could make it happen.  The way they do in Nike commercials.  You just have to be willing to work up a sweat.

Our attempt to subvert the will of a smoothly functioning universe had its downside, however.  It put us on a collision course with suffering.  When our Nike version of reality meets the real thing, it’s no contest.  We lose every time.  And when we lose we suffer, no matter how much we sweat.

To believe we control the movement of life is to believe we are driving a bus on which we are merely passengers.  We feel as if we are in control when the bus takes us where we want to go, but when it keeps chugging merrily on its way despite our attempts to turn or stop or slow down, we are incredulous.  We grip the frozen steering wheel and stare helplessly out the windows muttering that teenagers shouldn’t be having babies, corporations shouldn’t be exploiting legal loopholes for profit, and a cure for cancer should have been discovered by now.

Life asks many things of us, but suffering for our delusions isn’t one of them.  The biggest delusion is that life should unfold in ways that make us happy.  Since we weren’t even around when life began, our happiness could hardly have been a bullet point in its mission statement.  Finding happiness is our job, and there’s more of it to be found when we meet life with open arms rather than with a fistful of angry questions.

John Ptacek questions conventional wisdom and thinks you should too. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife Kitty and not far from his handsome son Joe. His essays appear on his website, On Second Thought, www.johnptacek.weebly.com.