From the Aloha State to "Zero State"

Aloha, y’all!

Break out the pineapples and coconuts, and don your gaudy shirts, grass skirts, and leis, Dear Ones; Hawai’ian Week is on again. After our tropical vacation was cut short a couple of weeks ago, in deference to Steve Jobs and his iPhone, we’re back on track. And what an opportune time for us to continue Hawai’ian Week, for tomorrow is also the official launch day of a new Hawai’i-related book that one of the book’s promoters asked me to mention on my blog. As it happens, that book’s big blast-off, originally scheduled for the end of June, was also delayed in order to keep it from upstaging the iPhone. Small world, eh?

The work in question, as you may have guessed, is Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More, by Joe Vitale and Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len (Wiley, $24.95 US). The "secret system" that will lead you to wealth, health and the rest is a modern – and proprietary – version of a traditional Hawai’ian technique called Ho’oponopono. The title of the book is an allusion not only to a limitless life, but to what is known as "zero state," which in this case has nothing to do with electrical circuit theory. "Zero state" in this latter-day incarnation of Ho’oponopono refers to "the source, where there are zero limits," as Joe explains in his introduction. Or, to put it another way, it is the place "where nothing exists but anything is possible. In the zero state there are no thoughts, words, deeds, memories, programs, beliefs, or anything else. Just nothing."

Which, I suppose, is as good a place as any to start. Accordingly the book begins with a quotation from Danish writer Tør Norretranders, author of The User Illusion, who wrote: "The universe began when nothing saw itself in the mirror." Right away that got me asking questions. Did mirrors exist before the Big Bang? And how could nothing see itself if there was nothing to see? Oh, wait, I think I just answered my own question there. But I still have other questions. For example, how would nothing know whether it was seeing itself, or if it was looking at something (or nothing) else? A person could drive herself crazy with such questions. For me, that would be a short trip.

But the big question you may be asking is, "Why was Cosmic Connie, of all people, chosen by a member of the Vitale publicity team to write about Zero Limits?" It all started when I got this email from an alert book publicist the week before last:

I noticed that you recently blogged about Joe Vitale’s book, "The Attractor Factor." Do you know that he has a new book coming out in a couple of weeks called "Zero Limits" that takes his message a step beyond "The Attractor Factor?" I’d be glad to send you a copy of the book if you'll consider mentioning it on your blog. We’d be extremely appreciative if you could do so on, or about, the book’s publication date, which is July 10.

Now, my first thought was that the publicist (1) had not taken the time to actually read my blog; (2) has a rich sense of irony; or (3) subscribes to the old and possibly outmoded belief that "there’s no such thing as bad publicity." It’s true that I have mentioned The Attractor Factor a few times. But it was not exactly in the most complimentary terms. As it happens, I had also written about Zero Limits…well, sort of. And believe it or not, I had half a mind to send an email back, advising the publicist to actually read a few posts on WM before being so quick with the free-book offer.

But my second thought was, "Hey, a free book is a free book." And as my friend Tony Michalski pointed out to me, getting free books to review is one of the perks of being a "journalist." Not that what I’m doing here on WM is anything remotely close to journalism, and I’ve never claimed it is. But why quibble? Besides, publicists are generally very busy people, and they don't have the time to read long-winded posts on silly blogs. In the end, I accepted the publicist’s offer to send me the book. It arrived via FedEx a couple of days later, and I noticed on the air bill that the FedEx charge was billed to a third party – I’m thinking the publisher. No problem; I’m sure they can afford it.

The truth is that I had seen quite a bit of advance hype about Zero Limits, mostly on Joe Vitale’s blog. Among countless other mentions of the book, Joe recently wrote that when he finally got the finished product back from the publisher, he was stunned all over again by what a splendid book it is. "I am beyond excited," he wrote. "I’ve seen the published book and it is beautiful. It’s a true miracle, as it’s the first book to reveal the updated form of ho’oponopono."

But we don’t have to take his word for it. The back cover, for example, is filled with praise from various pals of his who declare Zero Limits to be everything from "a stick of dynamite" to "the most mind-altering reading experience of your life." The latter comment is from BluBlocker king, direct-marketing master, and Maui resident Joe Sugarman, who opens his home to Vitale when the latter visits Maui. Marc Gitterle, MD, who happens to have co-founded a nutritional supplement company with Vitale, wrote, "I love this book! I feel it will be the definitive personal-change/self-help book for at least a generation and viewed as a watershed event by historians. There is real potential for this book to start a movement that will end war, poverty, and the environmental devastation of our beloved planet."

But what else would you expect from the man who, a couple of years ago, led a movement to redirect Hurricane Rita so it wouldn’t harm Houston or the Vitale estate in the Texas Hill Country? (Um, sorry, East Texas and Louisiana.) Could one expect anything less than an astonishing breakthrough work from a man who is known, at least to himself, as "The Buddha of the Internet," due to "his combination of spirituality and marketing acumen?"*

Even if you haven’t heard any of the advance hype about Zero Limits, you don’t have to read beyond the dust jacket to discern that it is not a scholarly study of ancient Hawai’ian belief systems. The subtitle is the first clue. Then there’s the copy on the inside front flap, which begins with the standard come-on to the legions whose frenzied pursuit of happiness** has sent them over the sometimes fine line that separates divine discontent from malcontent: "Are you overworked and overstressed? Are you doing your best but finding professional success and personal fulfillment frustratingly difficult to obtain?"

And then we’re off and running with the now-famous capsule version of the Joe Vitale story. In the tradition of many of today’s New-Wage gurus, Joe seems to be getting impressive mileage out of his rags-to-riches tale.

He was once homeless. Now, he’s the millionaire author of numerous bestselling books, an Internet celebrity, and an in-demand online marketing guru. What happened to create all of that success? Was it hard work, divine providence, or both? The answer may surprise you…

The answer may really surprise you if you subscribed to the belief that the secret to Joe’s success was the Law Of Attraction, as he said and implied on The Secret and in countless references to that hit infomercial and its companion book. Turns out, though, that it wasn’t really LOA after all. The real key to truly unlimited success for Joe lies – you guessed it – in the ancient Hawai’ian secret he writes about in Zero Limits. Joe verifies this in his introduction, presenting a laundry list of some of his proudest achievements over the past ten years. These include his 1997 Nightingale-Conant audio program, The Power of Outrageous Marketing; his BMW Z3 sports car (which he acquired in late 2000); his purchase of a Texas Hill Country estate, which he says he first set sight on when he was "broke and going through a divorce" (his divorce was final in January of 2001); his huge weight loss of 80 pounds (early 2000’s); and, of course, his appearance in the hit "movie" The Secret, which was released in March 2006 but was conceived in 2004.

Granted, most of the events listed in the introduction actually occurred before Joe hooked up with Dr. Len in the fall of 2005 and picked up the secrets of Ho’oponopono – quite a few years before, in some cases. And if you pay attention to details on the links to his old e-newsletters above, you'll see that he had his BMW Z3 when he was still going through his divorce. He must have been past the "broke" stage by then.

