Why Tony Robbins Never Talks about Funerals on Larry King Live and Other Dirty Tricks that Life Plays on the Happiness-Is-a-Vibration Gurus and Their Followers

Channel-flipping the other night, I mindlessly managed to let Larry King Live out of the TV genie’s bottle.

Actually, sometimes I watch his entire show. As when Bill Maher, the philosopher comedian, sheds more truth in an hour (minus commercials) than a year’s worth of Meet the Press. No such luck tonight. Tonight, I get “Chicken Soup for the Soul” genius Jack Canfield. Joe Vitale, the hypno-marketing/minister/therapist. And three other think-yourself-happy-happy-happy gurus.

King prattled his way through this opening: “Tonight, want to find true love, make more money, have the life of your dreams? Then think about it. That's right. The power of your thoughts can improve your life. Sound unthinkable? Well, science says there's something to it, so engage your brain for an amazing hour that could transform your world and help you live happily ever after.”

And the first question goes to an everything-is-energy-and-vibration authority named James Ray, famed for his “Law of Attraction.”

Which is what?

Answers Ray: “The law of attraction says when you're in a certain vibration you're going to attract to you that which you're in vibration or harmonic vibration with”—and they’re off, en masse, host and hosted, to live happily ever after, or at least for the next hour, pontificating about how to think yourself into a frenzy of continual bliss.

I’m being overly cynical. Believe it or not, we brain-function-studies types watch the
think-yourself-happy-happy-happy gurus as closely as most. Because they have outsized followings at the moment in the most advanced of our societies, including the U.S., the U.K., and Europe in particular. In those parts of society where there is surplus wealth, the happiness-is-a-state-of mind cult can flourish. It’s not that most of the followers of the Jack Canfields and Joe Vitales and James Rays necessarily have a lot of surplus wealth. It’s just that they are, at least momentarily, freed of just enough of the grimmer realities of life enough of the time to think that they can have a surplus of wealth, happiness and all else if only they get their vibrations right.

I wish them well … and wellness. But I can’t help but wonder what they would have had to say to people in neighborhoods where my family and I have lived on occasion of the onset of totally unexpected vibrations like these: (1) At 4 in the morning, a 21-year-old inebriated youth fails to make the slight curve at the end of our street, steers his car straight into a tree and dies instantly three doors down from our house. For days, his young friends stop, park, approach the tree, kneel, leave flowers, shout out feelings of hurt, lean on supportive shoulders or pull away angrily and flee. (2) Our next door neighbor was 48. He died a few weeks ago of a heart attack while coaching his son’s soccer game. Our banker said the mother of five was sobbing so hard when she opened the bank account for gifts to the children’s college fund in his memory it saddened the whole bank staff. (3) The son was 29, a life-long sufferer from schizophrenia—and off his meds. He shot his father to death upstairs while his mother fled to hide in a downstairs closet, cell phone in hand. Our teenaged daughter was home alone next door. It happened during a shift change at the police station. It took the cops forever to arrive. Who knows what else might have happened?

And these are some of the safest neighborhoods, statistically, in America. And this is what the happiness-is-a-state-of mind cults almost always ignore.

So I won’t.

The chances are pretty remote that you’ll ever be watching Dudley Lynch Live on CNN, but if it happens, here’s my opening night’s line-up of guests:

Dr. Thomas Attig, author of How We Grieve: Relearning the World and The Heart of Grief: Death and the Search for Lasting Love. Attig is an expert on brain vibrations, too. The vibrations of bereavement. In How We Grieve, an especially fine work, he warns about how our brains must struggle during extreme grief with a long list of vibrating vulnerabilities. And of all that the brain must relearn: the world, ourselves, our relationships with the deceased, as starters. Powerful stuff, experienced every moment by someone somewhere, maybe even next door.

Dr. Stephen Law, author of The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking. As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to be critical, dismissive even, of a huge amount of what philosophers think, write and say. But not of this philosopher’s work. He wants us all to be better thinkers and use some of the tools of philosophy to assure that we don’t live unexamined lives. In The Gym, he teaches us how to “question the assumptions and unpick the arguments” of people who would rather we be sheep than shepherd (and who often appear on Larry King Live).

And, of course, representatives from the families of the people who have died suddenly in recent years almost within an arm’s reach of my front door. How have their brains coped when so much of what they were in “harmonic vibration” with suddenly disappeared or unraveled?

I may even invite Larry King. I’d like to ask him what he really thinks of the think-yourself-happy-happy-happy gurus he keeps inviting on his show.

You can read the transcript of the Larry King Live program here: "The Power of Positive Thinking”

Order Tom Attig’s books here:
The Heart of Grief: Death and the Search for Lasting Love
How We Grieve: Relearning the World

There’s an interview with Attig here: “Interview with Tom”

Order Stephan Law’s book here: The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking

Go here for Law’s web site: "Thinking Big”

Posted on November 20, 2006

Let's Just Hope That God Is Indeed (As Some Physicists Claim) Left-Handed Or We Just Might Find Our Beloved Planet Abruptly Reversing Its Spin!

