If you haven’t heard, Oprah is doing an online series with Eckhart Tolle. She chose Tolle’s A New Earth for her bookclub this month. This is a pretty big deal. When Oprah gets behind a book, it sells millions of copies. The first installment of the online series had over 700,000 visitors (Oprah’s figure). The people that watch Oprah are not people who you would expect to be getting excited about consciousness evolution.

Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now was published in 1997. My mom gave it to me in college during my existential crisis phase. I remember thinking it was interesting and useful, but it didn’t cause a real shift. I haven’t read A New Earth, but the first installment of Oprah’s series is very interesting.

For those of you who are at all familiar with any variety of consciousness work, there won’t be anything new, however, it seems like an ideal introduction to mindfulness for traditonally religious people. I love Oprah and I know that many people trust her completely. Oprah takes callers’ questions about reconciling their religious beliefs with this scary New Age spirituality and she puts them totally at ease. The Universe couldn’t ask for a better spokesperson.

The whole endeavor could be seen as a watered-down version of any of the great esoteric traditions, still I think it’s fantastic. It’s so important that these ideas get into people’s daily lives. Just the fact that Oprah is able to do this at all shows that significant numbers of regular people are at least intrigued with the idea of spiritual growth, if not actually awakening to some degree. I am very excited about having lots of new people to consider the Universe with. I feel like I’m just beginning on my path and it’s nice to know there’s many other people in the same boat. Hopefully this will translate into more traffic for our blog. Ha!