by Harris, Dan
As I slid into the backseat of Vitale’s Rolls-Royce, it truly hit home to me how far Deepak was on the benign end of the self-help spectrum. Vitale had a doughy face and a large, hairless head, which gave the impression of a vastly overgrown baby. He was giving my crew and me a free taste of what would normally cost $5,000: something he called the “Rolls-Royce Phantom Mastermind” session. As his driver squired us through the Texas countryside, Vitale explained that people paid to come to his home in exurban Austin and take a ride with him, during which he helped them “mastermind ideas that change lives.”
With the camera pointing back at us from the front seat, I said, “This is an amazing car, but five grand is a lot for three hours with you.”
“Well, there are people who think I should charge a lot more than that. They think that’s giving it away.”
The Rolls was just one of many sources of income for “Dr.” Vitale. Homeless just thirty years ago, Vitale had earned his PhD in “metaphysics” through a correspondence course from the University of Sedona. He now lived in a large house with many cars, purchased with the proceeds from dozens of books, with titles like Expect Miracles and Attract Money Now. He also sold products like margarita mix, a health drink called YouthJuice, and stickers with pictures of Russian dolls on them that, for reasons I couldn’t quite understand, Vitale insisted would help the owner meet his or her life goals. (List price: $39.)
In an interview in Vitale’s home office, I asked, “You never wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m getting away with this’?”
“No, never,” he said, laughing as if this were the last thing that would have ever occurred to him.
While, in theory, I could see the appeal of positive thinking—especially as a man who unquestionably spent too much time ruminating—when I scratched the surface of this “philosophy,” I quickly encountered gale force inanity. On the DVD version of The Secret, Vitale pops on-screen to utter such memorable chestnuts as “You are the Michelangelo of your own life. The David that you are sculpting is you—and you do it with your own thoughts.” Under questioning in our interview, though, Vitale admitted that it was not that easy. In fact, he folded like a cheap lawn chair.
“So, what if I want a diamond necklace for my wife?” I asked. “Can I get that by thinking about it?”
“Not just by thinking about it. That’s one of the biggest misconceptions of all time. You have to take action. It’s not just thinking—it’s thinking coupled with action.”
“Isn’t that a statement of the glaringly obvious? You think it’s news to most people that if you want something you have to try to get it?”
“You know, when you put it that way, it sounds silly,” he said, laughing sheepishly. “Pretty brainless.”
The more worrisome message of The Secret phenomenon was not the preposterousness of its primary sales pitch, but instead its destructive undercurrent. “The inverse of your logic,” I argued to Vitale, “seems to blame the victim. Because if you aren’t getting what you want, it must be your fault.”
“This is not a blame game,” he insisted. “Our unconscious thoughts is [sic] what’s creating our reality—and many of our unconscious thoughts are not very positive; they are negative. They actually attract problems.”
So this would be true of kids with cancer? Victims of genocide? “It strains credulity,” I said, “to say that everybody who got hit by the earthquake in Haiti had some unconscious thinking going on that led to them being victims.”
“None of those people are being victimized. In other words—”
“In an earthquake, you’re victimized, aren’t you?”
An awkward pause. A stutter. And then he conceded, “In an earthquake you’re victimized.”
The other star of The Secret I covered managed to push the absurdity level directly into the truly dangerous range. James Arthur Ray was a fit, fifty-something, divorced junior college dropout who oozed smarmy overconfidence. An oily character, he looked like he always had a thin sheen of sweat covering his face. He promised his followers that he could help them achieve “harmonic wealth” in all areas of their life. He claimed that, using his own techniques, he’d not only gotten rich, but that he also no longer so much as caught a cold.
There was clearly some sort of error in his thinking, however, because in October of 2009, at a “Spiritual Warrior Retreat” in Arizona, which cost nearly ten grand per person, three of Ray’s followers died in a sweat lodge ceremony over which he personally presided. It was an imitation of a Native American ritual that Ray promised would be a “re-birthing exercise.”
As the sweat lodge story began to gain national traction, the producers of Nightline sent me to Arizona to check it out. Sedona, a city known as the New Age Vatican, set amid dramatic red rock cliffs, was a mecca for spiritual tourists who were catered to by a legion of self-proclaimed healers, mystics, wind whisperers, and intuitive counselors who offered such services as “soul-retrieval,” “energy healing,” and “aura photos.” The downtown shopping district echoed with the sounds of wind chimes and the low hum of didgeridoo.
For me, the most pathetic part of the entire story was talking to the survivors who still claimed to believe in Ray. We went to the home of Brian Essad, an unassuming employee at an event production company. He showed us his “visioning board,” on which he had a picture of Alyssa Milano, who he was hoping to meet. He also showed us the books and handouts he’d collected from all the Ray retreats he’d attended. Then he revealed all the unpaid bills that were mounting on his kitchen table—bills he might have been able to pay if he hadn’t given so much money to Ray. “It’s like right now, I don’t actually have enough cash in my account to pay all these bills. So I’m just kind of putting out there that I need to attract money that I need to pay all these.”
