Is Mike Myers Film "The Love Guru" Laughing WITH or AT Spiritual Self-Help?
The movie doesn't open until June 20, 2008, but people are already talking about THE LOVE GURU and Mike Myers' latest outrageous character, Guru Pitka, "the 2nd Best Guru in India."
As you can see in the trailer below, the movie will be laugh-out-loud funny - that just goes with the territory in a Mike Myers film - but will it be helpful?
Oprah caught so much grief in the 90's when she had a segment on her show called "Remember Your Spirit," but she continued to inspire the world, most recently in partnership with Eckhart Tolle (read about it here in O Magazine). Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Louise Hay and others have achieved incredible success by helping people improve their lives, but many people still scoff at their work. I have my own problems with "The Secret," but it's still helped millions of people feel more confident and focused and optimistic.
There are definitely ways to differentiate between what is helpful and what is not - for me, laid out most clearly in Ken Wilber's GRACE AND GRIT - and I would advocate that such discrimination is important. THE LOVE GURU seems to point out the worst excesses of spiritual self-help, and maybe in that way will help people discriminate between what is actually useful and what is sugary slop!
Will Myers' horny guru do anything to help people in the real world or do you think the movie's mockery will take the spiritual self-help movement backward?
How much can we laugh at ourselves? Do we take spirituality too seriously? THE LOVE GURU will be giving us the chance to hold it lightly! Will you see the movie? Does hearing that the movie is officially partnered with Deepak Chopra and Beliefnet (and that they asked MyOutSpirit for our input) change how you feel?











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