But those are just details. What Joe is trying to communicate in the intro to Zero Limits is that he achieved all of the wondrous things on his list because he was acting upon inspiration – accessing zero state, in other words – even if he wasn’t aware of it at the time. Just as, for the purposes of promoting The Secret, he was using the Law of Attraction to achieve those things, even if he might not have been aware of it at the time. And just as, when he makes his next big discovery, he will no doubt decide that he was using or accessing that miraculous technique or law or force or source to achieve his goals, even if he wasn’t aware of it at the time. And so on.

The most charitable way of viewing Joe’s personal and publishing histories is to look at both as a chronicle of shifting awareness. Giving him the benefit of the doubt for the moment, most of us change our minds, alter our perceptions, and learn and grow as we go along in life. (Except for me, maybe. I'm stuck on snarky for now.) And, to his credit, Joe does acknowledge and address some of the inconsistencies between his writings in previous books such as The Attractor Factor, and some of the things he writes in Zero Limits. (I’ll discuss that in Part 2.)

That said, most people who have taken the time to read my blog – and have not simply relied on keywords unearthed by Google or Technorati – know that I am rarely in a charitable frame of mind when dealing with New-Wage gurus. When someone is constantly selling something, it is difficult for me to separate the heart from the hype and hustle. Even in moments when I am least "skeptical" (in the classic critical-thinking, science-geek sense) – and most sympathetic to those engaged in the search for meaning – it is hard for me to take even the most potentially profound message seriously if the messenger is so transparently in pursuit of the next big cash op.

And so to the miracle breakthrough du jour: under the tutelage of Dr. Len, Joe has learned to reach "zero state" and wants to show all of us how to reach it too, using this modern version of Ho’oponopono. Or at the very least, he wants to get us fired up enough about it to take a thousand-dollar seminar to learn more. As the jacket blurb says, "It works so well…that Vitale had to share it with the world, so that others could experience the fulfillment and happiness he feels every day."

According to Joe, Zero Limits was an Amazon bestseller twice even before its release. The press sheet that accompanied my copy of the book suggested that the system Joe teaches in Zero Limits seems to be working, because the book was a bestseller on Amazon six months before its publication. As an expert on neither marketing nor spirituality, I am about as far from being a Buddha of the Internet as a person can be, so I could be wrong about this. But it seems to me that the pre-sell frenzies could have been a result of aggressive Internet marketing – which centered around a story that spread around the Net like crabs on '60s hippies – rather than Ho’oponopono. The book is doing quite respectably now, hovering around in the top 100 on Amazon as I write this. But its success on Amazon doesn’t really surprise me. Could we expect anything less from a man who is a long time Amazon gamer the author of too many bestselling books to mention here? By the way, Zero Limits has received mixed reviews so far on Amazon, though one negative review has already been removed. See the "comments" section on this post for more information.

I read Zero Limits – and yes, I did read it – with as open a mind as is possible for one whose distrust of such books comes not from ignorance of the terrain (as I’ve been accused by some) but from extensive firsthand experience with New-Wage/New-Age culture. Cynical and distrustful I may be, and it may seem here that I am being anything but open-minded, but the truth is, I liked some of Joe’s earlier books. What did I think about this one? More on that tomorrow. And I'll warn you right now; Part 2 will be even longer than this post.

I'm just getting warmed up.

PS - Joe is already reacting to some of the negative Amazon reviews of his book. He was sitting around with friends over the weekend getting a big laugh about the bad comments. His friends were sympathetic, of course.

They pointed out how people are sensitive to my success, that it makes them more aware of their not trying or not succeeding. It’s easier to blame me than to take responsibility for themselves.

Someone remembered the famous quote by German physics professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg,

“A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

But this just raises the question: What if an ass writes a book?

PPS - While you're waiting for tomorrow's post, mix a tropical fruity drink (or pack the pipe with some Maui Wowee – whatever floats your moku), and sail on over to Walter Terry's ROI Copywriting blog. Today Walter begins an eye-opening series on some Internet marketing misfires that are somehow relevant to all of the above.

Thanks to my friend Blair Warren for helping track down the URLs to some of Joe’s old e-newsletter articles. I used to be on Joe's mailing list, and I remembered that he was writing about his BMW around the time he was getting divorced, but I didn't have the exact references. In any case, if Joe was broke during those years, he sure hid it well from those of us who were on his mailing list. Hey, fake it till you make it, right?

Here's the link to Part 2 of my Zero Limits write-up.

* No less an entity than Google seems to have Buddha aspirations as well. Google supposedly sees itself as "The Buddha Of The Internet Age." Does this leave Google open to being sued by Joe for infringement… or vice-versa?
** There have been some interesting discussions of the "happiness" issue on Steve Salerno’s SHAMblog.

Jump thing to snark about

Just a few snippets for a busy Tuesday (or Wednesday, if you're in Another Part of the World)...

Cosmic Connie a Facebook Friend repellant?
I feel so bad, Dear Ones. My wonderful partner Ron, of RevRon's Rants, just lost a Friend on Facebook because of Yours Truly. He and his ex-Friend had known each other for years and years, and had previously exchanged friendly comments on Facebook, and all was well. But then the Friend attended the "final" (more on that in a moment) Zero Lemmings 3 event in Austin this past weekend to hear Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale and Dr. Hew Len reveal new Ho'oponopono cleaning secrets. Today Ms. Friend wrote an update on her Facebook page providing a link to Joe's blog post about the event.

And Ron, ever the helpful one, responded by offering a link to another perspective on the Zero Limits stuff. This link, as you'll see if you follow it, just so happens to be a page displaying all of the posts on my blog in which "Zero Limits" is mentioned. Among those posts are my two-part review of Joe's book, Zero Limits (here's the link to Part 1), and a piece telling the amazing story of my own miraculous experience with ancient Hawai'ian healing secrets.

Less than a half hour later, Ron saw that he had been removed from the ZL attendee's "Friends" list on Facebook.

Needless to say, he is devastated. (No, not really. I am being sarcastic again.)

Ron's ex-Friend was apparently in good company over the weekend, or at least a lot of company. According to Joe, hundreds of folks attended this "final" ZL event (at a thousand bucks a head). I'm thinking it was probably more like just a couple hundred, but hey, "hundreds" is still technically correct, and it sounds much better than "a couple of hundred." And Goddess only knows how many "absentee" attendees paid a hundred bucks a pop for an aloha-yagya* – the privilege of having their name put on a piece of paper and "cleaned on" by Joe, Dr. Hew Len, and the attendees.

Anyway, apparently there have been some exciting developments and discoveries in the Ho'oponopono field. For example, did you know that of those four magic Ho'opo phrases – "Thank you," "I love you," "I'm sorry," and "Please forgive me" – only the first two are actually necessary for cleaning and clearing? That's good news for those of you who are in a time crunch, as well as those who are sick of apologizing to the Divine. You still have to grovel a bit, but at least you don't have to apologize. On his blog post recapping the ZL3 event, Joe wrote:

Dr. Hew Len himself could be heard saying just the two phrases “I love you” and “Thank you.” Say the others if you like, or not. Follow your inspiration.

I guess love really does mean never having to say you're sorry!

