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.

In the spirit of Jungian synchronicity, are movie studios now mimicing our meme? Hundreds of millions have been invested in these feature films, and the producers branded them by using either the word “Soul” or “Code” in the titles — and on the cinema marquee:

Source Code

Three stars! This metaphysical, sci-fi thriller in the Inception and Limitless style stars Brokeback Mountain guy, Jake Gyllenhaal; Fast Five gal, Michelle Monaghan; and Up in the Air femme fatale Vera Farmiga. Long before Source Code was even written in treatment-form, and being shopped to Hollywood studios, we reserved SOURCE@SoulsCode.com as the general e-mail address for this site. Both the movie and this website explore the question, who are you?

Soul Code

Maybe our lawyers at Orrick, Herrington should have taken out the studio and distributor of this flick for trademark infringement. But they didn’t have to: The reviewers took down the movie instead. Soul Code wanted to be Source Code and Inception. Instead, this 2010 movie went direct to DVD. The heroine figures out a way to download and transfer a person’s memory. “Soul Code” telegraphs what happens when her memory is placed into a much younger woman’s body. Search the title in Google. Our site still comes out as the top result, thanks to our premium content and premiere practitioners like author and psychotherapist David Richo.

Soul Surfer

It’s 127 Hours — but on water. An against-all-odds 2011 docu-drama about an all-American girl in Hawaii, Soul Surfer tells the story of Bethany Hamilton who lost her arm at the age of 13 when a tiger shark bit it off at the shoulder — but did not lose her faith. (American Idol spawn Carrie Underwood plays a minor role).

Soul of Sand

Is a Bollywood drama about a watchman at an abandoned mine near Delhi who is drawn into a love triangle by a wealthy landlord’s daughter and her lower-caste lover.

The Source

It made a splash at Cannes 2011. It’s religious. It’s political. It’s a controversial, modern-day fable exploring female empowerment in the Arab world.

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.

1. 9th Company, the Russian side of “Charlie Wilson’s War”

Hulu.com, the website where you can play TV and movies for free, finally has a foreign flick worth watching. (Actually, make that any flick).

Hulu just posted 9th Company, “9 Рота” in the original Russian — the first time that a mass American audience has been exposed to the best movie we’ve ever seen from the post-Soviet Union (and in that spirit, it’s a co-production with Finland and the Ukraine).

Yes, the movie does has subtitles. But think of it as the Rus version of Platoon with the nitty-gritty psychological naturalism of Stanley Kubrick’s Natural Born Killers. But it’s actually based on a true story.

Dateline, 1988: The Red Army’s boot-camp for paratroopers, which makes Navy SEAL 6 look like a Disney Jamboree. The squad deploys to Afghanistan for the end-game of the Soviet occupation of the stone-age Muslim state. As we’re drawn into this experience, we identify and sympathize with the characters — and then it dawns: Oh shit, this is our war. As in the Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts vehicle written by Aaron Sorkin, Charlie Wilson’s War. Meaning, the U.S. and its allies are supplying the other side.

Second level of awareness: These humble Russian peasant soldiers from Siberian cities like Krasnoyarsk are actually  fighting our war, Act I  — that is, Obama’s current war in Afghanistan. In the movie, the mujahedin are not politicized, 9/11-wise. It’s left to us to realize who they are: 9th Company was fighting Bin Ladn and the Taliban 13 years before the World Trade Center.

2. Addiction: Stoned (as in Rolling Stones)

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards founded the Rolling Stones. Right?

Actually, the original leader of the group and most photogenic member, was Brian Jones. But by the mid-1960′s, he’d failed to record new music as fast as Jagger-Richards, and he abused his girlfriend — the German version of Catherine Deneuve, Anita Pallenberg. Jagger took over the band, Richards periodically took over Jones’ girlfriend Anita — and what happened to the real golden boy of the Rolling Stones is documented in cinema for the first time in the slyly-titled bio-pic, Stoned.

It’s a Tarentino-stylized  piece of cinema that serves an investigative journalistic purpose: Empirically answers — without the help of courts and police, who were conned in this case — the question of who killed Brian Jones. The founder of the most famous band on earth.

What’s new about this ? If the movie had been about an America singer-songwriter (Johnny Cash), and produced by a Hollywood studio (Fox), it would have been as big as Walk the Line (Joaquin Phoenix). You can now watch Stoned for free on American TV (Showtime).

3. Social psychology: Gods [dioces]

Surprise, Peru actually has wealthy people instead of the shanty-towns we are always shown in the media. And they’re as hot as Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. But they are also parasitically perched at the top of a supply-chain of wealth-creation that looks like this: Peru produces the coca base; Colombia is the CEO; Mexico, out-sourced transportation; and America is the end-market, the most addicted people on the planet.

Gods, the movie, shows how a person can coast to the top of Maslow’s famous pyramid showing the human hierarchy of needs with not much more than luck and beauty.

Reminiscent of Vitti’s movies from the 1960s, a bourgeois Lima family is living la dolce vita like Italians on the Amallfi coast: the maid marries the patriarch, and then has an Aha realizationl after she buys into — and then sees through — the narcissistic obsessions of the trophy wives who are her new best friends.

It’s not a new film but it’s new to us in North America. Best place to screen it: Virgin America, which just put Gods in the foreign film section of its on-board, movies-on-demand.

4. Peak experiences: Discover the Gift

Released on June 14, 2011, this spiritual travelogue is by a Hollywood director but is decidedly not a Hollywood film. Demian Lichtenstein, who made 3,000 Miles to Graceland, does his own version of the 1979 film, Meetings with Remarkable Men, with some of the flavor of The Secret. In fact, Secret star Michael Beckwith is not only in Lichentstein’s Gift: he hosted a special screening at his L.A. church. But the film goes beyond prosperity preaching and also features the Dalai Lama, Ravi Shankar and Marianne Williamson’s work on A Course in Miracles. The theme is closer to that of a famous book that happens to have a similar name to this site, The Soul’s Code — psychologist James Hillman’s meditation on how to access the essence of your individual role in Being.

5. Ecology: If a tree falls

The newest release on our list is also the only thriller. If a tree falls takes its name from an existential koan: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to here it, does it make a sound? But the subject is eco-terrorism, not metaphysics. Based on a true story, the Earth Liberation Front is a modern-day version of the Weather Underground: it burns and blows up anti-green targets like timber companies, SUV dealerships, wild horse slaughterhouses, and a ski lodge at Vail, Colorado. The arsonists are captured in a post-9/11 crackdown by the FBI, which calls them “America’s number one domestic terrorism threat.”

Who is Matt Smith?

Dark times ahead for everyone’s favorite Time Lord: “The Doctor is going to face his darkest days,” Matt Smith said at the Wondercon fantasy conference this week.

A bright spot? Expect “big changes” to Doctor’s relationship with his red-headed companion.

And your little dog, too: Doctor Who’s tin dog viciously parodied.

The birth of a holy child? Former Doctor Who star David Tenant becomes a dad.