Maybe I'm the last of the brain geeks to hear of this demonstration of a brain unto its own self, but it's indeed a new trick to me. One of our intrepid readers in Iowa writes:

"1. While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles with it.
"2. Now, while doing this, draw the number 6 in the air with your right hand.

"Your foot will change direction!!! And there is nothing you can do about it, even if you try it fifty times!"

I didn't try it fifty times, but I tried it several, and my right foot reversed directions every time. But not so the left foot.

Left brain/right brain aficionados (or any other kind of aficionado) are invited to submit their theories about what's happening here.

Posted on November 11, 2006

If Your Sense of Curiosity Likes Big-Picture Inquiries and Great Mysteries That Run in Sequels, Then You Couldn’t Have Picked a Better Time (So Far) to Live

For me, one of the things that makes the estimable “times in which we live” so doggone mesmerizing is the shear scope of the questions being asked. Add to that new technologies for pursuing answers. This equates to some remarkable successes, coming one after the other, in understanding ourselves and the world around us.

Such a thought kicked in the afterburner the other night as I watched a rerun of the BBC’s Horizon show about astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter’s search for a way to capture images and data on supernovas on demand. Perlmutter heads the international Supernova Cosmology Project headquartered at Berkeley Lab.

In the early 1990s, he realized that supernovas—exploding stars far, far away—held the secret to how fast the universe was expanding. But to make good predictions, scientists needed data on large numbers of supernovas, and these rara avises of the nighttime skies are among the most uncommon of events.

Maybe you saw the show, too. If you did, you know that in about a five-year period in the middle ‘90s, the indefatigable Perlmutter and his team developed ways to use the world’s biggest telescopes, new kinds of film and new computer technology to find very distant supernovae "by the batch" with only a few days of telescope time each year. With data from scores of supernovas, Perlmutter and company concluded that the universe is blowing itself apart fast enough to keep on expanding forever: eventually, the nighttime skies will be black because nearly everything that currently twinkles up there will be too far away for anyone to see.

This scientific triumph was still fresh on my mind when I read about a quest by another scientist that shares a kinship with Saul Perlmutter’s successful quest in ways that are more than merely metaphorical or poetic.

That scientist is Andrew Newberg, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind there. Since the mid-1990s (roughly the same period of Perlmutter’s supernova studies), Newberg has been hooking various spiritual practitioners, including Franciscan nuns, Buddhists and Pentecostal Christians who speak in tongues, up to imaging equipment and studying what happens to their brains when they get in a [you choose the best word for you] a religious, spiritual or contemplative state of mind.

But what Newberg would really like to do is have someone hooked up to his gizmos when the person is having a Meister Eckhart or St. Francis-like moment of world-shattering transcendence—a truly BIG, profound, INNER experience. Only, he knows the odds of having that happen are not very likely.

Well, if he were so fortunate as to capture such a rare event with his apparatus, what does he think he’d see?

Here’s what Dr. Newberg told Salon.com’s interviewer Steve Paulson: “I think the orientation part of the brain would be profoundly affected. So while we're seeing decreased activity in this orientation part of the brain during prayer, for example, I think if somebody had a true mystical experience, we would see a vastly greater change—to the point where there would be a complete loss of their sense of self in relation to the world. Now, one other aspect of the overall function of the brain that we haven't mentioned is the autonomic nervous system that regulates our arousal and our quiescent responses in the body. What we have hypothesized is that in these peak states, there is a simultaneous activation of both this very profound sense of arousal and alertness and also a deep sense of oceanic bliss and calmness. Maybe someday, if we're fortunate enough, that could actually be captured on a brain scan.”

The search for a “God center” in the brain is intriguing to more than neurotheologians like Newberg. Neurobiologist and geneticist Dean Hamer has already written a book called The God Gene that identifies a specific gene, VMAT2, that varies (is “polymorphic”) from person to person. VMAT2 seems to regulate how a person responds emotionally and cognitively to the same stimuli. Could this explain why some folks are more susceptible to hypnotic or to “religious” experiences than others? Hamers and other researchers pursing this line of research haven’t proved it but think they might.

But even if they hammer this puppy scientifically, notes philosopher Daniel Dennett in his remarkable book arguing for studying religions scientifically, Breaking the Spell, it will signal merely the beginning of a new, Saul Perlmutter-like inquiry. The next stage is to inquire into how whatever brain functions might turn out to be the lock-step companions of genuine religious experience managed to produce the extraordinary religious panorama that surrounds and involves humanity today.

Dennett quotes British scientist Richard Dawkins: “If neuroscientists find a ‘god center’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me want to know why the god center evolved. Why did those of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a god center survive better than rivals who did not?”

Just as Perlmutter’s discovery (that the universe is expanding so fast it will never stop) led to yet another deep mystery (why is it expanding so fast?), a documented worldclass transcendent experience or an ironclad God gene will merely deepen a greater mystery: why and how has religion come to exercise such a hold on humankind?

Isn’t life interesting?

You can read the transcript of the BBC Horizon program about Saul Perlmutter here: "From Here to Infinity ”

Salon.com’s interview with Andrew Newberg is here: "Divining the brain”

Purchase Dean Hamer’s book here: "The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes”

Purchase philosopher Daniel Dennett’s book here: "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”

Posted on November 03, 2006