But the really exciting development to come from ZL3 is a new cleaning/clearing technique using the classic retro toy Etch A Sketch® as your tool. And you don't even have to have a real Etch A Sketch®; you just think about having one and shaking it down to nothing. That's the whole idea with Ho'oponopono; you shake yourself down to "zero," which is the state where nothing exists and everything is possible. As Joe wrote:

Consider: What would you be if the etch-a-sketch in your mind got shaken right now and you went to zero?

Just don't empty your mind so much that you can't go to expensive workshops, or shop for new miracle products (especially those that involve automatically charging your credit card every month), okay? Since Joe is now officially using Etch A Sketch® as his own personal cleaning tool ("Shake it and I'm clear," he enthuses), I wonder how long it will be before he starts selling a specially Ho'opo-blessed/infused/cleaned Etch A Sketch® for accelerated Ho'oponopono cleaning/clearing (possibly a pocket or business-card-sized card Etch A Sketch®), or at least a DVD utilizing Etch A Sketch® imagery to aid in cleaning/clearing. I imagine he would run into a few copyright problems unless he came to an agreement with the Ohio Art Company. He really ought to consider it, though, because the lemmings would just eat it up. (And he ought to consider that Bobblehead idea too.)**

Notwithstanding all the hype about ZL3 being the "final chapter" of the Joe-and-Dr.-Len Ho'oponopony show, I wouldn't count on that, judging from these recent Tweets:

Dr Hew Len and I are talking about a second volume to our book Zero Limits.1:09 PM Apr 17th

Final day of final Zero Limits and no one wants this to end or be last event. 6:20 AM Apr 19th

But here's the biggest hint of all that Joe and Dr. Len have more in store for the Zero Lemmings:

Dr Hew Len just said "If anyone would put God first they'd make a lot of money." Lovin it. 1:42 PM Apr 17th

"Lovin it"...hmmm. That sort of puts me in mind of McDonalds commercials, which I suppose is entirely appropriate for McSpirituality.

Amazingly, the Zero Limits love spilled over onto Joe's hummingbird feeder.

4 hummingbirds drank in peace from same bottle this morning. A first. They usually fight. Zero Limits 3 spilled over. They are loving now. 8:03 AM Apr 20th

Actually, hummingbirds always fight over feeders, and, judging from what I've observed, they generally stop fighting so much when they finally get a clue that there's enough nectar to go around, especially if you hang up more than one feeder. But hey, who am I to argue with miracles?

I feel just terrible, though, about Ron losing his Facebook Friend because of me. Maybe I should clean on it. But I'm not going to say, "I'm sorry."

And speaking of lemmings...
A friend of mine sent me this old article on The Secret, book version, written by a book store clerk. While The Secret is old news by now, some things are timeless. (And as a former book store clerk myself, I can assure you that this clerk's attitude towards "lemming books" and their buyers is...shall we say...not atypical.)

And speaking of jumping...
Well, we weren't really speaking of jumping, but all that lemming imagery kind of brought it to mind. (I suspect that some of you will want to point out that real lemmings really don't commit mass suicide, but that belief does have a basis in truth – enough of a basis to work as an overused metaphor, for sure!)

Anyhow, I was recently Googling around and came across a marvelous new technique called Quantum Jumping: The Inter-dimensional Quest For A Better You. Quantum Jumping was discovered by a guy named Burt Goldman, who calls himself The American Monk. For over three decades, Brother Burt has been forced to keep this secret, but he can keep it no longer.

So just what is Quantum Jumping? Friend, I'm glad you asked.

"Quantum Jumping," writes Burt, "is the process of 'jumping' into parallel dimensions, and gaining skills, knowledge, wisdom and inspiration from alternate versions of yourself."

Interested? Then jump right over here.

And now I'm jumping outta here, and back into work mode.

* Re aloha-yagya: That's not what it's really called; I coined the term. It seems appropriate.
** No, no, you don't have to thank me, Joe. Generous royalties will be sufficient.

Lunatics, lawn chairs, and sweet little lies

One of the weapons of choice in the arsenal of certain types of New-Wage/selfish-help/McSpirituality gurus is some version of the cause-and-effect fallacy, or to put it in more snooty and educated-sounding terms, cum hoc, ergo propter hoc. Basically it goes like this: "If A and B regularly occur together, then A is the cause of B." But the hucksters often take it a few deceptive steps further, either exaggerating, cherry-picking or outright lying about "the effects." Generally this is in the service of convincing people that the guru in question was the cause of the marvelous, miraculous effect that they are claiming occurred or is occurring. If they're really clever, they'll bring the followers in on the miracle too, like Whirled favorite Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale did a few years ago when he led his followers in an effort to redirect Hurricane Rita -- which actually did quite a bit of damage, but never hit his area (which was never in any real danger anyway).

Still, his followers believed and praised him. Some were no doubt thrilled that he gave them credit for helping him "stop" Rita.

A few years later, Joe tried the same tack with Hurricane Ike. He selected and replaced "Rita" with "Ike," and basically sent out the same email to his followers. Ike did some devastating damage, including in my area. But Joe's neck of the woods, which once again was never in any real danger, remained unscathed, and while the Houston/Galveston metro area reeled from the devastation -- some people were out of power for weeks -- Joe, from his Hill Country hideaway, was tweeting away about sitting out by his pool on a sunny day, reading an Abraham Hicks book about attracting money.

Still, his followers believed and praised him.

Logic be damned: the gurus' fawning followers will continue to believe and heap praise upon their idols, which is why it comes as no surprise that serial scammer Kevin Trudeau's followers continue to believe and praise him as his proxy pours more stupid posts onto the official Kevin Trudeau Facebook fan page. In this April 21 post, which is mostly recycled crap about the paradise of diversity that is the MCC, Katie's proxy clearly implies that Katie is raisin' those jailhouse vibes, just by his very presence.

(My friend Julie Daniel wrote on a Facebook conversation: "[He writes that] you get what you expect. kt never expected 10 years." On more than one occasion, in fact, Katie cried and begged to the judge to puh-leeze set him free.)
 
I bet that if someone were to actually go and ask the wardens and other workers at the MCC, or even some of the prisoners, if things really have become more calm and balanced and harmonious in Katie's cell block over the past few months, we'd get a far different perspective.

But I suppose it doesn't matter. There are people who need to believe in Katie. There are those who seem to thrive on their gurus' sweet little lies.

Consider the now-famous miracle story, spread by our pal Mr. Fire, about the ward of criminally insane patients in Hawaii State Hospital back in the 1980s. Supposedly, "the world's most unusual therapist," Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, cured that entire ward without ever seeing a patient. And, the legend goes, he did it all by working on himself, sitting in his office using techniques from a modern, "proprietary" form of an "ancient" Hawaiian healing method called Ho'oponopono.

Joe first wrote about the miracle cure on a blog post around 2005. It spread around the Internet "like crabs on '60s hippies," as a certain Whirled blogger put it in Part 1 of her review of Zero Limits, the book that ultimately resulted from this amazing story of the miracle cures in the loony bin. (If you follow that link you'll be able to get to Part 2 as well.)

