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.

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.

SOUL’S CODE —  We don’t mean that Byron Katie is literally beating up on Oprah. The only reason we make the comparison between the two is that Byron Katie, who is a post-modern mystic, made a rare live appearance in the San Francisco Bay Area the same day that Oprah’s show hyped the movie The Secret and its gospel, the “law of attraction.”

The difference between Oprah and Byron Katie is that Oprah explicitly caters to America’s victim-culture — millions who don’t like their looks, their job, their love-life, their personal history, etc. Oprah pitches a grocery list of prescriptions to fix the personality’s grievances.Byron Katie, on the other hand, offers a radically different way out of pain.

Why would you care? Katie, as she goes by, comes as advertised. We won’t write that she has ‘achieved enlightenment’ — that is, a person who is free of internal conflict — because we can imagine her rejoinder. Katie would turn one of her famous four questions back on us, and ask:

“How would you know? Can you absolutely know that that’s true? Do you have any proof?”

No, we don’t. We have an impression from being in the hall this past week in her presence. This woman is utterly fearless, and radiates a clarity of mind that electrifies through the room and sparks mini awakenings in the audience.

Katie’s point about the “law of attraction” business is that it’s likely another forum for the mind to be at war with itself.

If you make your ‘spiritual’ practice a meditation visualizing the more money and happiness mantras from The Secret . . . the reason that self-messaging feel like such a chore is because you have a whole history of not believing that things will work out for you.

You can’t change your belief system because you saw a movie, or an episode of Oprah. We still have an undercarriage of streaming thoughts driven by the values we’ve interjected decades ago.

The above is paraphrasing of Katie; Better to put it in her own words:

“You’re thinking that you should believe in this (positive laws of attraction), what you’re visualizing up here, but you really don’t believe in it,” Katie told the audience. “What you really believe is these other thoughts deeper down that you keep having. And after a while you’ll think, ‘Oh, I’m not manifesting success and all these other new things — I’m failing.’

“Or alternatively, your life might suddenly get better and you’ll say, ‘See! I manifested that — and I’ll show you how you can do it, too.’

“Man, you can build an identity out of that for a lifetime.”

Actually, that ego-building exercise sounds exactly like the “story” that The Secret’s main producer, Rhonda Byrne, puts in her online brochure-ware:

And on that spring day in 2004, when a small, old book called The Science of Getting Rich was put into her hands, and Rhonda’s whole life suddenly pulled into spectacular focus, she knew exactly what her mission was to become. She was going to take this knowledge to the world. She was going to make a movie to carry joy to every corner of the Earth. And so the great journey that was The Secret began.

In early 2005, when The Secret was simply a name and a (momentous) vision, Prime Time Productions was made up of Rhonda, Producer Paul Harrington, and Director Drew Heriot. Paul, who had worked with Rhonda at Prime Time Productions virtually since its beginning, and Drew, who had directed several projects for the company as well, became, with Rhonda, the foundation for The Secret team.

As for Katie, she said she had no personal interest in practicing the tactics touted by The Secret.

“I’m a woman without a future,” she said. “I don’t need one. If I needed a ‘tomorrow,’ I’d imagine one.”

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