Soul's Code

A meditation to de-stress for the post-2012 era

BY DAVID RICKEY — January in northern California is usually a time of rain, cold, and a psychic hangover from the double-barreled Christmas and New Year holidays, which can tend to be anything but Holy days. After getting swept up in the maelstrom, let’s step back a bit a get some perspective. Thanksgiving is a good place to begin as both a word and place in time.

Being grateful for what we have, for what we experience — even for who we are — has a major effect on our daily life.

Gratitude comes from an awareness that this is not all just an accident. This morning, as I left for work, at about 5:30am . . .

Buying into 2012 as more “doom and gloom” is a collective projection. A new solar year is a sacred event that can ground you.

BY DAVID RICHO, author of Daring to Trust and 14 other books about spirituality and psychology — Annual planting among ancient peoples began with prayer that recalled how the gods performed this same task at the beginning of time. The human lifecycle, thus, became a repetition of a primal religious event.

Whatever happens every year becomes a promise in perpetuity, and thereby the phases of life and the seasons fit into a spiritual framework.

Among ancient peoples this fostered a sense of belonging here on earth.

Repetition and participation give humans roots: “I am real because I am part of something. I have a grander meaning than is outlined by my fragile body.”

Were the stories of impossible feats that Jesus performed the spiritual equivalent of case studies?

BY DAVID RICKEY — One of the miracle stories about Jesus that probably has actual truth behind it is the account of how he fed 5000 (or an additional 4000, according to Mark and Matthew). It’s framed as a miracle to impress upon us that Jesus is a powerful guy.

The version of that story that appears in Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 14:13-21) lends itself to a different interpretation, one that might hit closer to home.

According to one of the leading psychotherapists and spiritual authors in the United States, trust is a four-fold path

Adapted from, Daring to Trust: Opening ourselves to Real Love and Intimacy, By DAVID RICHO — A compass is a trusty tool for a journey, and we can see the four directions that trust can take using the symbol of a compass. Draw a diagram to see for yourself.

Place the words “I TRUST” in the center with a circle around it.

In the East position write: “MYSELF”

In the West position, pencil in: “OTHERS”

South: “REALITY,” or “WHATEVER HAPPENS”  — or “HOW LIFE UNFOLDS.”

Alternative healing and advanced science continue to converge — and leap-frog ahead of conventional wisdom

BY DAVID RICKEY and RICK LEED — As we evolve, both scientific researchers and esoteric healers have advanced new therapies to treat our bodies and our minds but when we first hear of some of them we make a snap judgement that this sounds too wacky to be legit. We use words like voodoo medicine or magical thinking.

Think back to examples like quinine and willow bark — the former a tribal medicine used by Peruvian Indians, the latter an ‘old wives’ remedy. In the modern age, the first was prescribed by doctors as a treatment for malaria and the second in derivative form as aspirin.

Pamela Wilson asks: When you worry, or feel fear, can you say this to the anxious voice in your head? “You are welcome here!”

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Pamela Wilson has many moving parts — part spiritual muse, part Gestalt Therapist and part post-modern mystic, in the sense that she can induct an audience into an expansive state using voice and anchors the same way that the late great Milton Erickson did with patients in hypnosis.

Featured in the Soul’s Code slide show, Female Mystics, Wilson comes as advertised: I and 60 others were moved by the power of her presence the other night in a simple hall in Berkeley, CA. She held an over-educated and highly-experienced audience in her sway, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones.

Wilson is fond of revealing the ways in which the mind acts as a blunt instrument.

“Before she was famous, a mystical neighbor changed my life”

BY ELLEN FENNER — We all have a moment we can look back on and see divine intervention that we didn’t necessarily recognize at the time. For me it was the day an angel (see photo) sat me down at her kitchen table and fed my starving soul.

In the spring of 1984, I returned home from my second year at college completely dejected. I had lost control of everything I’d ever imagined myself to have any control over. When I decided not to go back the next year, I gave up a full-tuition scholarship and set myself adrift.

Can our brains evolve fast enough to solve the problems that the un-evolved mind has created

BY DAVID RICKEY —Einstein said that the level of consciousness that created a particular problem cannot solve the said problem.

A hot new book by sociobiologist Rebecca Costa, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking our way out of extinction, illustrates Einstein’s point by documenting how our rate of social and technical change is out-stripping evolution.

Look at the economy: we have developed complex computer programs that can trade stocks in milliseconds. We have developed virtual ways of making money, and created a subculture of the super-rich.

Meditation doesn’t require much time — you can do it while you’re thinking

DAVID RICKEY: I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to say that Meditation is important for spiritual growth. Ken Wilbur claims that it is the quickest way to advance spiritual evolution. But it might come as a surprise that I don’t meditate, at least not in any classic way. I could say “I don’t have the time.” But the truth is I have never had much discipline. So, I have a form of meditation that takes no real time and requires only a bit of discipline.

In the an issue of the New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell uses Microsoft heavyweight Nathan Myhrvold as a case study for coincident scientific discovery — and I say, a collective consciousness

DAVID RICKEY — The ego exists only to function in relationship to the whole system, and the ego functions best when it is consciously aware of itself as part of a larger system.

Inspiration derives from the word, spirit. But it is the latest breakthroughs in science, not necessarily spirituality, that give us the clearest prism for viewing the way inspiration is actually created. Malcolm Gladwell’s profile of Nathan Myhrvold in The New Yorker — In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?— describes a number of instances where two or more people develop almost identical ideas or inventions pretty much simultaneously.