Since 2007, when Zero Limits was released, that "proprietary" form of Ho'opo has served both Vitale and Hew Len quite well, individually and together. Dr. Hew Len was doing his own thing with Ho'opo before that, but no doubt Joe's book gave him tons of new exposure.

I have heard credible buzz that in more recent times, the two had somewhat of a falling-out (no surprise, in light of Joe's ego), which is perhaps why Joe appears to sort of be throwing Hew Len under the bus in his sequel to Zero Limits, At Zero: The Final Secrets to "Zero Limits" -- The Quest for Miracles Through Ho'oponopono. (Final secrets? Huh.)


A friend who bought and read the book sent me some quotes from Chapter 17, which Joe titled, "Did It Really Happen? The Big Fat Lie." He begins:

People who've read Zero Limits often ask if the story was real. “Did Dr. Hew Len really heal the entire ward of mentally ill criminals? If so, why didn't I hear about it on the news? Where's the public record of it?”

Joe explains that he didn't believe the story either when he first heard it, but after talking to Dr. Hew Len on the phone, he did. Subsequent workshops he and Hew Len did further convinced Joe of the latter's authenticity. He says that while researching Zero Limits, he contacted social workers who were at the hospital when Hew Len was there, and they told him they "felt something" in his presence, but never claimed he was a messiah, and never attributed any healings directly to him. No one said the inmates were cured or the ward closed directly because of any of Dr. Hew Len's actions. Joe continues:

That doesn't surprise me. Life is so interconnected that my breath out affects your breath in, but you'd never consciously look at me and say, “Hey, thanks for breathing!”

The fact that the media never reported on the hospital doesn't surprise me, either. Years ago ABC News came to my home and interviewed me for an hour. We covered a lot of territory, including my books and people who have been transformed. Yet they didn't select the positive news for airing -- instead, they edited out the good stuff and broadcast a few seconds of me fumbling for an answer after they blindsided me with a question. [More on that below. ~CC]

Mainstream media aren't designed to tell you positive news. They need you to stay in fear so that you'll buy their advertisers' products. (I say this as I'm cleaning on it.) This is why they broadcast horrible, tragic, and unhappy news. When nothing bad happens locally, the news stations look for an unhappy story from another area, even other countries...

...But I don't want to dodge the question: Did Dr. Hew Len actually help heal 99 percent of the inmates in the mental hospital for the criminally insane? I believe so. But how can we be sure? Look at it this way: if I secretly pray for your well-being, and one day your sickness is gone, will you give me any credit? Probably not. How could you if you didn't know I had been praying for you?

...Now stop and consider: if someone silently cleans on something you want, and you get it, will you give him or her any credit? Of course not. How could you? You had no idea he or she was doing anything for you. He or she did it covertly and benevolently.

The same may be true for the story of Dr. Hew Len and the hospital. His clearing of himself sent out an attractor field that affected everyone else. They got better but can't give him any credit since they had no idea he was doing anything for them.

Mainstream news has no way to report on a story like this. They want to see visible cause and effect. If Dr. Hew Len dispensed horse pills and people got better, they might give him airtime. (Most likely they would find something wrong with the pills, though, and report on that.)

In short, believe in the story of Zero Limits, if for no other reason than it gives you power to create your own miracles. And if that still seems incomplete for you, clean on it.

Nice dodge, Joe. I mean, really. For someone who says he doesn't want to dodge, he does seem kind of dodgy, in every sense of the word. But the point is probably moot, because, as I've said so many times before, people who want to believe will believe, no matter what. Sweet little lies are better than bitter or even bland-tasting truths any day.

Here's another perspective, though. I recently heard from a real, legitimately credentialed psychiatrist who says he was actually at the Hawaii State Hospital when Hew Len was supposedly working his magic. Actually, Dr. George Gharda-Ward is recently retired, but I've seen and checked out his CV, which he sent me without my even asking for it, and he has authentic creds (he's also a J.D. but never practiced as a lawyer). Long ago and far away, Dr. G. was at Esalen for a while; this was back when the self-realization, touchy-feely movement was in its infancy. He spent the majority of his lengthy career in more buttoned-down settings than Esalen. (The things that this properly credentialed and qualified, board-certified psychiatrist (and that's a real board, not a made-up board) has to say about this Whirled's favorite psychopath and armchair diagnostician, Mocktor Lenny Coldwell, are truly amusing, but I'll save that for another blog post.)

Dr. G. became marginally involved in Trudeau's huge Ponzi-like Global Information Network (GIN) through someone close to him, but early on saw what a scam it was, and what a liar Trudeau was and is. Like so many others, he says that he met some really good people through his short-lived association, but he agrees that GIN was a scam and Katie a scammer. In the process of making these discoveries he stumbled upon my blog. His initial messages to me were about Katie and GIN, but in an early email he also wrote (and he has given me permission to quote him):

I worked at Hawaii State Hospital in 1987.  I did my psych residency at the University of Hawaii.  Guess what?  I worked on the forensic unit where all this Ho'oponopono was supposed to have happened...I worked there in 1987 as an attending psychiatrist.  I assure you there was no "magical" healing going on there. It is all a fairytale.  There is a letter from a social worker, identified as Omaka-O-Kala Hamaguch on page 180 of "Zero Limits." Sorry, don't believe a word of it...

Dr. Gharda-Ward was further inspired to write a book review about Zero Limits.

THIS BOOK IS TOTALLY FALSE, March 25, 2014 By G. Gharda Ward MD
This review is from: Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More (Paperback)
I am a Board-Certified Psychiatrist. In 1987 I worked at Hawaii State Hospital. ON THEIR FORENSIC UNIT, where Joe Vitale says these "miracles" took place. I can assure you this is completely phony and false. IT NEVER HAPPENED. There were no psychotic murderers and rapists that were "cured" by this Ho'oponopono. It is false and misleading. Many of the things in the book are completely untrue. There were no car washes (can you imagine letting murderers and rapists off the unit to go outside and wash cars?), patients did not walk around in shackles nor were they held for long periods in seclusion. This is a STATE HOSPITAL!! Can you imagine what would happen if the Honolulu Advertiser (the local paper) had gotten wind of these patients being allowed outside? What if one of them escaped?? The Doctor, the hospital administrator, heck, the Governor of the state would be in big trouble. Think about it!! The events described in the book simply did not happen.

PERIOD!!

Joe addresses these issues in Atzero by saying that if it didn't happen it doesn't matter. Sorry Joe, that baloney doesn't wash in the light of reality. Joe bases the ENTIRE BOOK and Atzero on the premise that it DID work. If it didn't happen as Hew Len said it did and as Joe "believes" then there is no validity to the book.

THIS WHOLE BOOK IS BASED ON A MYTH, NOT ON REALITY!!

Don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with the 4 magic sentences. There is nothing wrong with loving people or asking for forgiveness or trying to be as kind and thoughtful as one can be. And there is nothing wrong with myths.

But anyone who "believes" that repeating a mantra, no matter how well [meaning] it might be, can cure a whole ward full of psychotic criminals lives in Fantasyland.

The book should be labeled a fairytale, because that's what it is. It should sit on the same shelf as the books that say,
"When you wish upon a star......."

Well, you get my drift.

