Soul’s Code

Princeton hosts virtual “noosphere”; parallel universes and the “multiverse”; physicist Michio Kaku on the final season of LOST

An intriguing site at Einstein’s alma matter uses web nodes to illustrate: The Nature of Global Consciousness

Soul’s Code on Jesuit archeologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the meaning of his noosphere: “A history of consciousness, and how to live in presence”

The next What the Bleep do we Know? New science on YouTube

What is a parallel universe? Cosmologists dish to the BBC

The science behind LOST, Season 6: “the show is now diving head-first into multiverse theory” – physicist Michio Kaku

Why this existential edition of Spiritual Surf is good for you: “Talk deeply, be happy” - new study in the journal of Psychological Science

Vegas TV magician claims tarot and divination are not in the cards for him as “Mindfreak” blasts psychics

GUEST COLUMN: DANNY KENNY — In a CNN interview, Criss Sarantakos (a.k.a Angel) told Larry King, “no one has the ability, that I’m aware of, to do anything supernatural, psychic, talk to the dead. And if somebody claims to have supernatural psychic ability, I’m going to bust [him] live and on television.”

Ironically, Criss is Greek, and the word psychic also seems Greek to him (from the Greek psychikos—“of the soul, mental”) as it refers to an alleged ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses through extrasensory perception, or to people who claim to possess such abilities.

Criss, like most great stage magicians, is a master of misdirection, so let me redirect you for a moment to one very key word in there. . .

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.

Drawing on ideas and idioms from mysticism and transpersonal psychology, HBO’s The Sopranos was the most Soul’s Code show on television — until LOST took over

BY PAUL KAIHLA — “Read for the rapture” was a signature phrase in the penultimate episode of The Sopranos, which aired during the second week of June, 2007. We’ve come to love and learn those epiphanic flourishes of dialogue — and this one came from an FBI agent, of all characters.

Could we agree that the greatest series, ever, in television history is The Sopranos? Or could we at least agree that it ranks as the most spiritual show on TV? Here’s why:

1. You’ve heard homeless people ranting on the street. Step a bit outside of your own head, and realize that they’re simply voicing aloud the kind of thought-strings that race through most of our minds every minute. Since the homeless have little left to lose, they are less defended — and to put a generous spin on it, feel liberated to share their ‘inner voice’. The Reflections promo for the homestretch of The Sopranos channels that dynamic through Tony — overlapping, Altman-esque tracks of internal dialogue looping through the mob boss’s head. Ramana Maharshi himself couldn’t have showcased the mental noise of a neurotic mind more poignantly.

Since we like television that makes you think, it’s hard to beat PBS’ Bill Moyers. He sat down last year with a series of spiritually-fueled fiction greats to talk about faith and reason. Worth the price of admission, you can get it online.

Moyers revealed an amazing synchronicity that came about when he was trying to line up his subjects for filming:

I had been thinking of a series like this for some time and weighing who should be part of it. Faith is such a smorgasbord that everyone’s taste is different. I didn’t feel comfortable trying to pick the “representative” Christian, Jew, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim

Are some actors a bit too convincingly psychopathic? Maybe they’ve studied with Robert Hare

Congratulations to Soul’s Code friend Robert Hare, whose work on psychopathy was highlighted in the penultimate episode of The Sopranos. It aired on Sunday, June 3,  and won the love of reviewers because its tightly-wound narrative resembled Act III of a Godfather movie.

The high point for us was not the shootout in the parking lot of the Bada Bing, witnessed by topless strippers. It was a dinner table conversation where Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, Jennifer Melfi (the character standing in the top right of the image above), discusses studies into psychopathy with other psychs. Hare’s work is debated, and it becomes a catalyst for Melfi firing Tony as a patient in a later scene. The dramatic turn helps the series wind down in two ways: it exits a major character, and enables the audience to decathect from Tony by explicitly framing him as a clinical sociopath/psychopath.

At the dinner table, one of the doctors exclaims to Melfi: “Robert Hare suggested that sociopaths actually quite glibly engage on key issues like ‘mother,’ ‘family’ . . . .”

Hare’s book, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, delves into white-collar sociopaths as well as the criminal kind.

Notes from around the Internet about the physics and metaphysics of the ABC series, LOST episode, “Through the looking glass”

BY SOUL’S CODE — You never know how good something is until you’ve lost it. For lost viewers, we’ll be without the show until February 2008, writes Entertainment Weekly. The end of the third season represents the mid-point of the show, which will run for another three seasons before its end.

J. Wood has a brilliant analysis of the episode, citing it as an an inversion point. “The narrative itself twists inside-out, with the locus still on the island yet the flashes happening in the opposite direction. Like the White Queen of Carroll’s text explains, we’re seeing the future and its impact on the present,” he writes.

Up until this point we see how the past has influenced the present. Each person has a back-story that has brought him or her to the Island and affects their decisions.

But now we see the influence the future has on the present. The episode is chock full of trippy flash forwards, showing life after the rescue. And for some, it’s not all that hot. But they may not have been “forwards” so much, explains J. Wood. “A physicist named Minkowski realized that by considering time as a component of space, Einstein’s special theory of relativity . . .

A meditation on the meaning of the island in, Lost: Heaven, purgatory, a board game or karmic wheel?

BY SOUL’S CODE — The last two episodes of ABC’s hit series, Lost, Season 3 have laid the groundwork for the idea that the “survivors” that have been stranded on the island for the last two seasons may in fact be dead.

It’s easy to imagine heaven as an experience akin to being deserted on a tropical island with Evangeline Lilly (Kate); but Locke’s father suggests the island is something darker.

HBO called on documentary stars Barbara Koppel, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles to create the most ambitious series ever about addiction. But the slant is more science than spiritual

BY PAUL KAIHLA — Our friends at Entertainment Weekly invited us to the premiere of the HBO documentary mega-project, Addiction. It’s anchored by a 90-minute feature, which kicked off the series on HBO on March 15, followed by 13 half-hour episodes. HBO recruited some of the top documentary talent in American history for this effort: