F Rom O Prah To C Hopra
FROM OPRAH TO CHOPRA
From a problematic induction to an inescapable seduction, we move to an inevitable reduction and, finally, to a false deduction. Two of the biggest names associated with the New Spirituality reflect this very well. It will be worth our while to see a “Pilgrim’s Digress” here… how one starts out with a belief, pursues her dream aided by the values of that belief, attains the dream by capturing a medium for her gifts, lifts the power of those gifts to dizzying heights, is seduced by that very power, begins to market a belief different from that which brought her to those heights, and finally shapes that belief into making herself the object of the viewer’s belief. I might put it the following way:
First, the innocent is attracted to climb a mountain. Then the innocent draws others into her orbit to keep her company as she climbs. Then she seduces the others into believing that she has attained a higher status than the mountain and now has a transcendent perspective. Finally, she makes it look as if all along, the mountain should have tried to scale her heights but it couldn’t, because it is not the mountain that created the climber but the climber that created the mountain and everything around it is the climber’s creation. Now when others come to the mountain, it is to find that the mountain actually leads to her.
Through these two personalities that exemplify the New Spirituality, we see the perils of the New Spirituality made to look glamorous and a pseudoscience wedded to a mystical vocabulary that results in absurd deductions. I have chosen Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra to illustrate what I am saying. One reveals to us the slow but sure grip of being made an icon by a seduced populous and the inevitable devolution of a belief. The other shows the flawed induction of this New Spirituality, and the predetermined conclusions that defy both reason and observation. If they both represent two sparkling lights in this astral spectrum, there are hosts of others that also shine. Their beliefs and means of communication have shown how an idea can be taken and marketed, reshaped, and repackaged until it is taken at face value by a generation that has failed to ask the right questions. There is no spinning top here to tell them whether they are dreaming or awake.
The breadth of thinking ranges from the genuine to the fake to the fake fake and the genuine fake (I hope you read the introduction). You are told in smooth-flowing tones that you have an “ageless” body and a “timeless” mind, when you know full well that your body is aging and that your mind is still swallowed up by time. But if you keep repeating the mantra with your eyes shut and your mind emptied of anything meaningful, you will float through the various degrees of the mystical overriding the rational. That notwithstanding, both Oprah and Chopra show us something very profound in the process. Allow me to take you on this brief journey to show the digression they have followed.
For one, life began in poverty and has ended up in incredible wealth. For the other, life began in the East and has ended up in the West. For one, the definitions started with “You are nothing until you make yourself something.” For the other, it was “No matter what you make of yourself, at the core you are really nothing”… or everything, depending on your science or religion. For one, common sense and brutal reality are transformed into a rags-to-riches show-and-tell on the wings of telegenic strength. For the other, “quantum cosmology” and esoteric terminology provide the double-edged strength of two escape doors whenever questions are put to either; there is always a default position to the other when fault is found with one. The two things both Oprah and Chopra have in common are wealth and spiritual talk. Wealth is concrete, usable, power-leveraging, and the cause of mass envy. But the spiritual is the intangible, soul-appealing, sometimes foreign phraseology made marketable in one-liners and aphorisms that have the world eating ideas out of their hands.
What do I have in common with them? Very little, and very much at the same time. I, too, was born in the East and now live in the West. I, too, was raised in a small home and shared a small room with four other siblings. Just twenty-five yards away from where I lived, a family of eight lived in a shack made out of mud and cow dung. Poverty was writ large in a culture such as that. I grew up with spiritual talk all around me. I went to a school where the prescribed postures, breathing, and chants were part of assembly each day. I lived in a neighborhood where the silence of the dawn hours was regularly broken by voluminous chants in Sanskrit that wafted through the walls. The land of my birth is a country of complexities. You have both extreme wealth and extreme want. You have the ancient and the modern existing side by side. You live with dogma and myth. The ivory tower of the academy and the scourge of illiteracy exist a few feet apart.
But I have come to a conclusion radically different from those of Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra. I have looked into their ideas and their impact and wondered aloud if they have pondered long enough the reasons for their success. Is it not odd that both knew the impact of some form of Christianity in their upbringing? Is it not odd that both have made their fortunes in a country where the impact of the gospel made possible freedom to the enslaved and liberty to pursue one’s dreams? Is it not odd that the spirituality one touts still holds captive millions who are told that they are born inferior at their core? Is there an elephant in the room? Are they so enamored with their own statures that they are missing the fact that something larger than they are is struggling to make itself visible?
To their credit, they have in effect revealed the “unpaid bills” of Christendom. People yearn for the mystical and the relational. But at the cost of truth and reality? The vortex that suctions a person down the funnel of falsehood is that people are enamored by material success and want to know how they can get a piece of the pie. As Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof would say, “When you’re rich, they think you really know.”