Dr. G. and I continued our correspondence over the next few weeks. I asked him:

During your time in Aloha Land were you even aware at all of Hew Len's presence in or around that ward? He said he never saw patients, but supposedly he was hanging around the place and attended the occasional staff meeting. He was a psychologist, of course, not a shrink.

His response:

There was no Hew Len in my consciousness.  One thing that might help you in your pursuit of what is or is not truth, is that NO practitioners, be they psychologists or psychiatrists or social workers or nurses, were outside the radar of the administrators.  They always knew what you were doing, how many hours you spent on the ward, etc. The most specious thing about Hew Len is that he sat in his office all day, never went on the ward (except to bake cookies and run a car wash)  and never saw patients.  THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN.  The activities of all the professional staff were continuously monitored. 

Hew Len admits he was "fired" (in so many words.) He was fired because he didn't do anything...
Just the fact that you still cling to some belief that this dude was hanging around Hawaii State Hospital and "may have", "maybe"' "even though it seems crazy" "cured" even ONE person with this hocus-pocus, just shows how much ALL of us want to BELIEVE!!
I want to believe.  It is just my damn mind getting in the way!!

To which I responded:

The only belief I cling to is that Hew Len might have physically been working in the vicinity -- not that he actually cured anyone. But thank you for the additional insights...I still like my satirical version of the story the best. :-)

Just in case you haven't read it yet and don't want to interrupt your flow right now, I'll tell you that in my satirical version, "Mahalo, Dr. Yew," a "therapist" named Dr. Ihavascama Fer Yew admits, among other things, that all he ever did at the Hawaii State Hospital was sit in his office reading naughty magazines and "working on himself."
Dr. G. responded to me:

I think your satirical version is closer to the truth than the truth.
He probably was reading Playboy.  I did when I worked there (LOL),
What else can you do.  Those people [the criminally insane] are, literally, incorrigible.
Which is why the whole FANTASY that anyone, or anything, can cure these people is completely insane.
And why people who cannot handle reality HAVE to believe they CAN be CURED with a prayer.
Otherwise, LIFE is too complicated.
I think your "satirical" version is 1000 times more likely then the Vitale version.

Mahalo, Dr. Gharda-Ward.

Dr. G. cited some other examples in Joe's writing that, in Dr. G.'s view, indicate Joe has, at best, a casual relationship with the truth and a penchant for exaggeration. He doesn't even really buy the bed-wetting story that Joe tells in his "spiritual autobiography," Adventures Within. (Wrote the doc: "He claims that his URINE burned THROUGH the mattress and then THROUGH PLASTIC.  Why not metal? Does he pee ACID? Did he watch ALIENS one two many times? [Could he be] making it all up???")

But I don't want to piss anyone off too much, so let's move away from that subject. In a recent email Dr. G. wrote to me:

One of the MOST vexing things about people like Fireball [Joe Vitale] and Katie is that they take some really good things and distort them to fit their pocketbook. Ho'oponopono is a wonderful concept. It is a meditation or mantra. Those are useful tools to guide us humans in our quest to live a more peaceful and harmonious life. I frequently find myself repeating the mantra: I'm sorry Please Forgive Me I Love You Thank You. It is a lovely mantra and the spirit of Hawaii (though overstated) has its place.What is truly disturbing is that psychopaths do a better job of spreading this message then us regular folks. I wonder why that is so?  

To which I responded:

Keep in mind that the "Thank you/I love you" etc. is part of a "proprietary" form of Ho'opo invented and taught to Hew Len by his late mentor, Morrnah, a woman for whom he apparently left his wife and family to go live with for many years. The traditional Ho'opo is a form of conflict resolution, from which Morrnah supposedly borrowed a few concepts and then made up her own stuff. No doubt Hew Len added to that, and Joe of course took it and ran with it.  

I even admit on my own blog (in my 2007 review of Zero Limits) that this modern Ho'opo can be used as a meditation and a way to inner peace (yes, I even use the four phrases sometimes to calm my whirling mind), but it's not a miracle cure for everything, the way Joe strongly implies it is.

Psychopaths do such a good job of spreading good messages for their own bad purposes for the obvious reason: because they are master manipulators and will use every tool at their disposal. Pander to people's deepest secret longings and/or fears, and you've got it made.

They do it for the same reason that a dog licks its private parts: because they can. Ron and I call it the DLB (Dog Licking Balls) syndrome. When all rational explanations fail, DLB explains a multitude of atrocities, from psychopaths to governments to those infamous neighborhood Nazis known as Homeowners Associations. "Because they can."

And yes, I confess that I do rather like that four-phrase mantra. Really. But I don't think it has any magical powers. I even liked parts of Zero Limits, as I wrote in my 2007 reviews. I thought that Joe sounded relatively honest in some parts, and to me the book read as if he had put more work into it than he had in many of his recent (at the time) books, and in several of those that were published after Zero Limits. 

By the way, Joe also used up a whole chapter in his new Ho'opo book to slam another ex-friend and business partner. Here is some perspective on that. For such an optimistic, positive-thinking kinda guy he seems to be quite the whiner.

* * * * *

Looking over the chapter from At Zero, I notice how Joe once again slams the mainstream media, even though they've been his friend as much as they've been his foe. (Remember how the media fawned over The Secret, back in its early days? Joe has had numerous mainstream media appearances since then, such as appearances on Fox and Friends (though he probably paid for that exposure).)

As I've mentioned here a few times before, Joe is always nattering on about how the media refuse to run positive stories, instead preferring to focus on the negative. But that is incorrect. From what I've seen, the media are all too willing to run "positive" and even woo stories stories on miracles and angels and so forth. They go for the ratings, and it seems that both horrendously negative and sappily positive stories get good ratings. Joe is clearly still steamed because of that ABC debacle a few years ago, which he mentioned in the above-cited chapter from At Zero.

He's miffed because ABC refused to portray him and his beloved selfish-help industry in a completely positive light. In fact they made him look a bit foolish. As many of you may recall, ABC's Dan Harris went on one of Joe's Rolls-Royce ridealongs a few years ago, and also interviewed him at length. Despite Joe's hopefulness and proactive kissing-up, Dan ended up not portraying Joe in the most flattering of lights.


Recently Dan got in another potshot on a Nightline segment. You need to watch the whole thing for context, but the lead-in to Joe starts at 7:29 and really begins in earnest at 7:50. Dan Harris' declaration that Joe Vitale "folds like a cheap lawn chair" in an interview will go down on my Whirled as one of the classic comments.


So now, in addition to his other fine credentials, such as the Buddha of the Internet and the Charles Atlas of the Internet, Mr. Fire can boast that he is the Cheap Lawn Chair of the Internet. Or maybe the Cheap Lawn Chair of ABC. The CLC of ABC... it almost sounds like a credential to add to his faux-hDs: Joe Vitale, PhD, MSCD, CLC.
 
But at least Joe isn't behind bars like his good friend Kevin Trudeau (whom Joe defended several times online while helping Katie push GIN). So I guess that's something. Besides, even if Dan Harris' amusing simile doesn't sit well (so to speak) with Joe, cheap lawn chairs have their place in the world too.

