Soul's Code

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.

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.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Drawing on “Emotional Intelligence” author Daniel Goleman and a recent Oprah guest, Google launches a School of Personal Growth

PAUL KAIHLA — Apple isn’t the only Silicon Valley anchor-tenant that knows how to execute a stealth launch. For Google, though, this one wasn’t about products — and it seems that the world’s largest search engine and online ad agency prefers to keep this news quiet, even post-launch. Last summer with zero fanfare, Google joined the human potential movement. The vehicle: Google University, which is in a building one street down from the main Googleplex in Mountain View.

One of the institution’s four departments: The School of Personal Growth.

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.

The sub-text of the award-winning cable TV series has a lot to say about a society that bred Enron, Dick Cheney and Real Housewives

MICHELLE MORRA-CARLISLE: “Sociopaths can’t feel psychic pain but they can feel physical pain,” says narrator Dexter as on-screen Dexter plucks a hair – with gusto – from the head of a likely serial rapist and killer. It’s for a routine DNA test but the viewer, along with Dexter, feels pleasure when the bad guy says, “Ow!”

The bad guy somehow is not Dexter Morgan, hence the mastery of this Showcase series now in its fifth season. A man with an irrepressible urge to kill, Dexter (played by Michael C. Hall) is not an antagonist for the hero to catch. He is the hero.

From Enron and Wall Street graft to the White House — both occupants on the inside like Dick Cheney and crashers from the outside like the reality-show Salahis — psychopathic behavior in the world around us seems to be at a collective high. Dexter serves as a sympathetic benchmark for the mental miasma in our midst.

In 2010 America, we all live in a world that is 90 % mad: The most fascinating show on TV’s sly commentary on our current mental health

BY PAUL KAIHLA —  On October 1, 2010, the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a survey of the most recent data on depression — and the results were, well, depressing. One in ten Americans suffered from that mental illness as the economy careened into the current recession.

But what surprised many researchers, especially at pioneering psych departments like that at Stanford University, is that the statistic was not higher. According to Stanford neuro-psych Viveka Ramel, about half of us in North America will suffer from a clinical disorder of some kind during our lifetime — and for a fifth of us, that diagnosis will be depression.

A brilliant reflection of our current economic and spiritual health, and how those macro forces course through our personal psycho-dynamics, is on display this fall on the AMC cable channel series, Mad Men. The show’s writers — some of the same people who brought you the hit HBO show, The Sopranos — frame their mise-en-scene in the emerging New York megapolitan of the 1960′s, riven by characters who are careerists on Madison Avenue.

Casting this story in the past gives us just enough comfort-zone to look at ourselves in our present-tense, and make no mistake: Mad Men is a commentary on *our* anxious, over-politicized and publicized times.

A Stanford University neuroscientist and meditation instructor talks about the transformative power of Buddhism and why happiness is a trainable skill

Dr. Philippe Goldin, a psychologist who heads the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience Group at Stanford University, runs a National Institutes of Health-funded lab that studies adults with social anxiety disorder, and offers training in mindfulness meditation.

We caught up with Dr. Goldin, who spent six years in India and Nepal studying various languages and Buddhist philosophy.

Soul’s Code: What’s the appeal of Buddhism for you?

GOLDIN: Androgyny. The goal— the ultimate goal — of mental development is to become completely inclusive of all qualities, and I thought that was incredible . . .

A priest and psychotherapist finds answers in Genesis, the work of Carl Jung and the science of meditation

All Souls’ Day

Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics this week celebrate the “Commemoration of the Faithful Departed” or “All Souls’ Day” (November 2). Prayerful attention is paid to the souls of the departed going through a purification (or purging) of past sins in Purgatory. Popular in Mexico as El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), families gather in cemeteries to pray for deceased friends and families.  A more macabre remembrance of the dead occurred last week: a member of 1 Mind Ministries has refused to plea guilty to starving a one year old boy to death because he refused to say “amen” after his meals.

What is déjà vu? Is it repressed memories of times past, or something greater? Radio host and author Sandy Andrew offers a radical, spiritual view

GUEST COLUMN: SANDY ANDREW — Have you ever found yourself in a casual situation when, suddenly, your consciousness flashes back to a memory that seems impossible to be valid?  After all, you have not experienced this situation yet, so how on earth could you have a memory of it?

This unique sensation is one our culture has labeled déjà vu.  But what is it exactly?

Is it a memory, a premonition, or just a confused state of mind?