Soul's Code

“There’s something terribly wrong with spirituality today,” he said gently and sadly. “It’s as though the materialism that has a death grip on this culture has taken our spirituality as well.”

BY AUGUST TURAK – I was sitting in Father Christian’s small office at Mepkin Abbey monastery in the fall of 1997. I was early for our appointment, but just as I expected, he soon burst in.

As he greeted me warmly, I marveled once more at the vitality of this lithe 85-year-old man. Under his arm were a couple of books, one obviously a textbook. Casually curious, I asked about it, and was amazed to find it was a textbook on Quantum Theory.

A vanguard of self-schooled female mystics are doing an end-run around the mainstream self-help and New Age movements — and are advancing a radical, 21^st century spirituality. Call it the ‘Anti-Me Generation.’

Click here to read the 7-part series where Soul’s Code introduces some of the avatars of of what could rightly be re-labeled, the sage sex:

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Across the centuries, spiritual seekers have invariably been women and the teachers men; From Jesus to Gurdjieff and Rumi to Ramana Maharshi, enlightenment has been a male-dominated business.

But figures like Byron Katie are in the vanguard of an astonishing advent in the mystical tradition.

She is a leading light in a scattered coterie of women who have propounded a radical, new esoteric spirituality and seem to have leap-frogged ahead of male counterparts in the pursuit of the sacred.

Robert Louis Stevenson called it Mr. Hyde; Jung called it the personal unconscious. Psychologists today call it projection. The great sages say we want to own this denied part of ourselves.

GUEST COLUMN: MICK QUINN AND DEBORA PRIETO, 1st of 2 parts — Picture the ecosystem of relationships that hold you in this time and place, from lovers to office politics and friends and family. Ask yourself six  questions:

1. Are the ways in which other people act emotionally disturbing to you?

2.Do you sometimes feel that other people don’t seem to care enough?

3. Do you question the insensitive ways of others?

4. Do you feel intimidated by someone else’s power, self-confidence, wisdom or success?

5. Are you of the opinion that another person’s achievements are not well deserved?

How to recognize and reintegrate the shadow aspects of your personality

GUEST COLUMN: MICK QUINN AND DEBORA PRIETO, 2nd of 2 parts — But, before we get to the cure, let’s look at eight ways to tell if you have a shadow.

1.  Do you sometimes despise certain situations or people?

2.  Is there one person in your life who seems to bring up swells of emotion in you?

3.  Do insurmountable differences sometimes appear in your personal relationships?

4.  Do you seem to rush to immediate conclusions about people and situations?

What is your “story”? It’s a self-image, and self-talk that we repeat to ourselves internally and to others in conversation

GUEST COLUMN: GINA LAKE — People don’t just have ideas and self-images about themselves; they have stories.

These stories come up repeatedly in internal self-talk or conversation with others. They are easy to identify: like any story, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and usually something tragic about them.

Most have a “poor-me” or “isn’t it awful” quality about them, but others serve to glorify the self. Some change or disappear over time, while others endure for a lifetime. The stories we are most identified with have strong feelings attached to them. They have an emotional charge that we and others feel when we tell them, and they tend to trigger emotionally charged stories in others.

This often becomes the basis for relating to others, the means of sharing.

All of our life experiences — even the “bad” ones — are equal in value. How to expand from “contractions” like loss, hurt and other wounds

GUEST COLUMN: PHYLLIS KING — We are always eager to get on with it — to leave the past behind and to feel the “good” stuff. I understand this so well. I too have lived this pattern. This idea may be even more pronounced when we have had experiences that have drained our life-force energy.

We can’t imagine waiting even one more minute to feel better. We may say, “Haven’t I paid my dues yet?” and “Does this abundant thinking crap really work?”

I have witnessed, in my clients’ lives and my own life, how our dedication to higher consciousness can also be a mask for our pain. We believe we are living with right thinking and perspective when we are happy and when things are going well. We forget that the natural course of expansion includes contraction.

Making Your Mind Your Friend: Reclaiming Your Personal Power

Saturday, April 24th 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Jack London Aquatic Center, Oakland, CA

Soul’s Code’s has celebrated the notion of female mystics, and how spiritual teachers who are women have emerged at the forefront of a pursuit that has been male-dominated since the Old Testament prophets. Okay . . . since the Buddha.

Here, two of the most prolific contributors on Soul’s Code, appear together at the same time and place.  Vaishali and Phyllis will teach you how to:

• Become fully aware of your life purpose
• Identify your ego-based dialog, and how it affects your abundance
• Receive readings from these experts on enlightenment on your most pressing questions
• De-oxidize your thought-patterns and recycle your psyche to a fresh start

Go to:  Vaishali and this event, and Phyllis, the common-sense psychic

Michelle Obama is sans tattoos because “polite society” still frowns upon them. But body-art has a long, sacred tradition. A Boomer’s tattoo confession.

GUEST COLUMN: MARY GIUFFRE — I wear two tattoos.  The top of my left arm hosts an OM symbol, which, to my mind, reinforces my commitment to a spiritual path.  In the same spot on my right arm (that’s me, stage left) is an icon of an energetic spiral, a reflection of our very galaxy.

I love body art! And talk about an archetype, the first tattoo I ever remember seeing was on the forearm of a wrinkled, unassuming sailor.  It was a bell, faded by time but I loved the way it shifted and melted when his aged muscle flexed.

“I’m a woman without a future — I don’t need one.”

SOUL’S CODE —  We don’t mean that Byron Katie is literally beating up on Oprah. The only reason we make the comparison between the two is that Byron Katie, who is a post-modern mystic, made a rare live appearance in the San Francisco Bay Area the same day that Oprah’s show hyped the movie The Secret and its gospel, the “law of attraction.”

The difference between Oprah and Byron Katie is that Oprah explicitly caters to America’s victim-culture — millions who don’t like their looks, their job, their love-life, their personal history, etc. Oprah pitches a grocery list of prescriptions to fix the personality’s grievances.Byron Katie, on the other hand, offers a radically different way out of pain.

Why would you care? Katie, as she goes by, comes as advertised. We won’t write that she has ‘achieved enlightenment’ — that is, a person who is free of internal conflict — because we can imagine her rejoinder. Katie would turn one of her famous four questions back on us, and ask:

“How would you know? Can you absolutely know that that’s true? Do you have any proof?”

Ever wonder how bunny eggs, death and resurrection fit together?  A pagan history of  the goddess, and how the church stole Easter

GUEST COLUMN: DANNY KENNY — Ever since I was an angelic little boy, there are many reasons why I’ve always loved Easter. But I would no longer be angelic in good Irish Catholic fashion if I didn’t admit that gorging myself with sumptuous chocolate eggs after a cruel, six-week enforced abstinence (during Lent) from my first love wasn’t a huge part of that.

Even as a child I had trouble equating chocolate eggs and Easter bunnies, but when you’re in a self-induced chocolate coma, such heady thoughts soon pass.

On a deeper level — even though I grew away from my childhood addiction and religion — I still retained a different kind of deeper love for the annual celebration of renewal, faith and hope.