Todd Havens: March 2008 Archives

Here we are again all set to talk about the fourth week of the Oprah Winfrey/Eckhart Tolle "A New Earth" Worldwide Web Event. Monday night's class, based on Chapter 4 'Role-playing: The Many Faces of the Ego,' is now available for viewing at Oprah.com (or watch it here at Beliefnet).

The topic of role-playing as it relates to the ego, or unconscious thought, is a huge one. Luckily, it's one of the easiest to identify. I'll start with a quick story from my own life.

I've lived in Los Angeles for over fifteen years and visit my family in Ohio at last once a year. For the longest time I couldn't understand why my time spent there made me feel inauthentic to who I was the other 51 weeks of the year. It wasn't that my family treated me like I was still in high school, or college even, it turned out it was my thoughts and my reactions that were on auto-pilot from the olden days.

I came to these conclusions years before reading any of Eckhart's books, but this quote from "A New Earth" sums it up perfectly:

The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again. (p.101)

Once I realized that I, myself, was putting on an ill-fitted "SON" hat as soon as I stepped off the plane in the Buckeye State, I was freed from those behaviors that made me feel so different from the West Coast version of myself. I was reacting unconsciously in my life, allowing old conditioning and thought patterns to dictate my behavior.

This trap, for lack of a better word, is much like a mother who goes into depression when her child goes away to college or a man who doesn't know who he is once he retires. (Forgive the gender-typing there, they're interchangeable in my mind.) It's ultimately no different than losing ourselves in a relationship when we are "in love" and lost in the role of Boyfriend/Girlfriend/Fiancé(e)/Newlywed/Wife/Husband, etc. These are all very commonplace and the first step to breaking the spell is awareness.

Speaking of confessions, I'm not Catholic and I don't know much about the Sacrament of Penance (or Reconciliation) except for what I've seen in the movies and on television. I certainly don't know anyone that goes to traditional confession, though lapsed friends will stumble into a random Mass or give up something for Lent like tobacco or meat or Altoids. (Those suckers can get addictive!) What I do know, though, is that last week's CNN article about the proliferation of online confession sites caught my eye.

Looking for a church-backed site? Try ivescrewedup.com or mysecret.tv. In a silly mood or just liberal-leaning? Check out dailyconfession.com or the "social experiment" of grouphug.us where you can "hug" or "shrug" in reaction to a posted confession. I still haven't figured out the point of making an anonymous video confession for camfess.com and, judging from the infrequent posts there, I'm apparently not the only one.

With the blossoming of sites like these, the Internet feels like it has finally come full circle. Just think of the Missouri family who used the anonymity of the Internet to lure troubled 13-year-old Megan Meier into an online relationship with a fictitious boy her age only to later pull the rug out from under her, which caused her to take her own life. The very anonymity that facilitated that story's tragic turn of events can now deliver that family from their guilt! (If they had any to begin with.)

Starting with this week, the third week of the Oprah Winfrey/Eckhart Tolle "A New Earth" Web Event, I'll be posting here on what I gleaned from the live "class" held each Monday evening at Oprah.com (9/8c) (you can also watch the classes here on Beliefnet) and from the corresponding chapter in the Eckhart Tolle book, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose."

My first coherent thought after reading this week's chapter (Chapter 3: "The Core of the Ego") and watching the corresponding online class was...ack! No, really. ACK!!!

That's not a hairball lodged in my throat— I'm stunned at how the book and class ultimately bridge our outward-searching religions of the West with the inner, contemplative philosophies of the East. The scope of this subject matter spans who we really are, how to alleviate human suffering, why there's no point in "thinking" about what happens when we die and...the granddaddy of them all...what or who "God" is or isn’t!

I'm guessing next week we'll learn about the meaning of life and where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, though not necessarily in that order.

With the recent discovery that yet another memoir to hit the bookshelves was entirely fabricated, the latest being "Love and Consequences"--the Margaret A. Jones tall tale of being raised by a gang-banging foster family which led to her life of drug-running--it seems that a new literary trend is upon us, one signaling that we are no longer safe in the non-fiction aisles of our bookstores.

Who's to blame here and just whose head should grace the platter when the morality lynch mobs return from a hard day's search for the Truth? Should it be the fibbing author? Or the publishers who are failing to fact-check whether page two actually follows page one?

Perhaps Oprah should just add another network to her empire, this one devoted to the constant chastising of white-lie writers like when she turned her Chicago studio into the world's best-lit principal's office for her tele-flogging of James Frey.

Everyone seems so bent out of shape about this recent spate of fabled memoirs, but I think I have a solution. The publishing industry simply needs to come up with a new genre for the faux memoir...we'll call it the faumoir! It sounds French (read: classy) and full of joie de vivre yet with a provocative dose of oh la la. Think of the all fun suburbia will have displaying their latest faumoir next to the armoire in the boudoir. Everyone make way for Peoria chic!