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.

We knew that we had a winning combination when we created Soul’s Code. How Hollywood is using the same words

BY SOUL’S CODE — In the spirit of Jungian synchronicity, are movie studios now mimicing our meme? Hundreds of millions have been invested in these feature films, and the producers branded them by using either the word “Soul” or “Code” in the titles — and on the cinema marquee:

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.

Inspire change, and celebrate the Nobel Prize winner’s 93rd, by doing 67  minutes of good deeds today

BY PAUL KAIHLA — July 18 is South Africa’s annual Good Samaritan’s day. This year, Nelson Mandela turned 93. And the tradition here is to donate 67 minutes to helping others in honor of the former freedom fighter’s devotion to human rights and reconciliation.

The number 67 is not a random pick; It represents the number of years that Mandela devoted himself to public service and political struggle — 27 of them incarcerated in South African prisons (1962 to 1990) such as Capetown’s equivalent of Alcatraz, Robben Island, as well as five years as South Africa’s first non-white president (1994 to 1999).

SPIRITUAL IQ QUIZ — Religions channel the fears and aspirations of our collective unconscious through archetypal images and stories. That’s why the religious enterprise has been so successful for such a long period of time.

And maybe it’s also why video games are the fastest-growing form of modern entertainment.

If you don’t think video games are also spiritual, you simply haven’t played very many. Video games are rooted in the same myths and archetypes that have shaped us for millennia.

The key difference: video games put the audience in the middle of the action, whether that means blasting armies of alien invaders in Halo Reach or fighting with crooks and your own conscience in Grand Theft Auto IV.

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.

Flying to Norway to start a new life, Mary Anderson got a helping hand from a stranger: Barack Obama. In her own words . . .

For Barack Obama’s inauguration we call your attention to a little-publicized event in 1988, after the future president left his gig as a community organizer in Chicago and enrolled in Harvard Law School. The unknown Obama delivered a random act of kindness to a complete stranger at a baggage check-in line at Miami’s international airport.

The recipient: a former California girl named Mary Menth Andersen (left, with her husband, holding a letter from Obama). This story first came to light a month before the 2008 U. S. presidential election in Norway’s national newspaper, VG.

It was verified to Soul’s Code by H. Dagfinn Kvale, a long-time Lutheran pastor who knows Andersen.

Click here to read the remarkable back-story of Mary Andersen’s encounter with Barack Obama. In this special to Soul’s Code, Mary celebrates the against-all-odds inauguration of her Good Samaritan from 21 years ago:

GUEST COLUMN: MARY ANDERSEN — On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, as domino arrays of disasters sit on our doorstep, I find myself strangely confident. Can a small act of individual kindness, so long ago, still compel this spirited optimism I feel for everyone?

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.