After investigating for four months, police in Arizona charged Ray with manslaughter. The man who once told viewers of The Secret that they should treat the universe as if it were Aladdin’s lamp was perp-walked in front of news cameras, wearing handcuffs and leg irons, looking mortified. Even though he’d authored a book called Harmonic Wealth, he said he didn’t have enough money to make bail. In another delicious twist, investigators released documents that seemed to explain how Ray maintained his robust physical appearance. It wasn’t the Law of Attraction. After the sweat lodge, police found a suitcase in Ray’s room, filled with diet supplements and prescribed steroids.
That discovery in the hotel room crystallized everything that I found most absurd and hypocritical about the self-help industry. To tell the truth, it hadn’t taken long for me to figure out that this scene was not for me. Luckily, with an assist from my future wife, I’d found something more promising.
Chapter 5
The Jew-Bu
I was back at the Tribeca Grand, the self-consciously hip hotel in downtown Manhattan where I’d stayed in the days after 9/11. The place had now been restored to its natural state, with mood lighting, techno music, and well-dressed people sipping foreign beers on fluffy chairs. Hardly the environment in which I would have expected to find the kind of guru I was looking for. Until this moment, in fact, I hadn’t quite realized that looking for a guru was what I’d been doing all along.
The guy standing here with me at the bar certainly would not have embraced the title, which was, of course, part of his appeal. He was totally reasonable and utterly uncheesy, a man with actual credentials, including a medical degree from Harvard, which conferred a sort of legitimacy that, say, an online degree from the University of Sedona did not.
His basic message was that the best self-help program was developed 2,500 years ago—a worldview that, oddly enough, held that there is actually no “self” to “help.”
The seeds of this encounter had been planted one evening at home as I was changing out of my suit and tie and into sweatpants, shucking sartorial detritus—pants, socks, belt—all over the floor. I enjoyed doing this not only because it appealed t
o both my laziness and my constant desire to rush to the next thing (The sooner I get these clothes off, the sooner I’ll get dinner), but also because it annoyed Bianca, who sometimes playfully called me Hurricane Harris. On this night, though, she was not taking the bait. She was coming at me with a gift, in fact.
In her hands she had a pair of books written by someone named Dr. Mark Epstein. She told me that, after months of listening to me alternately rhapsodize or carp about Eckhart Tolle et al., it had finally clicked with her why the ideas I was yammering on about with varying levels of cogency sounded so familiar. About ten years prior, she had read some books by Epstein who, she explained, was a psychiatrist and a practicing Buddhist. His writing had been useful for her during a difficult time in her twenties, a quarter-life crisis when she was struggling with family issues as well as the decision about whether to embark on the interminable training necessary to become a doctor.
I flipped over one of the paperbacks to get a look at this Epstein character, and there on the back cover was a kind-faced, middle-aged guy wearing a V-neck sweater and wire-rimmed glasses, sitting on the floor against the type of white backdrop you often see in photography studios. Even though he looked infinitely less weird than either Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra, I still found myself thinking, Not my kind of guy.
That mild, momentary spasm of aversion was assuaged by the little bio next to Epstein’s picture, which said he was a trained psychiatrist with a private practice in Manhattan.
Thus began another night of delayed sleep and revelatory reading, with Bianca quietly dozing by my side. It was like my first evening with Tolle, only less embarrassing. What I found in the pages of Epstein’s book was thunderously satisfying. Like scratching an itch in an unreachable area. Like finally figuring out why Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia’s sexual tension never felt right. Very quickly, it became blazingly clear: The best parts of Tolle were largely unattributed Buddhism. Tolle had not, as I’d assumed when I’d first read A New Earth, made up his insights out of whole cloth. Apparently he’d appropriated them, and then effected a sort of intellectual elephantiasis, exaggerating their features in the most profitable of ways. Two and a half millennia before Eckhart Tolle started cashing his royalty checks, it was the Buddha who originally came up with that brilliant diagnosis of the way the mind works.
In Epstein’s writings, it was all there: the insatiable wanting, the inability to be present, the repetitive, relentlessly self-referential thinking. Here was everything that fascinated me about Tolle, without the pseudoscience and grandiloquence. To boot, the good doctor could actually write. Compared to Tolle, in fact, this guy was Tolstoy. After months of swimming against the riptide of bathos and bullshit peddled by the self-help subculture, it was phenomenally refreshing to see the ego depicted with wry wit.
“We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath,” wrote Epstein. “ ‘I like this. I don’t like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this, no more of that.’ Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more.” There were also delightful passages about the human tendency to lurch headlong from one pleasurable experience to the next without ever achieving satisfaction. Epstein totally nailed my habit of hunting around my plate for the next bite before I’d tasted what was in my mouth. As he described it, “I do not want to experience the fading of the flavor—the colorless, cottony pulp that succeeds that spectacular burst over my taste buds.”