I write all of this knowing full well that in the end, no matter how much I jab at Joe, make sport of Mocktor Loony, or kick at Katie, the lure of those sweet little lies will continue to win more hearts and wallets than a snarky little hobby blog ever could.

But if you think that knowing this is going to stop me, you have seriously misunderestimated me.

* * * * *

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Whirled snippets to take your mind off of the Kevin Trudeau trial (for a while)

Hey, kiddos, remember when this blog was about something besides serial scammer Kevin Trudeau's court cases? Remember when it lived up to its description of being a Whirling, swirling ocean of snark chum, devoted to a wide range of New-Wage/selfish-help/McSpirituality topics and hustledorks? I've said this before, but fear I may have alienated some of my loyal followers when I started obsessing so much over Katie. I need to remedy that, at least in some small way, in order to let my original fan base know I've not forgotten them.

Don't worry. I'm still going to keep you updated on the court doings. Just like I did here.

And here.

I'll have more in the next day or so about the latest court doings, links to the news media stories, and prolly some gratuitous snarks about some of Katie's supporters (though I would be surprised if he didn't have people rooting for him in court, and it actually gives me some satisfaction to acknowledge that to this day he has a far larger and more loyal fan base than some of his loathsome ex-b.f.f.s who are trying desperately to fill his shoes). 

But for now... oh, my, there are so many other topics tugging at my sleeve, just begging for attention, that I cannot ignore them any more. So take a brief break from the court watching (but be sure to check in on GIN Network Truth if you're on Facebook), and have a few snippets.

We don't need another Hero...
Oh, Good Goddess. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the book store, along comes Secret creator Rhonda Byrne with yet another insipid tome. Following 2010's The Power and last year's The Magic, the new book, due out November 19, is called, simply, Hero.

I can't wait to see the names of the twelve living "heroes" Rhonda picked to showcase this time. She did such a stellar job of hero-picking for The Secret. It really doesn't matter what she writes, though. Everything she publishes becomes a bestseller. That is one of the things that makes me worry for the future of the human race.

Hype'oponopono
Speaking of new books... it's been a while since I've visited New-Wage/McSpirituality guru and star of The Secret Joe Vitale, long a favorite snarget on this Whirled. (Actually he's a buddy of Kevin Trudeau too, or was -- as noted here and here and here -- though he has pretty much stayed mum about Kevin's more recent troubles.) Why, a little over six years ago I even sponsored a Hawaiian Week (which turned out to be considerably longer than a week) on this blog. This was in honor of the release of Joe's book, Zero Limits, a tribute to a modernized "proprietary" form of a native Hawaiian conflict resolution practice called Ho'oponopono. Responding to a request from a misguided publicist who'd been hired by Joe's publisher, I read and wrote an actual review of Zero Limits on my blog, in a two-part post published on July 9 and July 10, 2007.

About a year and a half before Zero Limits hit the market, Joe started getting people all excited about Ho'oponopono -- and ultimately about Zero Limits -- by spreading an apocryphal tale of Ho'oponopono-based miracle cures in a Hawaiian hospital for the criminally insane. Here's that story. It was copied and pasted and published and republished and peated and repeated countless times by countless starry-eyed believers, all over the Interwebs. Few people seemed to question whether the story was real or not.

And here is the more credible Whirled version. (Several people wrote to me asking if my story was real. It is as real as you want it to be.)

Now Joe has thrown together a new book to further exploit Ho'oponopono. (Or perhaps Joe'oponopono would be a better word.) The new work is called, At Zero: The Final Secrets to "Zero Limits" -- The Quest for Miracles Through Ho'oponopono (Wiley, October 2013).

So far Joe's new book has one review on Amazon. I would say that it is not a favorable one.

Ho'oponopono is a great tool for forgiveness. This book gets two stars because of the power of ho'oponopono. However, the book is at least 50% padding (unedited interviews, letters, etc), 30% marketing for other programs, and 20% stories of how other people have horribly wronged the author and how he used ho'oponopono to get over it.

It was disappointing to read the author basically recant the unbelievable story of Dr. Ihaleakela Hew Len's miraculous healing at the Hawaiian hospital for the criminally insane. Vitale uses the opportunity to take shots at ABC news and mass media being big downers. But it seems that the entire internet sensation of how and why ho'oponopono gained notoriety was based on admitted (in this book) half-truths.

As with most of Vitale's works, you'll have to endure endless marketing pitches for Miracles Coaching (with the registered trademark EVERYWHERE), awakening courses, and stories about meeting celebrities... and how horribly wronged he has been by friends, attorneys, and anyone else who questioned the validity of ho'oponopono.

I personally believe in the power of the practice. Ho'oponopono is very powerful in letting go of what you believe to be true so that you can experience something else. However, I wish I had passed on this overpriced more-of-the-same from Joe Vitale.

Yep, that pretty much sounds like Joe's formula for cobbling together a book. It didn't used to be that way, back in the day when I knew him, but his more recent efforts have pretty much complied with the formula that the reader described above. I'm amused but not particularly surprised that he would seem to disclaim the story about Dr. Hew Len curing those loonies. Oops, I mean those criminally insane people. And for a such a bastion of positivity, Joe does seem to spend an awful lot of time whining about how many people wronged him. Take it all with a huge amount of salt. Or better yet, just don't take it.

Rumors of my illness, jealousy, and abysmal taste in "men" have been greatly exaggerated

I guess it all does come back around to Katie after all, via his vile little ex-b.f.f., Mocktor Loony Coldwell. Although the Loonmeister has blocked me from seeing any of his rants on Facebook, others can see them and they take screen shots.

For those of you who are new here or just need a recap: A little over a year ago, apparently enraged because I had blogged a few months previously about him (here is the link to my first post about him, in case you haven't already read it), Loony began spreading blatant lies about me, mostly on Abe Husein's main Facebook page. I found his rants more amusing than outrageous, because they were such flagrant falsehoods. Other people were indignant on my behalf and reported him to Facebook. I was rather enjoying how he hung himself, though, and I have screen shots of everything.

Among other lunatic claims, he said his "research team" had learned that I was being paid by Big Pharma and/or the medical profession to discredit natural "healers" such as himself. Now, at least that would have been a somewhat logical lie -- although it is a lie nonetheless -- but, in an apparent attempt to make me seem even less credible, he also said I am a former prostitute who infected the guy who supposedly told him about me with "a bad STD." I've heard credible buzz about why he is so obsessed with prosties but he's definitely barking up the wrong tree with me. He said he had videos about me and would start publishing them soon (this was over a year ago). Later he came out and said I have AIDS. All of these are of course lies. And even his loyal fans (yes, he does have people who are blind or stupid enough to be fans) don't believe those lies.

He had been pretty quiet for a while, and then yesterday, on a thread on Abe's wall, Coldwell said I have cancer, which apparently developed because I am jealous of Loony and his peeps (see screen shot above). Of course as usual he doesn't come out and mention my name (the better to slither out of a potential lawsuit), but most of us snapped to his meaning because of the context. Everything in that rant is of course a lie, though perhaps wishful thinking on Loony's part. It's remarkable how a so-called "compassionate healer" who "really cares about people" can get such apparent glee from the prospect of anyone contracting the very disease he claims to be on a mission to cure.

