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Guest Blog Post: Oprah's New Earth Vocabulary
This week's episode of Oprah's A New Earth focused on one's awakening to life's purpose. Inappropriately, I couldn't help thinking of Steve Martin's awakening to his “special purpose” in The Jerk.
Billed as a global study group, packaged within the familiar rhythms of daytime television, episode eight of Oprah's newfangled spiritual enterprise/infomercial -- co-hosted with adviser/straight man Eckhard Tolle -- felt like a ritual intended to both create and enable spiritual narratives.
It is always surreal listening to celebrities, or anyone really, armed with newfound spiritual beliefs. What struck me about Oprah's New Age was her vocabulary, and how the newly appropriated language worked to re-frame her world and subsequently ours.
The strange flourishes of language – "abundance", "vibration", "presence", "thinking mind", "inner space" (also a great movie from the 80's), "object consciousness", "space consciousness" – pushed us into unfamiliar territory, a world fashioned through a language that reinforced its own ideology, but undermined our personal identities.
The structured interactions between Oprah and Tolle mirrored the events of a conversation, but worked towards a greater end. As in our daily lives, Oprah here personifies our own weaknesses, our own desires, and ultimately our own acceptance of Tolle's spirituality.
The power of the New Age is its lack of boundaries, its openness -- features it shares with Oprah's diets. There are no clear thresholds to cross, no conversions, just a cloud of, let's say “vibrations” that one settles into largely through jargon and the corresponding repositioning of one's self. As Tolle exhorts us, “You can only experience it to know what it means.”
-- Alexander Pincus
Editor's Note: Alexander Pincus has taught architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University and is a co-founder of Bureau V.
Claire Hoffman
| April 22, 2008; 6:50 PM ET | Category: Under GodShare: Email a Friend |
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Posted by: Anonymous | April 25, 2008 1:15 PM
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It sounds as if you are poking fun at Oprah/Tolle’s New Earth, which is fine.
I am probably considered more of a new ager than anything, maybe new age with some Buddhist sympathies mixed in.
Your one comment is accurate the power of New Age is the lack of boundaries and openness. This is a polar opposite of most traditional religious teachings. New age is more about experience and continued searching and examination than thinking one has all the answers.
Assuming that either God is infinite, or if you do not believe in God, that consciousness may be infinite how do you place boundaries on the infinite?
We don’t have all the answers on the finite, physical space and linear time then why do we presume to have all the answers on the infinite?
There is indeed some power to New Age thinking if you are willing to look.
Posted by: Spiritual Mongrel | April 25, 2008 1:55 PM
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Why do people write gibberish? Is this writing in tongues?
Posted by: teejay | April 25, 2008 4:01 PM
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why why why why why boooyaaaah
Posted by: snakes | April 26, 2008 1:06 AM
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Goofball has now taken over at least two threads that are currently unusable thanks to his compulsive behavior.....are there no blog monitors screening for abuse, at least periodically??
Posted by: Anonymous | April 28, 2008 11:07 AM
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Oprah stated she had questioned The Bible even as a young girl afer reading God was a jealous God. She is intelligent enough to know he what he scripture means and yet had the audience believeing that God was jealous of her. I will not watch her again nor believe the good she does is for the reasons I was so passionate about. She needs to rething her mission in life. How many she could reach with the right message. Such a waste of air time.
Posted by: Esther Williams | April 29, 2008 6:50 AM
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Posted by: sitckzqj jwulrh | July 10, 2008 11:54 PM
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"inner space" (also a great movie from the 80's"
Innerspace wasn't so great a movie really -just so-so..
I preferred Spaceballs that came out in the same year (1987).
Spaceballs- pretty much sums up Oprah and her new cashcow..