Soul’s Code

BEING THERE: DAVID RICKEY — I have always thought of “AHA” moments as those times when suddenly we “catch on” to a deeper reality, when we suddenly “get it” – the “it” being a deeper truth, or a clearer insight into “ultimate reality.” These experiences are sometimes caricatured by a light-bulb turning on. Suddenly we see something that had been invisible, or un-graspable before.

On a personal level, the “A-Ha” may be an answer to a problem or question that has been plaguing us; a sudden awareness of a solution or a new perspective that hits us, seemingly from nowhere, or “out of the blue”. From a deeper level, however, “A-Ha” moments, I believe, are breakthroughs in consciousness where an old, more limited, perspective gives way to an expanded awareness of what is really going on, our part in it, and then a summons to change our choices, behaviors, intentions to align better with this new awareness. Spiritual teachers speak of “waking up”, indicating that what came before was a state of “sleep-walking”, behaving and choosing without awareness.

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.

His Holiness says physical love spells “trouble.” A priest responds: in its highest form, sex spells “At-One-ness.”

DAVID RICKEY — Sex is a many splendored and often-splintered thing. The Dalai Lama, in a rare interview on the subject, focuses primarily on the splinters:

Naturally as a human being, some kind of desire for sex comes but then you use intelligence to make comprehension that those couples are always full of trouble. And in some cases . . . suicide, murder.

Speaking purely biologically, sex is the sine qua non for the survival of the species.