Soul's Code

According to this story in the online zine, Salon.com (Religious primates), religion is a meme — “an idea that evolved like a virus — that infected our ancestors and continued to spread throughout cultures.”

Give it a quarter turn, and another way to say the same thing is that all being in the universe have a hardwired need to experience the sacred as a group, because each of us are cells in the body of . . . call it Christ, call it the Buddha, call it whatever you want

Crank Watch: scientist claims there is no God [EurekaAlert]

Western Wall – Kotel – Jerusalem, Old City – 360° | Originally uploaded by Sam Rohn – Location Scout.

Forget that line from Joan Osborne’s ‘What If God Was One of Us‘ about “nobody calling on the phone.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that an Israeli startup is using the Internet to pipe prayers into the Middle East’s holy places, such as the Western Wall. Prayers Over IP, or POIP for short, claims to have more than 1500 callers a day.

Yuri Luzhkov is not gay. He’s, like, Russian. Now *that’s* a spiritual credential!

Here’s our stance: we like a parade, any parade. Not so Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, a religious conservative who says he will never sanction a gay pride parade in Moscow.

“Last year, Moscow came under unprecedented pressure to sanction the gay parade, which can be described in no other way than as Satanic,” Luzhkov said at the 15th Christmas educational readings in the Kremlin Palace.

Well, that was quick, comrade: from atheist collectivism to, well, theological fundamentalism in the space of a decade and change. Sometimes, The Times They Aren’t a Changin’.

• Cat Stevens says the music biz is filled with ‘fornication, intoxicants, idolatry, competition, greed, selfishness’ [BeliefNet]

· Church of England to offer masses set to U2 [The Daily Telegraph]

· French seek to kick religion out of hospitals [IHT]

· The gospel according to U2 [Christianity Today]

Whether it’s software or workaholism, LESS is a competitive advantage

SOUL’S CODE — Work, of course, is more than just a way to make a living. It’s one of the most spiritual things we do, whether it’s meditatively mopping the floors, caring for the sick, or… well, you get the point. Which is why discussions of how we work can be about so much more than work. Just consider software developer Jason Fried’s 2005 rant about the power of simplicity..

Pilates can be as spiritual an experience as yoga. One teacher’s spontaneous guided meditation at the end of class

BY PAUL KAIHLA — People often talk about the “body-rush” they feel after doing pilates, and I experienced a long-lasting wave of that after a class this weekend.

There was this swirl of energy and aliveness in my body, and elation in the mind. It doesn’t happen for me every time. A lot depends on the presence of the instructor and who is in the room.

At the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco we have Nicole Tesson, a dancer by training.

To me, dancers like her are a step ahead of a lot of us in their spiritual evolution because their whole discipline is devoted to bridging the Cartesian division between mind and body.

The dance profession, by the way, preserved pilates for the rest of us, during decades of relative obscurity after Joseph Pilates introduced it in the 1930s in New York (to dancers in George Ballanchine’s and Martha Graham’s companies). Pilates finally became a fad among the beautiful people in L.A. in the 1990s, and now it’s a staple in the training repertoire of virtually every professional sports team in America. But dancers remain the first and foremost apostles of pilates.

The reason I think it’s also a spiritual practice is because it literally works on the core of your being, the muscles and tissues deep in your torso and that wrap around your bones. It takes so much attention to isolate these muscles that you can only do the movements if you totally withdraw your awareness from work-a-day thoughts. The movements bring you out of your mind and into your body — into a quasi-meditative state.

Nicole brought us all the way into one at the end of our class with these words that she later said, “just came out of my mouth”:

Bring yourself back into your breathing.

Enjoy your breathing . . .

Feel the weight of your body melt into the mat.

Let the inside fall to the outside,

and the outside, fall to the floor.