The Church of Oprah

It's not really the church of Oprah per se, but this is an interesting debate. Hysteria (the commentators voice has an...er...interesting urgency), hype, or a few kernels of wisdom, a glimmer of truth between the karma and the dogma. You decide (well, you will anyway).

Eckhart Tolle - listen to him discuss The Power of Now and A New Earth

A good triathlete friend of mine, Daniel, a long time ago, when I first moved to South Korea, recommended I read a book with a mysterious title: The Power of Now. It is one of those rare books which do change your life - it has and still changes my life and I still refer to it often (except right now, once again someone else has my copy) - which you end up giving away and buying again and again.

Eckhart Tolle has written a new book; I'm reading it now. It's called The New Earth. I highly recommend both, starting with The Power of Now.
You can order the Power of Now here (Amazon also rates it very highly).

A New Earth is interesting. Listening to Tolle speak (he enunciates calmly and meticulously, speaks slowly and carefully and thoughtfully, in a German-American-British accent), it was strange for me to observe him observing the same thing I had observed in the bible. That Adam and Eve's discovery of 'good and evil' was really a mythological story about human beings becoming self-aware, developing discernment (being conscious even of the fact that they were naked, and of some other presence in the garden).

Consciousness begets consciousness, though if we try very hard, and are distracted enough, well, it begets fixation, obsession, indulgence, vanity and all the stuff the ego wants to bother with. Because we were all children once, we have the ability to remember both the mythic journey of man, and also our own spiritual journey in this lifetime. All there is, is this Isness. All we have is the Now. That makes all we say, and do, and think, and determine - precious, and vital, fragile and intransigent. It makes who we are and who we choose to be as important and meaningful as it is.
Itis all quite beautiful, quite magnificent, and quite terrible - this continuum that we are a part of (unless we imagine we are apart from it, as we may be apart from ourselves, or unless we cannot imagine ourselves to be a part - connected to- anything).

I also highly recommend A New Earth. You can order A New Earth here. If enough people read it, perhaps it will be, and perhaps sooner than some of our best hopes.

Listen to Oprah speak to Eckhart Tolle here.

Patrick Swayze diagnosed with pancreatic cancer

Ironically enough on Oprah last night Randy Pausch gave an on-television version of the 'dead guy' speech he gave (downloaded a gazillion times). Basically pancreatic cancer is the last cancer you want. Your chances are surviving it are very slim.

So if you could choose from a list, Pancreatic cancer would be the last one you'd choose. Only 5% of Americans diagnosed live longer than 5 years. Death itself is also pretty unpleasant, as more and more systems of the body shutdown, including the digesting, liver and lung function. Essentially your body then becomes poisoned, you're unable to use the toilet or metabolise food you eat, and then your lungs stop working. This is what makes Randy Pausch's upbeat speech so amazing. The question is, will Swayze survive? What are his chances? Apparently not terrible. Read here for more.

Watch Randy Pausch on You Tube here.

Let them paint on the walls

Juno MacGuff: I think I'm, like, in love with you.
Paulie Bleeker: You mean as friends?
Juno MacGuff: No, I mean, like, for real. 'Cause you're, like, the coolest person I've ever met, and you don't even have to try, you know...
Paulie Bleeker: I try really hard, actually.

Instead of crawling back into my cave last night I ventured out. As far as - GASP - Montecasino. It was quite funny. I was really starving and so I said to L, "Shall we sit out...er (glancing up at the fake ceiling)...should we sit out inside?"

Salad was great, and the movie was an incredible breath of fresh air.

Back at the cave I had a top 500 worst sleeps in my sleep (around 2 hours, low quality), and so when the alarm went off at 4:30am I cringed, moaned, assumed the foetus position. I sent A an sms saying: "Dude, don't you want to ride tomorrow. I'm death in a blanket." (I'm paraphrasing). After two minutes I said stuff it, and kicked my sorry ass out of bed. Had a very nice ride (this time on my Trek since the Cannon is probably sitting in a hanger in Cape Town already).

