ORIAH MOUNTAIN DREAMER
is a visionary teacher and writer and author of the best
selling The Invitation
and The Dance. She gives speeches and leads workshops, ceremonies, and retreats throughout
Canada and the United States.
Oriah and I have been holding mutual reality check
conversations, over the years, sharing reports from our
journeys along the
weird and wonderful
paths of the the New Spirituality.
It is the week before Canadian Thanksgiving and I find
her at home working on her new book and getting ready to get
married. She has
recently completed a speaking and workshop tour of the major and some minor
New Spirituality centers throughout the north American Continent.
ORIAH INTERVIEW PART
ONE:
ABE: So why aren't you still out there on the road
giving speeches and workshops? I hear that you are in very high demand.
Oriah: I was a bit anxious about this, because they say, well, you know the
book is hot and your books are still selling well, and you have to strike
while the iron is hot and you have got to go teach at these places now. And I
say "well I cant if its not there for me yet". And I'm writing the third book
in the trilogy now.
ABE: Looks like your entire life could become consumed by becoming a full time
new spirituality celebrity.
Oriah: I've seen a lot of that out on the road
Alexander, people who are speaking and teaching, good sincere people whose
personal lives and health are sometimes falling apart, and I know how easily
that can happen, and yet they have this interesting pressured sense of "well I
have no choice people want me to do all this speaking now, so I have to do it
all now" and I've had program directors say to me "you cant pick and choose"
and I say "well I guess I wont be doing it" *laughter *
ABE: So it really is a spiritual celebrity Star System...
Oriah: There is quite a bit of that, I think far more in the US than here in
Canada, because Americans have a bit of a thing for Stars to begin with.
ABE: Yes. I think that's fair comment, as we all know.
But is that what's really driving this spiritual celebrity system?
Oriah: I think a lot of it has to do with the level of
money. You can make an enormous amount of money in the US that you cant make
here in the same
kind of way. I had a real issue around that *laughter*- I don’t know whether
to reveal it or not, but- I went to get a TN Visa - Trade NAFTA Visa - for
teaching in the States, because I wanted to be upfront about going across the
border, and I was assured by this immigration lawyer that I fell into this
certain category and it was all going to be fine. When I went to apply - you
have to be crossing the border when you actually apply - so we drove down to
Buffalo on a day when I wasn’t really doing anything on the other side and
gave all the stuff the lawyer had given me to hand over, and they turned me
down flat.
ABE: Aha! A real American border incident. *laughter* So what happened
then?
0riah: They said, “No way. You don’t qualify, and now that you’ve applied,
we’re going to red-flag your file because we know that you’re trying to make
money in the US." And I had over $90,000 dollars of speaking engagements set
up, so I thought, "good, now what am I going to do?" And I had a friend with
me railing on “They can’t do this, blah, blah, blah.. "
ABE: What an interesting difficult situation. How do you get out of a thing
like that?
Oriah: l woke up that night
and did my ceremony and my prayers, and my grandmother said to me, “What do
you really want?”, and I said, “I want to cross the border without any
anxiety, and I want to stay free from getting hooked into the hype around all
this stuff”, and they said, "Then give away the money".
ABE: Brilliant. The
grandmother gave you real spiritual advice...
0riah: So I did. I gave
away the money, which got me out of the loop of the immigration thing. Now,
the irony of all this is that when I got back, my lawyer was very upset about
it all and he got me the Visa. I did in fact qualify. The guy who happened to
be at the border just really didn’t know what he was talking about. But by
then it became very clear to me that to give the money away for one year of
speaking engagements, to help me to really look at why I was speaking and
teaching was the right thing to do.
ABE: Yes I see that. An
examination of motives. Always a good thing.
0riah: But you can’t
believe how upset people got about that
ABE: That you gave the
money away?
0riah: Yeah, well, for the
first gig, I didn’t know I had the TN Visa. I wanted to give some of the money
to a musician, a wonderful man who had come to play with me when I did poetry,
who was willing to do it for little or nothing. So I phoned ahead to the
people who were sponsoring the conference, and I said: “Please send my
speaking fees to him”, and people just got very upset with me, I mean,
(laughter) really upset, it was quite fun, really, I had a very dear friend of
mine, a yoga practitioner, say, “You can’t do that, you can’t just give it
away, you’re making the money you have to keep it” I said, “I can do anything
I want to with it”.
ABE: Well of course... it’s
your money..
0riah: Well, the one, good
thing about getting the Trade NAFTA Visa was that I could receive the money
and then give it away, so I didn’t have to explain to whoever I was working
for that I was giving the money away, because some of them really had a hard
time with that.
ABE: Why do you think that
is, they’re presumably spiritual people, they’re plugged into Wholism, they
understand about laws of abundance and all of that. Why were they so upset?
0riah: There were a couple
of things that would happen: people would say funny things to me like, “Well,
I’ve decided to get a lot cleaner with my income tax”, and I hadn’t said
anything about income tax, right? (laughter) So some it was just that, it
brought up for them, wherever they felt they weren’t being clean and clear
about money.
ABE: So yet again the
spiritual teacher becomes the mirror of hidden things. But there's a little
more than that hidden in all this...
