Soul’s Code

• Cat Stevens says the music biz is filled with ‘fornication, intoxicants, idolatry, competition, greed, selfishness’ [BeliefNet]

· Church of England to offer masses set to U2 [The Daily Telegraph]

· French seek to kick religion out of hospitals [IHT]

· The gospel according to U2 [Christianity Today]

Picking up women really is about more than picking up women… at least for these men:

The men each begin with a brief introduction, describing their current plight with women. Some are funny and gregarious, others withdrawn and demure, and they vary in levels of traditional attractiveness and professional success. But each shares a general sense of unease with themselves, a deep frustration and loneliness.

We’re not in the business of using other people’s pain as a source of entertainment. So let’s reel this out and look at it as a mirror for what happens when any one of us falls into a rabbit hole of unconsciousness.

Here is a gallery of intelligent people who took the road less traveled, so to speak. Now they’re in a conflict that first went public with the publication of the book, Enlightenment Blues, a critique of Andrew Cohen, editor of a magazine that covers mysticism and transpersonal psychology. Then came the launch of a companion blog to the book. Here’s an entry from one of the contributors:

Legacy of Scorched Earth

Reflections from a former student

By Susan Bridle

I was a student of Andrew Cohen for ten years, and worked very intimately with him for many years in my work as a writer and editor for What Is Enlightenment? Magazine and other Moksha Press publications… I left Andrew’s community a little over three years ago, and while I am busy with new academic, career, and spiritual goals, I am still “digesting” my experience of my relationship with Andrew and my time in his community. Bottom line, I experienced so much that was truly profound and transformative – and that I will forever be grateful for – and also so much that was really abusive and twisted – and that still deeply saddens me. The lightest light and the darkest dark. Both. All tangled together like miles of black and white yarn entwined in a big ball at the pit of my stomach. I guess for me, I feel my work is to digest the whole thing, tease it apart… One thing that continues to strike me with painful irony is the fact that Andrew would, almost tearfully, lament about other teachers who had shown such great promise, whose passion for the spiritual life and searing dharma inspired so many spiritual seekers to abandon “the world” and give their entire lives to a spiritual revolution – but whose abuses of sex, money, power, and other addictions in the end disillusioned thousands of seekers and instead promoted cynicism about the whole endeavor. This is, in fact, the reality of the situation now with Andrew.

Last week, Cohen launched a counter-blog featuring a five-page inaugural post. Excerpts:

You didn’t think the techno-hipsters at Wired were above resorting to religion to sell magazines, did you? Kudos to writer Gary Wolf for digging up a first class group of crankypants: militant atheists! These guys combine the flexibility of Soviet bureaucrats with the fun factor of a bowl of bran flakes.

A documentary about fundamentalist day-camping depicts another theological, spiritual and cultural divide between red and blue states

BY SOUL’S CODE — Introducing the new documentary, Jesus Camp, and a new tire-fire in America’s religious wars. According to an account in The L.A. Times the filmmakers are being terrorized:

When Fischer arrived home Tuesday after a few days touring with the filmmakers, her e-mail inbox was loaded with hate mail. She spent the next two days writing lengthy explanations to the most common accusations – “How dare you brainwash those kids!” and “Are you raising up Christian terrorists or another Hitler Youth movement?” – then posted them on her website Tuesday.

“I’ve gotten thousands of hits on my website from those people,” she said. “I’m wearing sunglasses in the airports. It’s really making me nervous.”

Barack Obama’s memoir and manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, has echoes of The Cloud of Unknowing

BY PAUL KAIHLA — That’s the headline for the excerpt from Obama’s new memoir, which is featured on the cover of Time magazine. An accompanying news story by Joe Klein, the journalist who wrote Primary Colors, compares the junior senator from Illinois to an earlier political messiah, Bobby Kennedy.

Obama was raised by a single mother but not an overtly religious one. “She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life,” he writes.

Obama is driven by an intense intellectual curiosity – what else would you expect from a Harvard-trained lawyer? And he’s so comfortable with ambiguities and uncertainties that it calls to mind the 14th-century classic of English mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing.

A poem by the Sufi mystic, Rumi, shows up in a love scene in Casino Royale

BY PAUL KAIHLA — We’re not about to add the new James Bond movie opening Nov.17, Casino Royale, to our Top 12 Spiritual Cinema list on Soul’s Code but if you’ve seen the trailer, it suggests Bond has been reincarnated with a deeper dimension.

This Bond film scraps special effects in favor of a retro repertoire for the spy, both in terms of his toolkit and character.

Viz, Bond’s highly mystical language in this romantic scene with Casino Royale‘s sophisticated Bond girl, played by French beauty Eva Green. Note the similarity of the words with a love poem that the Sufi mystic Rumi wrote more than 7 centuries ago.

After hearing my friend K talk about her marriage this week, I had this thought that psychological pain is a master of disguises.

And another thought: Isn’t the path of pain like water damage in a house or apartment? Water can seep into the building from wherever, lurk in the joists and studs for a while – and then blister the basement wall or crater the kitchen ceiling.

This thing we call pain plays with the same energies. It hides out because it’s not wanted. Yet it’s a living thing. It finds a back door. Or broken pipe.

A vanguard of self-schooled female mystics are doing an end-run around the mainstream self-help and New Age movements — and are advancing a radical, 21st century spirituality. Call it the ‘Anti-Me Generation.’

In this series, we introduce some of the leading lights of the sage sex, and their teachings

Across the centuries, spiritual seekers have invariably been women and the teachers men; From Jesus to Gurdjieff and Rumi to Ramana Maharshi, enlightenment has been a male-dominated business. But figures like Byron Katie are in the vanguard of an astonishing advent in the mystical tradition: she is a leading light in a scattered coterie of women who have propounded a radical, new esoteric spirituality and seem to have leap-frogged ahead of male counterparts in the pursuit of the sacred.

Their work, if you want to call it that, isn’t wholly cribbed from Indian gurus or apprenticeships in Asian monasteries but forged in a homegrown fashion in the crucible of the modern, over-caffeinated, high-tech West – sometimes as a result of frustration with oriental traditions. Alongside Katie, these self-schooled spiritual masters include Oregon-based Catherine Ingram, Santa Fe’s Pamela Wilson, and Calgary, Alberta-based Karen McPhee (pictured above).

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