Last night on Oprah I watched this professor with pancreatic cancer giving this speech on living. Are you an Eeyore or a Tigger. Oprah summed up the whole show by quoting something from his presentation. He'd said he had fantastic parents. When he was a youngster he asked permission to paint various things on the walls of his room. They felt that art (and expression) was more important than walls, so he went on to paint an elevator, rockets, equations and so forth on his bedroom walls.

We can do the same in our lives today, but the canvass is the walls we put around us, to defend our own views of the world.

Watch Randy Pausch's lecture here.

Oprah asks girl to return to academy

Oprah Winfrey has met the family of the first pupil to complain of abuse at her elite school for disadvantaged girls, and invited the girl to return to the academy.

The US magazine People quoted the girl’s father as saying they met for two hours with Winfrey on Sunday at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls and that it was the first meeting since they had withdrawn their child from the school after staff ignored her complaints.

For the rest of this article from Sowetan Online, go here.

NVDL: Will she return? Should she? I think she should.

Girl quits Winfrey Academy

From Sowetan Online:
by Canaan Mdletshe

Mom says daughter was ill-treated

Philanthropic TV personality Oprah Winfrey may have tried to light up the lives of some lucky South African girls with a R300 million state of the art school.
But for 12-year-old Aviwe Ngubo, her brief stay at the institution was a nightmare, says her mother, Bongiwe Ngubo.

“I have pulled my child out of the school and I regret the day I sent her there,” she said. “She was treated like dirt in that school and she suffered emotional abuse.”

For more, click here.

NVDL: Oprah recently mentioned on her own show that the school was not 'too strict'. She described the need to protect the girls from drug dealers etc. How though, to protect the girls from within, from snobbery and bickering?

Luciano* has died, but you can start living now

Late last night I went for a swim at the Old Eds Virgin Active. It's that quiet time when almost everyone has gone home, and the day's work has exhausted a cities staffers.

I had gone to gym hungry, and had no choice but to immediately eat, and then train. So I didn't feel comfortable in the water.
I swam 1.5km - 36:17 - but had lost 500g through that workout, weighing in afterwards at a somewhat discouraging 76.7kg.

It had been an irritating day for various reasons. Today in my car, as I started up Glenhove road two black athletes started their ascent. It's a long, steady, brutal climb. I hooted halfway up and gave them the thumbs up. It may have been my imagination, but they seemed to speed up. At any rate, they got to the hill - running on foot - before I did, jammed in traffic.

The lesson really is to start living now, to be aware opf what's possible, and not to go through your life, half asleep, doing what everyone else is doing. Wake up and smell your own coffee.

A great place to start, is to go to your pain. Your pain is like a great treasure chest at the top of a mountain. Getting there isn't easy (even just in emotional terms). We insulate ourselves against that chest of pain by eating, or filling our lives with various inconsequential things. Our relationships too can be an endless scenario that avoids getting to the chest. It is only once we bravely take the trouble, do the work, and commit and stay on the hard road up that mountain, that we will find the secrets in the treasure chest.

They are, quite simply, the most important reasons behind who we are who we are, and what has hurt and formed us in our lives. It may be regrets or losses. It may be things we are aware of, but not fully aware of just how powerful these things are.

For me - and I realised this once again this morning - it's my mother, and I think, in general, my family. Like everyone else, you keep bumping your head against your pain, without fully acknowledging its importance.

Pain provides the quintessential message for your life to rediscover its meaning. So climb that mountain. Don't procrastinate. Be alone with your pain, and listen. Then begin to learn and find your way to the treasures that flow from really knowing and being who you are. That's the way to start living the life you are meant to be living.



*By Bernard Holland

Luciano Pavarotti, the Italian singer whose ringing, pristine sound set a standard for operatic tenors of the postwar era, has died. He was 71.
His death was announced by his manager. The cause was pancreatic cancer. In July 2006 he underwent surgery for the cancer in New York and had made no public appearances since then. He was hospitalized again this summer and released on Aug. 25.