0riah: ...I think the other
thing is - it’s true here as it is in the US, but in the US because the sheer
quantity of money is so much greater. Materialism is the implicit but
absolutely assumed truth under everything, its so strong, it’s overwhelming.
The only place I hear new spirituality people, as well as everyone else say,
“I have no choice”, is when it comes down to, “I’ll get more money in one
direction than the other”.
ABE: Now that's both
interesting and disturbing..
0riah: Being convinced that
you have to do what is most profitable financially, that it’s not just a
choice, that its a truth, like a universal truth, is so strong that if you
freely choose to do something else, people get very upset. It’s the closest
thing I think I’ve ever done,-of all the seemingly strange things I've done-
that’s convinced some people that I’m a little crazy.
ABE: How is that so called
'spiritual mentality' going to liberate the American people and the Canadian
people from their fatal materialism and consumerism?
0riah: It won’t.
ABE: So its all very
strange then...
0riah: Yeah it is all very strange. I was watching the Oprah show the other
day and saw this woman, Susie Ormond, who does all this financial counseling.
She's painful to watch because she tells people such obvious common sense
things that you cant believe that they don't already know them. She was on
Oprah, taking to people who were all living way beyond their means, into debt
up the wazoo on credit cards and trips, things they simply couldn’t afford. At
the end of the show Oprah asked her: "Why do you think so many Americans live
beyond their means, why do we feel we need all this?” And she said, “It’s
genetically programmed.”
ABE: Amazing!
0riah: I couldn’t believe
it! Now, I’m not an anti-materialist here, you know, it’s not like I feel we
should all be wearing a hair-shirt and living impoverished or anything.
ABE: No, you always look
nice when I see you, you obviously like nice things,
0riah: Yeah, we bought a
nice home, you know, I mean, it’s not that. The problem is still, that there’s
never any serious questioning, about an economic system that is completely
dependent on getting people to buy things they don’t need and can’t afford.
And when you couple an economic system like that with this spiritual hole in
the centre of people’s lives, which every advertisement says it will fill, and
that's the unspoken bottom line for everyone. It’s quite frightening, really.
ABE: To approach this
question in a hard-headed way for a moment. Is that why the new spirituality
movement is tolerated in this society, because it’s actually an aspect of
capitalism itself?
0riah: It’s good business,
Alexander! You know, I was at the beginning of a conference in New York city,
2,000 people there, and Wisdom-tellers network was co sponsoring the
conference, and they were going to get on stage and just announce a couple of
things they were launching, all new stations and some other things. Then this
woman got on stage, she was so enthusiastic and sincere, and she said to this
huge audience, "We are no longer on the fringe, we are mainstream, we are a
multi- billion dollar business!" and the crowd cheered. I was back stage with
the co sponsors of the conference who were completely mortified. I just
totally cracked up because it was so blatant, but it was the truth! There’s
big business in this new age spirituality, there’s a lot of money to be made.
ABE: So, okay, so, now,
here’s a question then, is this capitalist new spirituality, which then makes
it look a lot like the old spirituality, is it actually helping people, is it
doing anything to transform society, or is it just an arm of the entertainment
industry?
0riah: I don’t know that
it’s transforming society. I don’t know about that. I do clearly see real
individuals come and, through a variety of spiritual things, receive
inspiration or information or establish a connection with other people that
helps them shift their own lives. I think, one of the things I've learned
through being on the road and going to these conferences is, you cant tell
what will touch and shift people, and sometimes somebody will speak in a
certain way or do something that I have all kinds of criticism about, and then
I will talk to someone who’s been in the audience and I will hear how very
concretely that same thing has helped change their life. So that softened me
up a lot to a kind of harshness in myself, about teaching having to be a
certain way, having to have a certain edge and clarity.
ABE: So would you say a
more fluid more intuitive approach?
Oriah: There are a thousand
ways to say the same thing. You don’t know what’s going to hit people at a
certain moment. I’ve had people come back to me and say, “You know, I saw you
speak in such and such a place, and when you said this, everything in my life
changed and has been different since then. And they’ll tell me what I said,
and either, honestly, I didn’t say it, or I didn’t say it the way they heard
it, but for them it’s had enormous meaning and shifted things. So now, I don’t
worry too much about that end of it anymore, because I see things that I think
are wonderful not necessarily seem to do much, and I’ve seen things I’m iffy
about seem to really have an impact on people.
ABE: That phenomenon of people hearing what they need to
hear even when one didn't say it, is fascinating and mysterious. How do you
stand inside that?
Oriah: I think for me who
is writing and speaking, trying to stay as clear as possible is central - I
don’t have a problem with people making money at all - but trying to stay as
clear as possible about where my starting point is, and why I am there.
When my grandmother said to me, “Don’t take the money”, I said, “Well, if I’m
not going to be paid, will I do it at all?” And they said, “Good question. It
depends, if you’ve got anything to say and if these are the people you want to
say it to, and if you don’t, don’t go”. Now, as it turned out, I discovered I
did, I really did want to talk to people. I had something I wanted to say.
Copyright © A.
Blair-Ewart 1995-2003.
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