Prior to reading Epstein, my most substantial interaction with Buddhism was when, as a fifteen-year-old punk kid, I stole a Buddha statue from a local gardening store and put it my bedroom because I thought it looked cool. Despite the fact that I was now a religion reporter, I still had only a glancing understanding of this faith. With Buddhists comprising only about 1/300 of the U.S. population and not being in the habit of taking strident political stands, they didn’t attract much coverage. What I knew of Buddhism was limited to the following: it was from Asia somewhere; the Buddha was overweight; and his followers believed in things like karma, rebirth, and enlightenment.
Epstein made clear, though, that you didn’t have to buy into any of the above to derive benefit from Buddhism. The Buddha himself didn’t claim to be a god or a prophet. He specifically told people not to adopt any of his teachings until they’d test-driven the material themselves. He wasn’t even trying to start a religion, per se. The word Buddhism was actually an invention of the nineteenth-century Western scholars who discovered and translated the original texts. As best I could tell, the whole thing appeared to be less a faith than a philosophy, and one that had been intriguing psychologists since the days of Freud, when his early Viennese followers studied those newly translated texts. In recent decades, the mental health community had come to embrace Buddhism in an increasingly thoroughgoing way. According to Epstein, the Buddha may well have been the “original psychoanalyst.” To my surprise, Epstein seemed to be arguing that Buddhism was better than seeing a shrink. Therapy, he said, often leads to “understanding without relief.” Even Freud himself had conceded that the best therapy could do was bring us from “hysteric misery” to “common unhappiness.”
Epstein’s frank admissions about the limitations of therapy tracked with my personal experiences. I was, of course, grateful to Dr. Brotman for getting me to quit drugs and then steadfastly but affably making sure I stayed the course. I was also fond of him personally—especially for his ability to point out my idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies. However, I still had that nagging and perhaps naive sense of disappointment that he had failed to come up with some sort of “unifying theory” to explain my entire psychology. Now Epstein seemed to be saying that even if Brotman had ripped the cover off some primordial wound, it wouldn’t have left me better off. The limitation wasn’t my therapist, Epstein seemed to be arguing—it was therapy.
So what exactly was this not-quite-religion that could purportedly do a better job of salving the tortured soul? I attacked the question the way I would a major investigative news story, learning everything I could. I bought a ton of books, adding them next to the already precarious stack of self-help tomes on my bedside table. (A tableau Bianca often insisted on covering up when we had company.)
According to the official story, the Buddha was born about five hundred years before Christ in northeast India, in what is now Nepal. As legend has it, his mother was spontaneously impregnated, in what sounded like the Buddhist version of the Immaculate Conception. She died seven days after the birth, leaving the boy, whose name was Siddhartha, to be raised by his father, a regional king.
The king had been advised by a local wise man that Siddhartha would grow up to either be a powerful monarch or a great spiritual leader. Eager to ensure that the boy would one day take the throne, the king arranged to have him confined to the palace walls, protected from the outside world and anything that might trigger his mystical tendencies.
At age twenty-nine, however, Siddhartha grew curious, ran away from home, and became a wandering monk. This was a pretty common practice back in those days. Penniless renunciates with shaved heads, bare feet, and tattered robes would roam the forests, seeking spiritual awakening. The prince did this for six years, until one night he sat under a bodhi tree, vowing not to get up until he’d achieved enlightenment. At dawn, the man formerly known as Siddhartha opened his eyes and gazed out at the world as the Buddha, “the awakened one.”
For a skeptic, there was obviously a lot not to like in this story. However, the substance of what the Buddha allegedly realized beneath the bodhi tree—and then began disseminating to his followers—was fascinating, illuminating, and once again appeared to have been crafted by someone who had spent a great deal of time inside my brain.
As best I could understand it, the Buddha’s main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, w
e suffer because we cling to things that won’t last. A central theme of the Buddha’s “dharma” (which roughly translates to “teaching”) revolved around the very word that had been wafting through my consciousness when I used to lie on my office couch, pondering the unpredictability of television news: “impermanence.” The Buddha embraced an often overlooked truism: nothing lasts—including us. We and everyone we love will die. Fame fizzles, beauty fades, continents shift. Pharaohs are swallowed by emperors, who fall to sultans, kings, kaisers, and presidents—and it all plays out against the backdrop of an infinite universe in which our bodies are made up of atoms from the very first exploding stars. We may know this intellectually, but on an emotional level we seem to be hardwired for denial. We comport ourselves as if we had solid ground beneath our feet, as if we had control. We quarantine the elderly in nursing homes and pretend aging will never happen to us. We suffer because we get attached to people and possessions that ultimately evaporate. When we lose our hair, when we can no longer score that hit of adrenaline from a war zone we so crave, we grow anxious and make bad decisions.
Unlike many of the faiths I’d come across as a religion reporter, the Buddha wasn’t promising salvation in the form of some death-defying dogma, but rather through the embrace of the very stuff that will destroy us. The route to true happiness, he argued, was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens. Waking up to the reality of our situation allows you to, as the Buddhists say, “let go,” to drop your “attachments.” As one Buddhist writer put it, the key is to recognize the “wisdom of insecurity.”