In that same rant he claimed that I had asked Kevin Trudeau's former marketing guy Peter Wink for a date with him (Coldwell), and that because Loony rebuffed me, this is why I went on a "hate rampage" against him and Peter. Wow... more wishful thinking on Loony's part? Shudder, shudder.

My pal Bernie at GINtruth.com has already blogged about it, complete with screen shot. Heeere's Bernie!

As I 'splained in my comment to Bernie's post, and have mentioned here and on other forums as well, the truth about my correspondence with Peter, regarding Loony, is more mundane. These communications always centered around Peter’s attempts to get me to stop writing critical blog posts about Loony. Peter tried very earnestly, ultimately to no avail, to convince me that Coldwell is a very nice guy who really, really cares about people. At one point Peter wrote an email to me proposing that if I would stop writing blog posts about Coldwell and would take down the ones I had written, then Peter would approach Coldwell and ask him if he MIGHT stop spreading lies that I am an AIDS-infected former prostitute. I do not make deals with the devil, so… no deal.

Besides, even if I were in the dating market -- which I'm not, and haven't been for more years than the former Bernd Klein has even been in the USA -- I have always had a tendency to want to stick to my own species. I'm just funny that way.

* * * * *

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Into the volcano (a tale of two Joes)

"My father says almost the whole world’s asleep. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says only a few people are awake. And they live in a state of constant, total amazement."
~ Meg Ryan as Patricia Graynamore in Joe Versus The Volcano (1990)

"Dear God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot how big… thank you, thank you for my life."
~ Tom Hanks as Joe Banks in one of my favorite scenes from Joe Versus The Volcano

While there are cases in which unceasing wide-eyed wonder is a sign of psychosis, severe mental challenges, or the ingestion of some really good drugs, I'll grant that it would be pretty cool to live in the state of "constant, total amazement" that Meg Ryan’s character, Patricia Graynamore, described in Joe Versus The Volcano.

Put aside, for the moment, the small detail that the person Patricia is quoting in the movie, her father, is a ruthless gazillionaire who is all too willing to make a human sacrifice in order to obtain a rare resource he needs for his enterprise. The quotation is still pretty powerful in its own right. And the elder Graynamore is hardly the first person to express the notion that most people are, in essence, sleepwalking through life. Nor, for that matter, is he the first to say that people who are truly "awake" exist in a state of amazement. Buddha reportedly said much the same thing, which is probably where the screenwriters for the movie got the idea in the first place.

Joe Versus The Volcano is fiction, of course. But author and spiritual-marketing guru Joe Vitale claims he really is experiencing an almost continual state of amazement and wonder these days, the strong implication being that this is largely a result of what he has learned from Dr. Hew Len, the therapist who teaches a modern form of a Hawai'ian technique called Ho'oponopono. In his new book Zero Limits, which I wrote about on July 9 and July 10, Joe describes the "three stages of awakening." He says he believes he has reached stage three, which, he explains, is a state of almost constant amazement, wonder and gratitude. And at one point in the book, Joe even paraphrases the Meg Ryan quotation above, saying it came from "a character in a movie," though he didn’t name the movie.

Many years ago I recommended Joe Versus the Volcano to Joe Vitale. It's one of my favorite flicks. Okay, so I don't have the most highbrow tastes in movies. Actually, though, this movie is pretty deep, in a shallow kind of way – sort of like I'm shallow in a deep kind of way, which may be one reason that I like it so much. Yes, I do get all, or most, of the allegories and metaphors and life lessons in the movie, and I do get that I (and all of us) should pay heed to those lessons, as more than one person has been kind enough to point out to me. I liked the movie for all of those reasons, but also for its quirky charm, the soundtrack, the ambiance, and most of all, though it lasted only moments, for that scene with the surreal night sky over the ocean: the wheeling constellations, the enormous moon. I've seen the sky like that, and I wasn't in a state of delirium, as Joe Banks was in the movie, nor was I under the influence of any recreational substances.

Anyway, Joe V. rented the movie and said he thoroughly enjoyed it. He told me that what he especially loved was that bit about being asleep versus living in a state of total amazement. I guess this thought stuck with him.
I think we could all benefit from having more of a sense of profound wonder, a recognition that life can be experienced as a gift and not just a series of ordeals, unpleasant surprises, and gray routine, punctuated by occasional joy (as seems to be the case with most people). But is "zero state" via Ho’oponopono the way to Wonderland? Apart from the fact that it seems to be a safer path than hallucinogenic drugs – a point worth remembering on this fortieth (!) anniversary of the Summer of Love – is "zero state" achievable, or even particularly useful? More than that, is it desirable? To put it bluntly, when you wipe your mental slate clean of the effects of your memories, when you cease being so judgmental, does this mean you're really in touch with the Divine, or just more vulnerable to the next New-Wage trend that comes along?

You'll have to make up your own mind about that, but I think these are questions worth asking. I have to say that for me, it's been very tough not to view Zero Limits in the context of Joe's other work, and especially in the light of his penchant for overly-enthusiastic promotion. Truth is, virtually everything Joe has ever promoted has supposedly cast him into a state of wide-eyed wonder and amazement similar to what he describes in Zero Limits.

I am sure some folks will point out that Joe is just an enthusiastic guy by nature, and that in any case, that sense of wonder and amazement isn't even the central point of Zero Limits or of Ho'oponopono. Taking "100% responsibility" for healing yourself and all of the problems that come into your awareness is the real point, they'll say, and that's accomplished, in part, by "cleaning" via those four powerful phrases: "Thank you," "I'm sorry," "Please forgive me," and "I love you." And the ultimate point, perhaps, is healing the world. "Peace begins with me," after all. (To me this is reminiscent of the "Peace Song," which was written over 50 years ago and is sung at the services in many Unity and other New Thought churches. "Let there be peace on Earth / and let it begin with me..." They've been singing that song for years and years. So where's the peace?)
Be that as it may, this post focuses on the sense-of-wonder angle because it is the one thing that really grabbed me about Zero Limits.
And it's one of the factors that led me to read the book again and try to filter out the things I found annoying the first time around.

Some history
Like most people who have built a public persona and gained a following, Joe Vitale has his share of passionate fans and fierce defenders, and that's putting it mildly. Over the past several months, some have accused me of engaging in "Joe-bashing." Some have said it is very obvious I don't know him.
 
But I did know Joe during what he has referred to as his "Houston daze." Regarding that small but meaningful pun, he’s not the first and surely won’t be the last person to view Houston as a place from which to flee in search of greater things. As columnist Kristen Mack wrote in the Houston Chronicle recently, people come here primarily for work. It’s rarely a place to which one journeys for awakening or enlightenment. The climate alone, particularly on a steamy summer day, is enough to stifle any longing beyond the primal urge to immerse one’s entire being in a body of cool, cool water. And let's not even get into the traffic and the air quality.
 
