Soul's Code

An Irish immigrant and psychologist with a love of sleep, dreams up a new reality from a mystical past

GUEST COLUMN: HELENA DALY — I am as Irish as Irish can be . . . a nomad, a bit of a gypsy from the West of Ireland’s wild rugged beauty. On a visit home a few years ago, I sat in the kitchen one morning having a cup of infamous Irish tea, and watched with amusement out of the corner of my eye, my dad (who is now 82). Seemingly lost in his own world, he would shake his head every few minutes.

So I said, “Dad, did you sleep okay?”

“No,” came the energetic response.

“Why not?” I asked, to which he responded: “They came again.”

The cosmic side of Courtney Cox; B.F. Skinner and Arthur Koestler redux; Does ABC’s Amazing Race have any grace?

Test your knowledge of movies ranging from the transcendental genius of The Last Temptation of Christ to those that just try too hard . . . yes we mean you, The Love Guru

1.  Which composer scored the music for The Mission, the Oscar-winner about conquistador sin and Jesuit redemption that starred Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons?

A.  John Williams
B.  Vangelis
C.  Ennio Morricone
D.  Philip Glass

Congratulations to Xuan-An Thai, an upwardly-mobile seeker from Texas who took a clandestine trip to Cuba — and stumbled upon a smokin’ (cigar, that is) smiling Buddha

First, we asked everyone in the world to send Soul’s Code an image of a person, place or thing that inspires or “enlightens” them.

Then, some in our Soul’s Code circle may have quietly imagined  . . . ‘Megan Fox meditating at Machu Picchu’?

Still others may have projected: modern-day shaman, Tony Samara, imagining satori in San Francisco?

But we suspect that you fell in love with the winning entry (left) because Xuan-An’s moment of Zen-lightenment in Havana, Cuba is such a pristine revelation of the  serendipitous, sublime, shit-happens quality of being that defies linear thought.

Pilates is part of the training program of every professional sports team in America. It is also a meditation

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Some people don’t go to a gym at all. Some go to a gym, but they do their own thing, in their own silo of solo, whatever. For two decades, I was one of those muscle-heads. Then, I discovered the power of the group — and the “metro-sexual” workout that a German emigre made eponymously famous as, pilates.

It’s one of the reasons I go to the gym now.

There is an energy in the room, gracefully non-verbal, that invites my own attention to do a deep dive into my core, both somatically and pyschologically .

September 21st, the fall equinox, is the UN’s International Day of Peace — not to be confused with Global Orgasm Day, to be celebrated on December 21st, the winter solstice.

Old enemies team up: Execs from adidas and Puma will shake hands for the first time in six decades, and play football for peace. (Peaceoneday.org)

The Dalai Lama edits a newspaper for peace: The Nobel Peace Prize winner takes over The Vancouver Sun for a day, September 26, and hosts a global conference on loving kindness

Negative karma happens when we try to store up life’s riches for our own use. Positive grace takes place when lessons happen that an Intelligence wants us to know

BY DAVID RICKEY — Ever since I was kid, I’ve had an insatiable need to understand how things work. I used to take my toys apart to try and figure out what made them go. I even took my father’s pocket watch apart . . . which had the extended benefit of learning how to fix things. I learned, for example, that it was better to go slowly and not panic. Not easy, when the goal was getting it back together again before my father got home.

As my toys got more complicated, I took them apart less, and instead just experimented and observed. But still tried to make sense of what I saw.

Call it non-duality, call it Advaita, call it whatever you want. If the present is all we ever have, why do we feel so lonely?

BY SMADAR DE LANGE — Three top tropes of the New Age are “interconnectedness”, “oneness” and the general notion that ‘reality’ has different ‘levels’, or frames — say, like a video game or the TV series Lost. The buzzwords are sign-posts: they point to a reality that is not ordinarily perceived in the realm of our work-a-day world.

The perennial question, What is reality? — what a concept — dogs us because we humans have always resided on a plane of interconnectedness and non-duality, yet we experience isolation and separateness as facts of life.

How to recognize and encourage a deep thinker under the age of five

GUEST COLUMN: AMY LEASK — When I thought she was just coloring, a five-year old on the floor decided to pipe up and state “What makes us human is love.”

Confident, even matter-of-fact, it seemed as though she’d been mulling the question “What makes us different from other species?” over in her little brain for years, and had long since figured it all out.

She went back to her crayons, but the rest of us observed a good ten or fifteen seconds of silent awe.