Soul's Code

We’ve had our fun with Oprah!, the be-all-things-to-all-people TV filter. Her May issue of O! is 348 pages — rivaling the page-count of In Style and the luxury New York fashion magazines. Her roof line: “BEAUTIFUL BOTTOMS: At last! Pants that really friggin’ fit.”

The cover line is what got our attention: Have Your Own AHA Moment! A practical guide to the spiritual side of life (it’s time to wake up and smell the roses!)

The notion of having — and sharing — psychological realizations and mind-body breakthroughs is kinda the whole point of Soul’s Code. It’s one reason we’re called to have fun with Oprah’s “Aha! Moment” franchise — a cliche lifted from a long-dead German psychiatrist named Karl Buhler.

True to form, Oprah’s current cover story reveals no Secret-worthy specifics for getting spiritually high. It features a gallery of celeb testimonials — NAACP chairman Julian Bond says he subsumed his ego marching in the 1960s, Elie Wiesel riffs on whatever for 12 sentences. They’re snippet sermons by established personality-brands.

But two spots where Oprah gets it right are a snippet on Ram Dass, and a five-page interview with Eckhart Tolle, two post-modern mystics who can genuinely talk about peak experiences (aka, what Oprah brands Aha Moments).

Was Oprah’s own Aha Moment making the March 24, 2008 issues of Forbes magazine, which ranks the world’s top billionaires? Forbes annoints Oprah as the richest celebrity in America — and estimates that her net-worth is $2.5 billion, and that last year alone she made $260 million in take-home pay!

Contrast that with the Soul’s Code slide show: AHA Moments that Blow Oprah off the Screen. It features spiritual teachers like the contemporary American mystic, Byron Katie, and Ramana Maharshi, perhaps the greatest sage, ever.

GUEST COLUMN: DAVID RICKEY

Whereas millions of spiritual seekers see the *mystical* in PADRE PIO, the mainstream media sees — well, the mawkish

Padre Pio died in 1968, was canonized in 2002, and more than a million people will visit Puglia in the coming months to view the remains of this remarkable holy man, which have been exhumed for veneration. Under the headline, Italian Saint Stirs Up a Mix of Faith and Commerce, today’s New York Times treats Pio as a tourism gimmick: The miracles he performed are relegated to a throw-away line for snickers, and a string of paragraphs citing contemporary critics who claimed Pio was a fake.

To the “post-enlightenment” (and now, pretty much “post-Christian”) mind, the idea of a saint performing miracles — like evidencing stigmata, or bi-locating — isn’t even worthy of consideration. But the fact that so many seek to believe — enough so, that critics spend commensurate amounts of energy debunking the object of their faith — points to a deeper thirst in the human psyche.

The diminutive Indian-born designer of buildings, furniture and landscape also happens to be a pioneer of green-building at the high-end of the luxury market

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Narendra Patel is an architect who was born in the Indian province of Gujarat, did his post-grad in Canada — and made his name in Rancho Mirage, CA, the better-half of Palm Springs. He radiates an out-sized aura in proportion to his bantam-physique, and walks around with a stillness and slight smile that makes you wonder if he knows something that the rest of us haven’t quite figured out.

One thing we know Patel *has* figured out is design — homes like the one above (photographed by Arthur Coleman), commercial buildings, furniture, materials, whatever. Patel weaves together classical geometry and undulating forms that call to mind sand dunes or ocean waves.

As this site has morphed from its original incarnation of 9Choirs to Soul’s Code we’ve been stepping up to the brand — and adding more exhibits to the slide shows you see in the column on your right. Instead of *nine* spiritual resorts on the West Coast, we now have a new Top 10 list — and extend our geography way down the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Before, our north pole of mystical destinations was the Wickaninnish Inn on Vancouver Island — and the south, The Chopra Center near San Diego.

We add the Present Moment Retreat, a half-hour north of Zihuatanejo, and for our research interviewed founder, Tom Morisette.

The New York Times Magazine threw 5,000 words at the subject of the kabbalah, which its freelancer labels “an esoteric occult offshoot of Judaism dating at least to the 13th century.”

It’s actually a hit-piece on The Kabbalah Centre: The World’s Leader in Kabbalah Education, which has more than two dozen locations on four continents and its flagship in Beverly Hills, CA . . .

The “bitter” quote? The elitist rap? The Democratic primary is a proxy war between a low-chakra candidate (with beer below) and a high-chakra one

BY PAUL KAIHLA —  John McCain argued that Barack Obama’s reading of blue-collar voters in Pennsylvannia is “elitist,” and represents a “fundamental contradiction of what I believe America’s all about.”

At the umpteenth Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said Obama is “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”

In the argot of public relations firms, those were killer ‘key messages’ to put Obama in a reactive mode for his candor at a San Francisco fundraiser on April 6 (listen to the recording). But if you pull the camera back for a moment, Obama’s take on Reagan Democrats who go right-wing on social issues exquisitely mirrors the received wisdom among leading figures in transpersonal psychology and the spiritual self-help movement.

Carl and Pat Turner are elderly and ailing. They require, at turns, the help of siblings, their three children,  neighbors — or hospital inpatient care. This request comes from their daughter . . .

Freud was raised in Vienna, Austria — and died in London.Jung was born in Switzerland three decades later, died in Switzerland two weeks after the outbreak of WWII.

Who can America claim as a founding father of modern pscyh? James Hillman is probably the best candidate: born in New Jersey, intellectually-bred by Jung — and still breathing.

Hillman is using his incredible cred to boost Obama — and carpet-bomb Hillary.

How the Beijing Olympics made Tibet a wedge issue between China and the West

GUEST COLUMN: SHARON BROCK — The global appeal of the Olympics is vested in a time-honored ideal of one-world peace. To bring the world together through a shared love of human *being*, embodied by the dreams and devotion of young athletes. The Olympics is an answer to the Babel conundrum: A way to communicate and gather, even when we can’t speak each others’ languages.

At the Olympic torch relay in San Francisco, I felt a mix of emotions.

We can see and hear thousands of angry demonstrators jamming San Francisco’s financial district and waterfront along its famous bay as we write this. It’s a miraculous outpouring of support for the Dalai Lama, and his campaign to reclaim Tibetan self-rule — and his homeland’s status as a sanctuary for Buddhist practice. The heat of what’s happening outside has been ratcheted up several orders of magnitude by . . .