There were many things I liked about Joe when I knew him back in the daze. I liked his love of books and writing and the fact that he was (and is) a voracious reader. I liked some of his earlier books about marketing, particularly the one I’m in. (Hey, it's just a cameo appearance, but you know I'm a narcissist.) I liked Joe's long-time fascination with advertising and copywriting – not just the how-to, but the history as well. Like Joe, I love those old-time ads, such as those reproduced in They Laughed When I Sat Down by Frank Rowsome, Jr. I liked Joe's sense of humor and the fact that he wasn't afraid to laugh at himself. I liked his fascination with the Internet; say what you will about him, for better or worse, he was one of the first people I knew to really grasp the entrepreneurial potential of the Net. In fact he introduced me to email and the Internet way back in the prehistoric mid-nineties (though it was computer-whiz Ron who actually got me online and taught me how to use the Net). I still use the Juno email address I got when Joe gave me a disk with an early (free) version of the email program. I liked that Joe was supportive and helpful in my earlier days as a freelance writer. Finally, as a hopeless cat lover myself, I liked that he adores cats, and even today, I think the Catarium he has on his Hill Country property is very cool.

So I'm not just some random "basher," and really not a basher at all.
Like many others, I have been turned off in the past few years not only by the breathless hype Joe brings to everything he promotes, but by the increasingly "out-there" ideas (and products) he is selling or promoting, The Secret being the most glaring example. (The logic he continues to employ in explaining the Law Of Attraction leaves me wondering sometimes who's the real satirist here: Cosmic Connie, or Mr. Fire? Is the joke really on me, after all?) Also off-putting is Joe's tendency to write excessively about his cars and other expensive toys, his wealth, and his fame. It comes across to me and many others as boasting, pure and simple.

With Joe, as I noted in a previous post, it is all too often difficult to separate the heart from the hype, the core messages from the messenger’s entire body of work (and, for that matter, from the entire New-Wage/self-help industry). It's not a simple matter of pulling salient quotations from a movie, finding kernels of wisdom in what was intended to be mainly popcorn fare. For me, it’s more like scrabbling for a tiny treasure, which may or may not be there, in a huge box of Styrofoam peanuts. (You'll have to excuse the metaphors; once I get started it's hard to quit.) The point is that even a sense of wonder and amazement, however genuine it may be, loses its sheen in a milieu of ceaseless marketing.

As for "stage three" in the three stages of awakening described in Zero Limits, you will forgive me, I hope, for wondering how long it will be before Joe reveals that there is, after all, a "stage four," newly discovered, and you can find out all about it on his exclusive new DVD series. (In all fairness, he did say in the book that he believes there are at least three stages, so that certainly gives him some leeway to invent...er...discover, and market...additional stages.) [See PS below. ~CC]

It boils down to a credibility issue, and these are legitimate criticisms that do not come from a place of snarkiness. But I don’t expect Joe to change his style any time soon. And why should he, if it’s working for him?
 
As for the bragging, friends of his have told me that they honestly don't think Joe is aware of how this appears to others. One person said that Joe still doesn't believe that all this – the wealth, the fame, the accolades – is happening to him, and that Joe can't understand why people like him so much. What sounds like bragging, this person said, is simply the expression of "an amazed heart."
 
I couldn't help wondering, though, why no one apparently saw fit to suggest that Joe tone down some of the parts in Zero Limits that seemed boastful, particularly those exchanges with Dr. Hew Len that painted Joe as a minor deity. I speculated that maybe early readers of the manuscript had offered this advice and it was ignored. One friend suggested that perhaps these people, having heard Joe relate these tales in person, understood the spirit in which he told them in the book. In person, Joe's pal assured me, these stories come across as joyous sharing, not bragging. Others have told me, and I'm sure Joe himself would say, that his purpose in relating his stories is to encourage other people towards similar success. ("If I can do it, so can you!")

Insightful as those comments may be, they did raise another question for me: Could Joe really be so unaware of how his words appear to others, when he is supposed to be an expert on marketing, persuasion, and perception?
 
It's one thing to share endless stories about your luxury sports cars, your celebrity and fame, or your growing status as a spiritual leader in a warm conversation with close pals, or even with folks who have paid a thousand bucks to attend one of your intimate weekend workshops. It's quite another to repeat these stories incessantly on the printed page (or on screen) to millions of perfect strangers. It doesn't come out the same at all.* Context is everything; the medium does matter. In fact, anyone who has ever been involved in an acrimonious online exchange with relative strangers could tell you the same thing. Many of us have, at one time or another, found ourselves embroiled in an online "fight" because the words we wrote appeared overly harsh to the recipient. More than likely those same words, spoken in person over margaritas or coffee, would have resulted merely in a spirited debate.
 
Nevertheless I understood what Joe’s friends were trying to say. Viewed through the eyes of his friends, I can almost believe that Joe is simply expressing gratitude, in the way that other Joe, Joe Banks, does during the luminous moment cited at the beginning of this post. "Thank you…thank you for my life." I get it, I really do.
 
But it still rubs me wrong the wrong way, as it does many readers, when an author engages in what appears to be excessive self-aggrandizement in a book. As a person who loves books and makes a living trying to help people write better books, I still think that someone somewhere along the line should have taken more responsibility to keep out elements that, for many, would distract from the core messages in Zero Limits. Supporters of Joe will no doubt point out that what I perceive as the book's flaws have not kept Zero Limits (and some of Joe's other books as well) from climbing pretty high in Amazon ranking. I submit that the success of these titles is as much a result of the power of aggressive marketing and promotion as anything else.

Speaking of which, call me closed-minded or easily distracted, but in my rereading of Zero Limits I am still finding it a challenge to focus on the more profound messages, particularly in light of one of Joe's latest marketing gimmicks. Someone suggested to me that marketing is so much a part of what Joe does and who he is that he can't not do it. Maybe so, but I can only take it in small doses. I guess you could say I've got a serious case of marketing fatigue.
 
Still, I thought it fitting to take a brief break from my routine of what some must have viewed as gratuitous sniping. But don’t worry, I haven’t gone soft on y’all. And no one has paid me off or anything. Tomorrow, or the next day, it'll be back to Snarky Town for me. My email "in" box is full of snarkworthy tidbits from my favorite New-Wage spam service.
But I felt, somehow, that I needed to write this post, if for no other reason than that I used to know Joe.
 
One more thing before I sign off: If you haven't done so already, go rent (or better yet, buy) Joe Versus The Volcano, which Ron and I watched again just the other night. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll roll your eyes. But I think you will mostly be delighted. Pick up some orange soda to drink while you're watching.
 
And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to work. The Rev and I are not quite at the point where we can just pack up everything and go "away from the things of man," but we're doing work we love, and when our work is done for the day, we are going to venture out and about in Space City.
 
Which really isn’t a bad place to be at all.
PS - This post counts as a wrap for the increasingly ill-named Hawai'ian "Week," because the last portion of Joe Versus The Volcano takes place on a little Polynesian island that has a big volcano. Also, Tom Hanks plays a ukulele and sings (though it's an old-style cowboy song, not "Tiny Bubbles"). His voice isn't half-bad!

* Here is a video of Joe Vitale talking about Zero Limits at one of his weekend workshops.

PS added months later: Yup, I was right about that "fourth stage of awakening"....