Soul's Code

“Every emotion you go through in this rat-race life, I am going through, too”

GUEST COLUMN: NICK RALLS — I try to find love and peace in the everyday world while in the midst of the rat race.  I often reflect on how it might be easier to cut the world off but I know that love is in my heart and that I can find what I am looking for.

Today, I reflected on how easy it is to be peaceful, loving and harmonious— in short, divine — when living in a cocoon, in a monastic or spiritual retreat, away from the strains and stresses of reality.

But it can be a hard job when you are in the throes of modern life, with people coming at you . . . demands, money problems, communication challenges and not always being the person you imagine yourself to be.

Lost goes all the way with, Namaste

When the Sopranos was on the air, Soul’s Code liked to call the HBO “family” show the TV series with the most mystical messaging. Sorry Tony, but ABC’s Lost now blows your crew off the screen on that score. The way that Lost routinely plays with the notion of both linear time and personal identity as illusions of the mind makes it the most spiritual show on TV.

Episode 9 of Season 5 is called, “Namaste”, a Sanskrit word uttered when you bow to the divinity, or spark in the heart chakra, of another. “Namaste” is also the greeting they say on the Lost island to new recruits at the Dharma Initiative, a 1970′s scientific commune that is now the center of action for Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lily), Sawyer and the other main characters.

As a producer in the revolving-door of media, Heli knows job loss. Here’s how she accepts the day she gets the news

GUEST COLUMN: HELI TUOMI CARLILE— I have a positive approach to job losses. I always try to welcome them as signs from the universe, signs that it’s time to move on to a new adventure, painful as it may be at the time.

Clichéd as it may sound, in these moments I visualize “one door closing, but others opening,” even though I can’t quite see what lies behind those new doors.

This technique hasn’t failed me yet, and I have come through some tough emotional times with that reassurance, finding fabulous new adventures and opportunities that have gotten better and better.

On the 40th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 bed-in, thousands will lie down to give peace a chance

GUEST COLUMN: PIPPA BARTOLOTTI — Have you ever really thought about what you can do for peace?

Many thousands of people are prepared to click an icon and join a peace group.

For instance, on Facebook I am inundated with prayers, mantras, and with blessings, words of love and incantations, but that is not enough for me. I believe that peace has to be worked for.

Dalai Lama: Tibet has become “Hell on Earth”

Speaking yesterday in Dharamsala, India, on the 50th anniversary of Tibet’s foiled uprising against Chinese rule, the Dalai Lama warned that Tibetan culture faces extinction and that authoritarian rule has made life in the Himalayan nation “hell on earth.”

It’s one of the boldest announcements that the Peace prize winning leader has yet uttered against the government that claims its policies are designed to do just the opposite – create a post-faith, materialist heaven on earth.

We may be one consciousness but Mary Roach’s Bonk details in naturalistic glory how we are also 6 billion runny noses and rumbling stomachs

GUEST COLUMN: AMY LEASK — I’m on my third book by Mary Roach and I’m riveted. It’s called Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, and it’s a very graphic account of the anatomy of sex.

Having taught gender studies, I’m not easily rattled, but I have to admit this makes me slightly queasy.

I keep looking over at my dearest love, imagining his reaction to such medical monstrosities (in one section, Roach apologizes to her male readers for the shock and revulsion they’ll likely feel).

Ayurvedic medicine made Deepak Chopra rich and famous. It can make your next spa visit an exercise in deep healing

GUEST COLUMN: ALAN ANNAND — You may have heard about Ayurveda, and wondered what it is.  Ayurveda is a holistic system of medicine that has been practiced in India for over 5,000 years.

Literally, the word Ayurveda means “knowledge of life,” and its practice constitutes a science of routines and remedies designed to foster and maintain optimum health.

Featuring Eckhart Tolle, parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake, philosopher Teillard de Chardin and psychiatrist Margaret Mahler

BY DAVID RICKEY — If Eckhart Tolle is correct (and I believe he is) that the purpose of life is the evolution of consciousness, how does that happen in an historical and biological perspective? Leaving aside the big question of whether there is a God or something directing it from outside, how could this “purpose” in life evolve naturally?

How life began is the first mystery, and I can’t answer that here (or anywhere). But it did. Some “hot soup” of chemicals came together and figured out how to replicate, and life began.

The Indian poet Nachi Ma’s view of a child’s wisdom isn’t the street-smarts in Slumdog Millionaire.  It’s a theory of consciousness

SPECIAL TO SOUL’S CODE: NACHI MA — I feel that there is lot of wisdom rooted in childhood that is ignored, or not recognized because we never assume or look that way.

When a child is probing us with open, transparent eyes perhaps he is not looking at us from mere innocence — perhaps there is something more there.

Maybe we need to look at it — not in relation of being an adult to child but with an inquisitive mind — to let the beauty and truth inside a child be revealed to us.

This poem is about the child in us all . . . the inner child that we carry . . . no matter what our age.

Supreme Court: Ten Commandments trump Seven Aphorisms

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court determined that Summum, a religious group that blends Egyptian practices like mummification with Gnosticism, could not place a monument in a Utah public park inscribed with its Seven Aphorisms, even though a tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments already stands in the park. In his opinion for the court, Justice Samuel Alito noted that such monuments are erected “for the purpose of presenting the image of the city that it wishes to project to all who frequent the park.”  Maybe next time the court should just decide with a game of “rock, paper, scissors.”